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The Darkening Nation

The Darkening Nation

Ignacio Aguiló

(2018)

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Abstract

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Argentina was in the midst of its worst economic crisis in decades, the result of years of drastic neoliberal reforms. This book looks at the way ideas about race and nationhood were conveyed during this period of financial meltdown and national emergency, examining in particular how the neoliberal crisis led to the critical self-questioning of the dominant imaginary of Argentina as homogeneously white – allegedly the result of European immigration and the extinction of most indigenous and black people in the nation-building age. The Darkening Nation focuses on how the self-examination of racial and national identity triggered by this crisis was expressed in culture, through the analysis of literary texts, films, artworks and music styles. By considering a wide range of artistic and cultural products, and different forms of racial identity and difference (white, indigenous, Afro-descendant, immigrant and negro as it is understood in local contexts), this study constitutes a timely addition from a literary and cultural studies perspective to recent academic enquiry into race and nation in Argentina.


Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Cover Front Cover
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Contents vii
Series Editors’ Foreword ix
List of Figures xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction 1
Exceptionalism 10
Migration 11
Space 15
Multiculturalism 17
Structure and texts 20
Chapter 1: Neoliberalism and its crisis 25
Chapter 2: The historical construction of whiteness in Argentina 38
Chapter 3: Facing darkness in the literature of the crisis 51
Literary production and the crisis 52
‘Asterix, el encargado’ 57
La Villa 62
Cucurto 67
Chapter 4: ‘A Bolivian walks into a bar …’: race in New Argentinian Cinema 84
The renovation of Argentinian cinema 86
Bolivia 91
Copacabana 100
Chapter 5: Amerindians, fashion models and picketeers 109
Huellas 111
La conquista del desierto 123
Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) 132
Chapter 6: Cumbia villera and the new racialised marginality 141
Cumbia music in Argentina 143
The boom of cumbia villera 146
Racialising the villero youth 149
Afterword 166
Notes 174
Works cited 203
Index 225
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