Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina

This book reconsiders the relationship between race and nation in Argentina during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Paulina Alberto (Edited by), Eduardo Elena (Edited by)

9781107107632, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 March 2016

400 pages, 19 b/w illus.
23.6 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.66 kg

'The relationship between race and nation continues to be a major theme in Latin American studies, and Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina will help instructors and students explore the interactions and tensions between the symbolic dimensions of 'race' and its role as an unstable signifier for specific populations. The excellent essays in this book will definitively bring Argentina into the larger conversation about race and nation in the region.' Barbara Weinstein, New York University

This book reconsiders the relationship between race and nation in Argentina during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and places Argentina firmly in dialog with the literature on race and nation in Latin America, from where it has long been excluded or marginalized for being a white, European exception in a mixed-race region. The contributors, based both in North America and Argentina, hail from the fields of history, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies. Their essays collectively destabilize widespread certainties about Argentina, showing that whiteness in that country has more in common with practices and ideologies of Mestizaje and 'racial democracy' elsewhere in the region than has typically been acknowledged. The essays also situate Argentina within the well-established literature on race, nation, and whiteness in world regions beyond Latin America (particularly, other European 'settler societies'). The collection thus contributes to rethinking race for other global contexts as well.

Introduction: the shades of the nation Paulina L. Alberto and Eduardo Elena
1. Insecure whiteness: Jews between civilization and barbarism, 1880s–1940s Sandra McGee Deutsch
2. People as landscape: the representation of the Criollo interior in early tourist literature in Argentina, 1920–30 Oscar Chamosa
3. Black in Buenos Aires: the transnational career of Oscar Alemán Matthew B. Karush
4. La Cocina Criolla: a history of food and race in twentieth-century Argentina Rebekah E. Pite
5. 'Invisible Indians', 'Degenerate Descendants': idiosyncrasies of Mestizaje in Southern Patagonia Mariela Eva Rodríguez
6. Race and class through the visual culture of Peronism Ezequiel Adamovsky
7. Argentina in black and white: race, Peronism, and the color of politics, 1940s to the present Eduardo Elena
8. African descent and whiteness in Buenos Aires: impossible Mestizajes in the white capital city Lea Geler
9. The savage outside of white Argentina Gastón Gordillo
10. Between foreigners and heroes: Asian-Argentines in a multicultural nation Chisu Teresa Ko
11. Indias blancas, negros febriles: racial stories and history-making in contemporary Argentine fiction Paulina L. Alberto
Epilogue: whiteness and its discontents George Reid Andrews.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Social & cultural history [HBTB], 21st century history: from c 2000 - [HBLX], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]