Brendan Lanctot

Beyond Civilization and Barbarism examines how various cultural forms promoted competing political projects in Argentina during the decades following independence from Spain. This turbulent period has long been characterized as a struggle between two irreconcilable forces: the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829-1852) versus a dissident intellectual elite. Most famously, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento described the conflict in his canonical Facundo (1845) as a clash between civilization and barbarism, which has become a catchphrase for the experience of modernity throughout Latin America. Against the grain of this durable script, Beyond Civilization and Barbarism examines an extensive corpus to demonstrate how adversaries of the period used similar rhetorical strategies, appealed to the same basic political ideals of republican government, and were preoccupied with defining and interpellating the pueblo, or people. In other words, their collective struggle was fundamentally modern and waged on a mutually intelligible discursive terrain.

This article examines how Matías Piñeiro’s films El hombre robado/The Stolen Man (2007) and Todos mienten/They all Lie (2009) critically redeploy foundational figures and rhetorical devices that structure the dominant narratives of Argentine national history. Both films take lesser-known writings of the nineteenthcentury intellectual and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, best known for Facundo: Civilización y barbarie/Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845) (1845), as the point of departure for intricate plots involving the romantic intrigues of young people in twenty-first century Buenos Aires. Contrary to the teleology integral to official versions of national history, which have been conspicuously on display during the Bicentennial celebrations of Latin American independence in recent years, Piñeiro’s films posit a more porous and more unstable relationship between the present and history, in which the ruins of the latter persistently, if intermittently, and fragmentarily ...

This article examines how Matías Piñeiro’s films El hombre robado/The Stolen Man (2007) and Todos mienten/They all Lie (2009) critically redeploy foundational figures and rhetorical devices that structure the dominant narratives of Argentine national history. Both films take lesser-known writings of the nineteenthcentury intellectual and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, best known for Facundo: Civilización y barbarie/Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845) (1845), as the point of departure for intricate plots involving the romantic intrigues of young people in twenty-first century Buenos Aires. Contrary to the teleology integral to official versions of national history, which have been conspicuously on display during the Bicentennial celebrations of Latin American independence in recent years, Piñeiro’s films posit a more porous and more unstable relationship between the present and history, in which the ruins of the latter persistently, if intermittently, and fragmentarily inform everyday life, and vice versa. Thus, through the insistent repetition of the basic components of foundational myths of Argentine identity, El hombre robado and Todos mienten redirect a force of habit to restore the polysemy of the commonplace tropes of national history.

Este ensayo examina tres adaptaciones contemporáneas del Martín Fierro escritas por tres escritores jóvenes. Con sus versiones del poema nacional, Oscar Fariña, Diego Meret y Pablo Katchadjian cumplen con lo que era rito iniciático obligatorio de la cultural intelectual argentina a lo largo del siglo XX. Si bien el gesto común señala cierta continuidad con respecto a una relación histórica entre literatura y estado, las reconfiguraciones que ofrecen El guacho Martín Fierro de Fariña, En la pausa de Meret y El Martín Fierro ordenado alfabéticamente de Katchadjian coinciden en destacar la índole reiterativa y anacrónica de un gesto tal. El Fierro que aquí emerge es una figura fantasmal que se vislumbra en un momento de desaparición constante. Estos tres Martín Fierro critican así la repetición de prácticas fundacionales en una época neoliberal en la cual la literatura no puede imaginar subjetividades para un Estado también espectral.

This essay examines three contemporary adaptations of Martín Fierro, written by three young authors. With their versions of Argentina’s national poem, Oscar Fariña, Diego Meret, and Pablo Katchadjian rehearse what was an obligatory rite of passage for aspiring intellectuals throughout the twentieth century. While their common gesture signals a certain continuity with regards to a historic relation between culture and state, the reconfigurations offered by Fariña’s El guacho Martín Fierro, Meret’s En la pausa, and Katchadjian’s El Martín Fierro ordenado alfabéticamente conjointly emphasize the anachronistic and reiterative nature of this gesture. The Martín Fierro that emerges in these texts is a phantasmal figure who is glimpsed only in a moment of perpetual flight. These three Martín Fierro thus critique the repetition of foundational practices in a neoliberal era in which literature is no longer able to imagine subjectivities for an equally spectral State.

In 1850 Charles DeForest Fredricks took a portrait of the Governor of Corrientes (Argentina) and, by way of payment, received a tiger.  The episode, retold in numerous histories of early photography in the Americas, seems at first glance little more than a colourful anecdote set amid a rather dull litany of firsts: the first daguerreotype taken in this or that city, the first portrait studio, the first “native” photographer, etc. Yet a close reading of the few primary sources about this unlikely encounter suggests that the oft-repeated vignette articulates in condensed form the unique power that photography possessed in mid-nineteenth-century Latin America. In giving a live beast in exchange for an image of himself, the local strongman not only makes a display of his authority, but also realizes a radical, if momentary indistinction between animal life and social life–a literal enactment of what philosopher Giorgio Agamben identifies as the original activity of sovereign power. In this respect, the story of the tiger and the daguerreotype is representative of how, in the violent transition from colonies to republics in nineteenth-century Latin America, cultural practices were instrumental in making the idea of the modern state discernible.

En el contexto de la prolífica producción cultural en torno al Bicentenario argentino, este ensayo examina la escritura del autor argentino Washington Cucurto (seudónimo de Santiago Vega, n. 1973), en particular su novela 1810: la Revolución de Mayo vivida por los negros (Emecé, 2008). En contra de la repetida noción de que la poesía y las novelas de Cucurto les conceden visibilidad a grupos marginados, arguye que revelan el intrínseco exceso de representación de los nuevos relatos sociales. Es decir, Cucurto no critica la falta de inclusión de ciertos actores sociales en la vida cívica argentina o la historiografía nacional, sino – según el término de Alain Badiou – la excrecencia operante de la coyuntura actual. 1810 no rechaza las convenciones de la ficción histórica ni del relato estatal sino, al contrario, las lleva a un extremo absurdo, poniendo en escena una frenética acumulación de anacronismos. Al representar la destrucción y reconstrucción del Cabildo en plena orgía patriótica, Cucurto vincula de manera explícita el nuevo pluralismo nacionalista con el repertorio monumental de los festejos patrióticos anteriores. De este modo, 1810 constituye un pastiche corrosivo que no aboga por la representación estética y política de los grupos marginados de la sociedad argentina actual, sino que interrumpe o aturde un discurso sociopolítico que se empeña en fijar, vigilar y disciplinar el lugar del otro.

Criticism and academic inquiries of contemporary Argentine cultural production continue to uphold certain aesthetic categories that stymie the comparative analysis of film and literature. Surveying the parallel critical corpora regarding César Aira’s novel "La prueba" (1992) and Diego Lerman’s "Tan de repente" (1992), a loose adaptation of Aira’s text, not only provides evidence of this durable partition, but it also suggests a deeper affinity that the works hold in common. While interpretations of the novel and the film typically regard them as allegories of specific sociopolitical conjunctures, our comparison of the conclusions of each work – their ostensibly most dissimilar parts – demonstrates how "La prueba" and "Tan de repente" deploy a narrative logic whose divergent permutations undermine conventions of closure and, in turn, seek to destabilize the broader historical narratives they are held to exemplify. In other words, the abrupt, cinematic finale of "La prueba" and the gradual, meandering decomposition of "Tan de repente" seek to reactivate their respective media beyond traditional aesthetic and commercial norms, whose lingering presence still conditions the study of these cultural objects.