Positivism, the predominant philosophy of Latin America's elites at the end of the nineteenth century, found its exemplary expression in Brazil's castilhismo and Mexico's porfiriato. Argentina, in contrast, seemed to have deviated from the norm of ‘enlightened dictatorships’. After the end of the Rosas tyranny in 1852, authoritarianism had been discredited. Early positivism, as embodied by Teacher-President Sarmiento, could barely be distinguished from liberalism and no single political philosophy was able to exert hegemony. However, the significance of ‘scientific politics’ should not be downplayed. As this article argues, the merger, in the 1880s, of Comtean positivism and teacher training revolutionised education policies that aimed at erasing frontier backwardness and inserting future generations into an export-led economy, oligarchic polity, and homogenous national organism. Normal schools, especially Sarmiento's Escuela de Paraná, acted as laboratories for the assimilation, merger, and contestation of European, North American, and autochthonous scientific, philosophical, and pedagogical traditions.
This article explores Jorge Luis Borges's reconceptualization of the periphery of Buenos Aires in the 1920s by focusing on his poetry collection Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) and a number of his critical essays of the same period. It becomes clear that Borges opts for the liminal landscape of the orillas – the borders between Buenos Aires and the Pampa – in order to create an essentialist myth for the city and, metonymically, for the entire nation in an era when the country's most enduring national narrative – criollismo – is imperilled by immigration and modernization, most strikingly in the capital city. Part 1, ‘Changing landscapes: from ultraísmo to criollismo’, follows Borges's return to Argentina in 1921 and contextualizes his swift transformation from a fervent ultraist and ‘a good European’ into an impassioned criollo who ventures into the city's most progressive region – the suburbs – in an attempt to rehabilitate Pampean criollismo against the indomitable backdrop of modernity. Part 2, ‘The intimate na(rra)tion: a close up of Fervor’, studies in more detail the conceptual nation-rebuilding that Borges undertakes in his first poetry collection, and links it to contemporary theories on nationalism.
This article develops existing critical perspectives on Lucrecia Martel's La niña santa, in the light of recent theoretical debates on childhood and cinema. In particular, it focuses on the film's evocation of childhood experience, especially the portrayal and evocation of feminine adolescence, which can be understood within the framework of (feminist engagements with) the Freudian uncanny. This film can be seen as engaging in a dialogue with horror and its hegemonic uses of the child- or adolescent girl-figure, as well as refusing the allegorical uses of the child common to Latin American cultural production. The article redresses a critical ‘blind spot’ around queer understandings of the film which complement a focus on surface both evocative of childhood experience and negatory of futurity and representation.
This article explores the 2008 revival of Eva, el gran musical argentino as part of a political campaign to secure Nacha Guevara's seat in the Cámara de Diputados as a candidate for President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's party in the midterm elections of June 2009. In the musical, Nacha Guevara (real name Clotilde Acosta) plays an independently minded and politically competent Eva Perón, and her own political credentials are strengthened as she is identified as a fellow actress-turned-politician. In the context of the revival, links can also be made between Eva Perón and Cristina Fernández. Whilst Fernández struggled to emerge from the shadow cast by her now late husband, former President Néstor Kirchner, the musical downplays Perón's influence in his wife's political career and Eva is presented as creating the conditions for the future election of a female president.
Publisher: Routledge