In an innovative cultural history of Argentine movies and radio in the decades before Peronism, Matthew B. Karush demonstrates that competition with jazz and Hollywood cinema shaped Argentina's ...domestic cultural production in crucial ways, as Argentine producers tried to elevate their offerings to appeal to consumers seduced by North American modernity. At the same time, the transnational marketplace encouraged these producers to compete by marketing "authentic" Argentine culture. Domestic filmmakers, radio and recording entrepreneurs, lyricists, musicians, actors, and screenwriters borrowed heavily from a rich tradition of popular melodrama. Although the resulting mass culture trafficked in conformism and consumerist titillation, it also disseminated versions of national identity that celebrated the virtue and dignity of the poor, while denigrating the wealthy as greedy and mean-spirited.
By the mid-twentieth century, Eastern European Jews had become one of Argentina’s largest minorities. Some represented a wave of immigration begun two generations before; many settled in the province ...of Entre Ríos and founded an agricultural colony. Taking its title from the resulting hybrid of acculturation, The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho examines the lives of these settlers, who represented a merger between native cowboy identities and homeland memories. The arrival of these immigrants in what would be the village of Villa Clara coincided with the nation’s new sense of liberated nationhood. In a meticulous rendition of Villa Clara’s social history, Judith Freidenberg interweaves ethnographic and historical information to understand the saga of European immigrants drawn by Argentine open-door policies in the nineteenth century and its impact on the current transformation of immigration into multicultural discourses in the twenty-first century. Using Villa Clara as a case study, Freidenberg demonstrates the broad power of political processes in the construction of ethnic, class, and national identities. The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho draws on life histories, archives, material culture, and performances of heritage to enhance our understanding of a singular population—and to transform our approach to social memory itself.
Argentina’s partisan past Goebel, Michael
2011., 20110427, 2011, 2011-04-27, 2013-04-24, 20110101, Letnik:
11
eBook
Argentina’s Partisan Past is a challenging new study about the production, the spread and the use of understandings of national history and identity for political purposes in twentieth-century ...Argentina. Based on extensive research of primary and published sources, it analyses how nationalist views about what it meant to be Argentine were built into the country’s long drawn-out crisis of liberal democracy from the 1930s to the 1980s. Eschewing the notion of any straightforward relationship between cultural customs, ideas and political practices, the study seeks to provide a more nuanced framework for understanding the interplay between popular culture, intellectuals and the state in the promotion, co-option and repression of conflicting narratives about the nation’s history. Particular attention is given to the conditions for the production and the political use of cultural goods, especially the writings of historians. The intimate linkage between history and politics, it is argued, helped Argentina’s partisan past of the period following independence to cast its shadow onto the middle decades of the twentieth century. This process is scrutinised within the framework of recent approaches to the study of nationalism, in an attempt to communicate the major scholarly debates of this field with the case of Argentina. The book is a valuable resource to both students of Argentine history and those interested in the ways in which nationalism has shaped our contemporary world.
When Sugar Ruled Patricia Juarez-Dappe
03/2010, Letnik:
49
eBook
Two tropical commodities-coffee and sugar-dominated Latin American export economies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.When Sugar Ruled: Economy and Society in Northwestern Argentina, ...Tucumán, 1876-1916presents a distinctive case that does not quite fit into the pattern of many Latin American sugar economies.During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the province of Tucumán emerged as Argentina's main sugar producer, its industry catering almost exclusively to the needs of the national market and financed mostly by domestic capital. The expansion of the sugar industry provoked profound changes in Tucumán's economy as sugar specialization replaced the province's diversified productive structure. Since ingenios relied on outside growers for the supply of a large share of the sugarcane, sugar production did not produce massive land dispossession and resulted in the emergence of a heterogeneous planter group. The arrival of thousands of workers from neighboring provinces during the harvest season transformed rural society dramatically. As the most dynamic sector in Tucumán's economy, revenues from sugar enabled the provincial government to participate in the modernizing movement sweeping turn-of-the-century Argentina.Patricia Juarez-Dappe uncovers the unique features that characterized sugar production in Tucumán as well as the changes experienced by the province's economy and society between 1876 and 1916, the period of most dramatic sugar expansion.When Sugar Ruledis an important addition to the literature on sugar economies in Latin America and Argentina.
Countries throughout the world have passed regulations that promise protection for workers and the environment, but violations of these policies are more common than compliance. All too often, ...limitations of state capacity and political will intertwine hindering enforcement. Why do states enforce regulations in some places, and in some industries, but not in others? In Politicized Enforcement in Argentina, Amengual develops a framework for analyzing enforcement in middle-income and developing countries, showing how informal linkages between state officials and groups within society allow officials to gain the operational resources and political support necessary for enforcement. This analysis builds on state-society approaches in comparative politics, but in contrast to theories that emphasize state autonomy, it focuses on key differences in the way states are porous to political influence.
Edge of empire Prado, Fabrício
2015., 20150916, 2015, 2015-10-13
eBook
In the first decades of the 1800s, after almost three centuries of Iberian rule, former Spanish territories fragmented into more than a dozen new polities.Edge of Empireanalyzes the emergence of ...Montevideo as a hot spot of Atlantic trade and regional center of power, often opposing Buenos Aires. By focusing on commercial and social networks in the Rio de la Plata region, the book examines how Montevideo merchant elites used transimperial connections to expand their influence and how their trade offered crucial support to Montevideo's autonomist projects.These transimperial networks offered different political, social, and economic options to local societies and shaped the politics that emerged in the region, including the formation of Uruguay. Connecting South America to the broader Atlantic World, this book provides an excellent case study for examining the significance of cross-border interactions in shaping independence processes and political identities.
Tanks roaring over farmlands, pregnant women tortured, 30,000 individuals "disappeared"-these were the horrors of Argentina's Dirty War. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Finalist for the ...L.L. Winship / PEN New England Award in 1998, A Lexicon of Terror is a sensitive and unflinching account of the sadism, paranoia, and deception the military junta unleashed on the Argentine people from 1976 to 1983. This updated edition features a new epilogue that chronicles major political, legal, and social developments in Argentina since the book's initial publication. It also continues the stories of the individuals involved in the Dirty War, including the torturers, kidnappers and murderers formerly granted immunity under now dissolved amnesty laws. Additionally, Feitlowitz discusses investigations launched in the intervening years that have indicated that the network of torture centers,concentration camps, and other operations responsible for the "desaparecidas" was more widespread than previously thought. A Lexicon of Terror vividly evokes this shocking era and tells of the long-lasting effects it has left on the Argentine culture.
Looking beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary social interactions, The Moral Power of Money investigates the forces of power and morality at play, particularly among the poor. Drawing on ...fieldwork in a slum of Buenos Aires, Ariel Wilkis argues that money is a critical symbol used to negotiate not only material possessions, but also the political, economic, class, gender, and generational bonds between people.Through vivid accounts of the stark realities of life in Villa Olimpia, Wilkis highlights the interplay of money, morality, and power. Drawing out the theoretical implications of these stories, he proposes a new concept of moral capital based on different kinds, or pieces, of money. Each chapter covers a different piece -money earned from the informal and illegal economies, money lent through family and market relations, money donated with conditional cash transfers, political money that binds politicians and their supporters, sacrificed money offered to the church, and safeguarded money used to support people facing hardships. This book builds an original theory of the moral sociology of money, providing the tools for understanding the role money plays in social life today.
