Argentina: Stories for a Nation (review)

This wonderful book poses a conundrum to a reviewer. While it is not a book that can be read easily by people only casually familiar with Argentine history and literature, those with more experience in the field, as well as specialists in Jewish-Latin American history and literature, should put the book on their must-read shelf. This reviewer has read the book twice and found new insights each time.

Amy Kaminsky explores the nature of Argentine literature and argentinidad through an examination of how outsiders, especially North Americans and Europeans, have imagined Argentina, and how their imaginings are received in the Southern Cone. The United States and Europe represent to Kaminsky the industrialized north, which needs countries like Argentina as a foil to make a measure of its own worth. As she puts it, the study of the nation-state endeavors to insert “itself between the global and the local, it acts as a refracting lens between the global and the local that allows us to see the complex relations among all three” (p. xiii). Thus in order to understand Argentina, we need to comprehend its attraction to outsiders and vice versa. Kaminsky achieves this through an analysis of Argentine and foreign writers, both contemporary and non-contemporary, elite and non-elite.

The author covers many topics, including, the ways that Victoria Ocampo both perpetuated and mocked the “exotic” nature of Argentina held by the elite European writers she so admired and wanted to be admired by, the adoption of the Argentine tango by Europeans who create their own meanings of the dance, the particular attraction of Argentina for Europeans, the orientalization of Argentina through the fables and legends of white slavery and prostitution in the capital city of Buenos Aires, and the horrors of civil war depicted in scenes from the Argentine “Dirty War” from 1976 to 1983. By telling each of these stories, the author shows how argentinidad is invented over and over again, at home and abroad, and thus the nation-state seems to be continually reborn, destroyed, and reinvented.

Argentine complicity in fostering an exotic version of the nation-state provides the backdrop for the relationship between Victoria Ocampo and Virginia Woolf. Eager to be accepted by the Bloomsbury group, Ocampo gives Woolf a collection of butterflies, probably Brazilian. In return, writers like Woolf “invent an Argentina that responds to their own desire” (p. 69). Marta Savigliano’s work on the tango, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (1995), shows how Argentina first exoticized the dance, which then was reinterpreted by Europeans seeking their own meaning for the dance.

Many of the authors discussed are well known, while others are less so. These include Judith Katz, author of the 1997 novel, The Escape Artist, a novel about Jewish prostitution and white slavery in Argentina, and Hermann Keyserling, an author whose work on such topics as Mongol Spiritism crops up in the strangest places in European literature. Keyserling had become a friend of Ocampo and wrote a strange book about his perceptions of South America in which he feminized South America. Kaminsky devotes a considerable amount of time to both. In contrast, Nathan Englander, whose novel The Ministry of Special Cases (2007), which covers three generations of a Jewish family from white slavery to the Dirty War, is lamentably absent, as his work appeared shortly after Kaminsky finished writing the manuscript. She would have done well to add this important work, as well as that of Elsa Drucaroff (El infierno prometido [2006]) and Edward Bristow (Prostitution and Prejudice: the Jewish Fight Against White Slavery [1982]), rather than mention them in a footnote or ignore them altogether. These, however, are relatively minor quibbles. The book is really wonderful and insightful, and it provides a well-designed showcase for Kaminsky’s hypothesis that the global must interact with the local in order to sustain and refresh national identity.