Argentina: Stories for a Nation

Amy Kaminsky's earlier books consolidated her reputation as an original and wide-ranging critic of Hispanic literatures. Reading the Body Politic (1992) is an important intervention in debates about gender and sexuality in Latin American literature. In After Exile (1999), she told the story of Latin American exile literature-a fairly familiar story by now-through looking at literary production not in Spanish but in the languages of countries where some of the exiles ended up (particularly Swedish, since that is a language she herself knows well). Her anthology Waterlilies (1995) is a fascinating selection of women's writing from Spain from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. And now she has published Argentina: Stories for a Nation, which focuses on representations of Argentina in a wide variety of literatures, including, but certainly not circumscribed by, its own national literature.

In this book, Kaminsky looks mostly at representations of Argentina in literary texts in English, French, Yiddish, German, and Italian (as well as some in Spanish by Spaniards as well as by Argentines), and in films made by directors as diverse as Alan Parker, Martin Donovan, and Wang Kar-Wai. Some of the texts she looks at are rather repellent: this is the case with Lawrence Thornton's trilogy on the Argentine Dirty War, or the earlier travel essays by Count Keyserling. Kaminsky's readings of them, though, are patient and intelligent. She explains (better than anyone else has to date, in any language) what Victoria Ocampo thought she saw in Keyserling, and how the (rather comic) misunderstandings between them culminate in Ocampo's rebuttal of Keyserling's account of Argentina, published some years after the latter's death. Kaminsky compellingly shows how important Argentina has been to the world imagination, from Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Claudio Magris and Judith Katz. Kaminsky's work is well-grounded in Argentine writing on Argentina, but she brings together a fascinating international body of texts that show that Argentine self-representations were far from the only ones.

The book is organized in eleven fairly short chapters. The first, "Bartered Butterflies," focuses on the ways in which Victoria Ocampo submits to Virginia Woolf's exoticizing fantasies of the Argentine pampas by sending her some preserved butterflies (from Brazil!). The second, on identity narratives, focuses particularly on Graciela Scheines's and Hugo Biagini's book-length essays on Argentine culture, teasing out of them a fascinating discussion of Argentina's cultural dependence on external images of itself. The third, "Imperial Anxieties," considers British images of Argentina from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in Wilde, Conrad, and Christie. The fourth, "Europe's Uncanny Other," examines how Argentina is gendered female, and rendered Indian, in works that range from Claudio Magris and Sylvia Iparraguirre to Nathan Englander, Azorín and Carmen Nestares. The fifth concerns Victoria Ocampo's complex relations with Count Keyserling, whose "othering" of her country she does not respond to publicly until after his death. Chapter six, "The Race for National Identity," analyzes representations of race, including the comic strip that features the Indian cacique Patoruzú and the representation of Blacks and Indians in El gaucho Martín Fierro. The seventh chapter, "The Other Within," concerns representations of Jewishness in Argentine culture from Borges and Magris to Antonio Muñoz Molina and Dominique Bona, including discussions of visual artists Michiko Hoshino (Japan), Vija Spekke (Lithuania-Italy) and Jules Kirschenbaum (US); a fascinating section focuses on images of Argentina in the novels of Judith Katz and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The eighth, "The Outlaw Jews of Buenos Aires," continues the analysis of Singer and Katz, showing how they (and earlier, Sholem Aleichem) grapple with the presence of Jewish groups in "white slavery" and prostitution in Argentina early in the twentieth century (also the subject of a well-known historical study, Donna Guy's Sex and Danger). The ninth, "DirtyWar Stories," focuses on international representations of the military dictatorship of 1976-1983, with particular attention to Lawrence Thornton's Dirty War trilogy (of which the first novel, Imagining Argentina, was the best known), Douglas Unger's Voices from Silence, and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Quinteto de Buenos Aires; an eloquent final section concerns V. S. Naipaul's essay "The Return of Eva Perón." The tenth, "Violent Exclusions," analyzes films such as Robert Duvall's Assassination Tango, Wang Kar-Wai's Happy Together, and Martin Donovan's Apartment Zero, showing how these works explore the connections between sexual repression and state violence. The final chapter, "The Persistence of Memory," continues this exploration of cinematic representations by looking at Alan Parker's Evita (and the much earlier Down Argentine Way and You Were Never Lovelier); the final pages sum up the ways in which Argentina is represented as familiar and other in works by Blasco Ibáñez, Dominique Bona, and several recent films on tango.

Kaminsky's work is polemical in the best sense of that term. She grapples with the ways in which familiar explanations are inadequate, looking at things from different angles. Even as early as Reading the Body Politic her account of the uses of feminist theory in the field of Latin American literature grappled with linguistic and cultural difference, though ultimately the kind of gender analysis that she argued for, and the word género itself, did come to the fore in work on the topic in Latin America. In recent work, she brings layers of complexity to her discussions of sex, gender, sexuality, national identity, and linguistic self-fashioning. Kaminsky once again in Argentina: Stories of a Nation reveals her intellectual curiosity and wide-ranging knowledge, bringing together texts and problems that no one had thought to bring together before; she finds connections, and explores tensions, in a way that I can only call eloquent.