The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics (review)

276 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies would have liked some reference to the Instituto Borda, which has become elevated almost to a metaphor of Argentine culture, in films like ElÃ-seo Subidas 1986 film, Hombre mirando al sudeste and Marcelo Pineyrós 1993 film Tango feroz: L· leyenda de Tanguito; there is also the widely known photography of female inmates by Alicia D'Amico and Sarah Eacio and of male inmates by Eduardo Gil. A third section contains more historical material . There is a study by Hugo Vezzetti of the enormously influential Enrique Pichón Rivière, whose intellectual stature is still much admired. Finally, Plotkin surveys some of the major scientific personalities in the affirmation of the discourse of psychoanalysis/the psychoanalytic discourse in Argentina. A major omission—again, I must stress, when read by someone involved in Argentine cultural studies—is the staggering role of Jacques Lacan and an Argentine translation of Lacanianism in Argentina, beginning with the work of Oscar Masotta (it is important to note that Plotkin does accord space to Masotta in his companion study Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina [2001]). What is particularly important about Lacanianism is that it becomes an extremely influential theory/discourse for responding intellectually and culturally to the neofascist tyranny of the period 1976-83, and it continues to underlie so much of contemporary cultural production in Argentina. Indeed, the Freudian model may have established the psychoanalytical discourse of Argentina, but it has been the Lacanian model that gave it a particularly laterwentieth -century pertinence. Finally, I should note that the pop culture interpretation of Argentine psychoanalytic discourse, Viviana Gorbato 's Los competidores del divan: el auge de las terapias alternatives en L· Argentina (1994) is listed in the bibliography of Plotkin's 2001 monograph, but Gorbato does not appear in the index. A book like this, while undoubtedly viewed as extraneous to the analysis of the history of a medical science, is nevertheless, of enormous importance for making the links that the cultural historian would find most important. These reservations aside—which are, I must stress, those of someone from rhe domain of cultural studies—these essays are intriguing and they provide fragments of an important dimension of Argentine society. David William Foster Arizona State University The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics Duke University Press, 2002 Edited by Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaoldo The Argentine Reader is part of the Duke series "The Latin American Readers: Latin America in translation/en traducción/em rraduçao,"of which volumes for Peru, Brazil, and Mexico have appeared , in addition to this volume on Argentina. Each volume is characterized by a map of the country examined, along with a bibliography of readers , classified in broad topics. Each volume is also divided into broad historical/chronological categories , and there is a general introduction setting forth the scope of each volume. Unfortunately, there is, given the generally historical conception of the series, no chronology of important dates for the reader who may have trouble remembering that Evitas La razón de mi vida appeared in 1951 ; Perón was inaugurated in his second term in 1952; Evita died in 1952; and Perón was deposed in 1955. Not to mention the sequence of military dictators and the major deeds (so to speak) between 1966 and the return to constitutional democracy in 1983. The seventy-seven selections, distributed in ten categories, represent an impressive range of historical, sociological, and cultural sampling of Argentine texts. While the bulk is from the period of rhe division in which it is found, there is also the occasional essay that, from a later point of view, comments on the period. For example, the second section on nation building, which includes texts by major voices like José de San Martin, Juan Manuel de Rosas, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 277 Juan Bautista Alberdi, among other contemporaries , also includes an opening essay by the Berkeley historian Tulio Halperin Donghi. The section on the early-twentieth century, in addition to texts by Roberto ArIt, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, and Enrique Santos Discépolo, also includes two historical essays...