Primitive Modernities: Tango, Samba, and Nation by Florencia Garramuño (review)

In early 1914, Charlie Chaplin appeared alongside Ford Sterling and Fatty Arbuckle in the one-reeler Tango Tangles. It was Chaplin’s sixth comedy for Mack Sennett’s Keystone studios; although his Tramp figure had debuted a month previously in Kid Auto Races at Venice, Chaplin had not yet sufficiently merged with his creation for the audience to have particular expectations of his character, and indeed here he appears without his soon-to-be-trademark moustache. The film’s humor is broad, and its plot remarkably simple. Three men vie for the attention of a hat-girl, bouncing back and forth between dancing with her and fighting one another, in sequences that are so energetic that the dancing and the fighting occasionally switch places: in one memorable sequence, a rival plants a kiss on Charlie’s lips; in another, Charlie retaliates by presenting his rear, cheekily taunting his opponent.

It has been suggested that none of this has any particular connection to tango—that the relation stops at the handily alliterative title, which does of course provide an index of tango’s sudden and massive international popularity in the years preceding World War I. But the film in fact harmonizes remarkably well with the characteristics of the dance as unpacked by a series of tango scholars, from its frictional gender and class relations, through its demarcation of the shifting spaces of popular culture, to its actual bodily movements—the hip-thrusts, the collisions. And indeed in its physical and sociological equation of dancing and fighting, it not only hints at tango’s roots in African dance and its reworking in turn-of-the-century Argentina as social disturbance; it also reminds us that art itself is the product of conflict. Or, as Florencia Garramuño puts it in her graceful and pugnacious Primitive Modernities: Tango, Samba, and Nation, culture—particularly a self-consciously national culture—is “the figurative embodiment of a fistfight” (7). The particular cultural battle that Garramuño traces here has to do with the establishment of national symbols for the postcolonial sites of Argentina and Brazil in the early twentieth century—battles involving not only ethnic and economic alliances and tensions within the two nations themselves, but also pulling in an internalized foreign gaze. In other words, a sense of how these nations-in-reformation were being viewed from Europe, and how their modernizing self-presentation both entangles itself with and disentangles itself from the metropolitan embrace.

The classically received story of tango has it arising in the brothels of Argentina and Uruguay in the late nineteenth century, arousing only contempt among local cultural elites, traveling to Europe to makes its fortune in Paris, and returning home “civilized” to widespread acclaim. Over the past two decades, serious scholarly work has explicitly countered this narrative, doing so partly by adopting a provocatively mobile stance with relation to the object. For instance, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (1995), by the U.S.-based Argentinean dance ethnologist Marta Savigliano, deploys a variety of voices, from the academic to the performative to the sarcastic, moving playfully and ironically between prose, lyric, and drama to tell an often caustic, always mesmerizing story of tango’s enmeshment in processes of exoticism abroad and class conflict back home. In Paper Tangos (1998), Julie Taylor, an American ethnologist who spent the formative years of her training in Buenos Aires, narrates her immersion in tango during the dictatorship period, through an ostensible outsider’s moving meditations on politics and the personal. Finally, Robert Farris Thompson’s Tango: The Art History of Love (2005) presents the U.S. historian’s painstaking recovery of the African and Afro-Argentine roots of the genre’s dance, music, and lyrics, revealing its history to be much more grounded in textured cultural encounters from the 1850s to the present...