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  • The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina by Ignacio Aguiló
  • Cynthia Tompkins
Aguiló, Ignacio. The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina. U of Wales P, 2018. 235 pp.

In his book, The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina, Ignacio Aguiló focuses on the impact of Neoliberalism on racism in Argentina. In the rich introduction, Aguiló notes that, "following Loïc Wacquant [he] conceive[s] neoliberalism as an articulation of state, market and citizenship, in which the first is utilized to impose the stamp of the second onto the third" (4). While the imposition of neoliberalism by way of the 1973 coup d'état in Chile is well established, Aguiló does a wonderful job chronicling the way Neoliberalism was institutionalized in Argentina during the military dictatorship (1976-83) and its aftermath. The book is particularly enlightening regarding the description of the rationale and manifestations of the crisis unleashed during la década Menemista (1990) as well as the profound economic debacle of 2001. In order to determine why the crisis was articulated through the language of race, and how to connect the economy with cultural production, Aguiló notes that one of the main traits of Neoliberalism is what Fredric Jameson defines as "dedifferentiation" that is, "the collapse of the distinction between economy and culture" (6). Thus Aguiló sets out to analyze: "the impact of the crisis on the myth of Argentina's exceptionalism and its relationship with middle-class imaginaries"; "the construction of certain Latin American migrants as a racial alterity"; "the identification of the shantytowns as the locus of a new racialized marginality"; and "the rise of neoliberal multiculturalism" (9). [End Page 285]

The introduction includes a brief contextualization of Argentine ethos. It begins with "Exceptionalism" founded "on the unparalleled realization of the civilizing project of European modernity in the last decades of the nineteenth century," updated in the 1950s and 1960s with theories of modernization that equated "development and whiteness/Europeanness" (10), and "reinvigorated during the late 1990s by some sectors of the middle class" (11). The second section, "Migration," shows that the percentage of immigrants from neighboring countries remained at "2.8 of the population" (11); however, the xenophobic response to Bolivians, Paraguayans, and Peruvians arises from their relocation to Buenos Aires "as a result of the crisis of local economies [as well as the] progressive impoverishment of the population due to neoliberalism" (12). In other words, by tying racism to neoliberalism, Aguiló makes the case that Argentina anticipates "xenophobic and nativist sentiments that would become widespread in the United States and Europe" (12). In terms of space, and following Wacquant, Aguiló states that, "slums and ghettos can be seen as spatial devices that reconcile the opposing objectives of capitalist exploitation and racial subordination" (15). Indeed, as the author remarks, this is a vicious cycle since "ghettoes and shantytowns confine a previously racialized group, but also contribute to the group's continuing racialization." The relationship between neoliberalism and multiculturalism is particularly well addressed as Aguiló argues that "key neoliberal actors like the World Bank, UNESCO, the Inter-American Development Bank and the European Union saw in multiculturalism a source for transforming cultural minorities into efficient players in the global economy" (17). Furthermore:

Neoliberalism also used multiculturalism as a force that could contribute to the disarticulation of traditional forms of identification and politics based on class. This was strategic given the fact that, in Western countries, workers constituted the leading opponent to the transition to a post-industrial, post-welfare social order.

(17)

While indigenous rights were first acknowledged in the 1994 reform of the Argentine Constitution, few indigenous groups have been able to jump all the necessary hoops to be recognized, and even fewer have been able to get the State to acknowledge their rights to their ancestral lands. As Aguiló notes, "the political implications and conflictive instances of diversity have been systematically undermined to the benefit of a rhetoric that acknowledges heterogeneity but not necessarily inequality" (17).

The book is structured around an introduction, six chapters, and a brief conclusion. In the first chapter, Aguiló dwells on the economic crisis, arguing that "neoliberalism went beyond the economic re-engineering...

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