In this Book

buy this book Buy This Book in Print
summary
Argues that Jewishness is an essential element of Argentina’s self-fashioning as a modern nation.

The Other/Argentina looks at literature, film, and the visual arts to examine the threads of Jewishness that create patterns of meaning within the fabric of Argentine self-representation. A multiethnic yet deeply Roman Catholic country, Argentina has worked mightily to fashion itself as a modern nation. In so doing, it has grappled with the paradox of Jewishness, emblematic both of modernity and of the lingering traces of the premodern. By the same token, Jewishness is woven into, but also other to, Argentineity. Consequently, books, movies, and art that reflect on Jewishness play a significant role in shaping Argentina’s cultural landscape. In the process they necessarily inscribe, and sometimes confound, norms of gender and sexuality.

Just as Jewishness seeps into Argentina, Argentina’s history, politics, and culture mark Jewishness and alter its meaning. The feminized body of the Jewish male, for example, is deeply rooted in Western tradition; but the stigmatized body of the Jewish prostitute and the lacerated body of the Jewish torture victim acquire particular significance in Argentina. Furthermore, Argentina’s iconic Jewish figures include not only the peddler and the scholar, but also the Jewish gaucho and the urban mobster, troubling conventional readings of Jewish masculinity.

As it searches for threads of Jewishness, richly imbued with the complexities of gender and sexuality, The Other/Argentina explores the patterns those threads weave, however overtly or subtly, into the fabric of Argentine national meaning, especially at such critical moments in Argentine history as the period of massive state-sponsored immigration, the rise of labor and anarchist movements, the Perón era, and the 1976–83 dictatorship. In arguing that Jewishness is an essential element of Argentina’s self-fashioning as a modern nation, the book shifts the focus in Latin American Jewish studies from Jewish identity to the meaning of Jewishness for the nation

Table of Contents

Download EPUB Download Full EPUB
  1. Cover
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. Halftitle
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. Series information
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. Title Page
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. Copyright
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. Dedication
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. Contents
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. List of Illustrations
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. Preface
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. Acknowledgments
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. 1 Planting Wheat and Reaping Doctors: Another Way of Being Argentine
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. 2 Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Anxiety
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. 3 Provisional Identity
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. 4 Family Stories and the Invention of Memory
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. 5 Jewish Legibility and Argentine Self-Fashioning
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. 6 Incidental Jewishness
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. 7 Embedded Jewishness: Memory and the State in Times of Terror
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. 8 Troubling Difference: Jewishness, Gender, and Transgressive Sexuality
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. By Way of Conclusion
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. Notes
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. Bibliography
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. Index
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
  1. Back Cover
  2. open access
    • View HTML View
Back To Top

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.