Argentine Fin-de-Siècle: Melancholic Decadence and the Rise of the Popular

Abstract

Argentine Fin-de-Siècle:Melancholic Decadence and the Rise of the Popular Alejandra Uslenghi KEYWORDS Fin-de-Siecle, Fin de Siglo, Modernity, Nation Building, Oligarchy, Queer Studies, Joven Moderna, Modern Femininity, Drama Criollo, Gaucho, Literatura Gauchesca, Juan Moreira, Mass Media, Female Magazines, Octavio Bunge, Delfina Bunge, Manuel Galvez, Podesta Circus, Jose Podesta, Nini Marshall, Tita Merello WILLIAM G. ACREE, Jr. Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay. U of New Mexico P, 2019, 288 pp. JOSEPH PIERCE. Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890–1910. SUNY UP, 2019, 336 pp. CECILIA TOSSOUNIAN. La Joven Moderna in Interwar Argentina: Gender, Nation, and Popular Culture. U of Florida P, 2020, 184 pp. The long turn of the century in Argentina has continually claimed nostalgic narratives, fierce ideological impeachments, and abundant scholarly attention. It is indubitably one of the foundational periods of the country's modernization and of the transformations Latin America would undergo in the twentieth century. The increased flow of European immigration—a product of the 1929 hemispheric economic collapse—and the subsequent military coup that inaugurated "an infamous decade" resulted in a retrospective and conservative characterization of a time of unprecedented accumulation of wealth and demographic growth. This idealized period would come to be known as the Argentine Belle Époque, the Age of Splendor, or una época brillante. The ascent of the country's landed oligarchy to power and their control of the nation-state apparatus, alongside their subsequent decline and collapse opposite the Peronist party and the popular masses, who had been politically disfranchised, culturally manipulated, and brutally repressed, sedimented a historical narrative. Although this narrative has often changed narrators and central characters, it remains a hegemonic pole of attraction for many scholars from various disciplines. Historians and philosophers have traced the constitution of the modern nation-state under worldviews shaped by positivism and eugenics; political scientists have examined the power dynamics that informed a new centralized state apparatus; literary critics and art historians have analyzed the rhetoric and ideological trappings of the brand of cultural nationalism that [End Page 95] became hegemonic; and, more recently, cultural studies scholars have brought interdisciplinary approaches to redefine the cultural divide between "high" and "low" cultural practices in light of the increased literacy, new media, and novel forms of sociality in modern urban life. Joseph Pierce, one of the authors under review here, hints in his introduction that we "are still under the spell of that turn of the century, that age of splendor in which the matter of kinship was cast anew as something that had been and could be again but different, modern" (2). The three works under consideration examine the cultural history of the decades between the Argentine fin de siècle and the interwar period in different yet interrelated ways. Staging Frontiers historicizes the phenomenon of the drama criollo since the wars of independence and focuses on the widespread popularity of these performances between the 1880s and 1910s. This period overlaps with the focus of Argentine Intimacies. La joven moderna extends beyond the chronological limits of the fin de siècle and into the mid-twentieth century as it considers the emergence of Eva Perón as a political figure. The confluence of these studies bears witness to the continuous spell of the age of splendor and highlights the significance of the Argentine case in Latin America. These books, however, suggest that it is not merely the charm, glamour, or enchantment of the long turn of the century in Argentina that continue to captivate scholars, but rather the far-reaching effects of the collapse of the political and ideological edifice of the nation. The legal, political, and cultural infrastructures built by the intellectual elite of the 1880s, closely aligned with the interests of the landed oligarchy, constitute a most troubling legacy, a politicized cultural archive, and a pervasive nationalistic discourse that continues to haunt present-day Argentine society. These three authors delve into the problematic nature of the period in question during which the intellectual elite who sought to exercise control over the political system and public life was confronted by all kinds of responses: The two decades that...