Argentine Literature

Abstract

Argentine literature is somewhat of an outlier among the major productions of Latin America, having its roots neither in the culture associated with the great Spanish and Portuguese empire viceroyalties (centered in Mexico City, Lima, Bogotá, Havana, and Rio de Janeiro) nor in multifaceted contacts with indigenous cultures, some of them empires in their own right (Mexico, Peru). Indeed, most Latin American literatures have eventually had to come to terms with indigenous influences. And while this is also true of Argentina, there is not the historical depth associated with dominant traditions such as Mexico and Peru or with peripheral ones such as Paraguay or the Central American republics. Also, while most Latin American national literatures are associated with the centripetal force of their political and administrative capitals, Buenos Aires has always been a paradigm of the almost absolute dominance of its major population center. Argentina’s rupture with its colonial past, of which only a thin record in terms of literary culture exists, will be fundamentally driven by the need to look toward Europe, especially France and England, and the imperative to pursue a project of modernity that will lead it to becoming, in the 19th century, the preeminent economy of Latin America. One of the most impactful dimensions of the preeminence Buenos Aires gains from the late 19th century going forward is the consequence of its policies of immigration. Although immigrants have a multitude of origins, there is nothing quite like the Italian and Jewish diaspora that settled in the city and areas extending up the Río de la Plata system. Argentina is rightly called “the second homeland of the Italians,” and it is recognized as having the largest (mostly urban) Jewish population in Latin America and one of the largest in the world. Spaniards also represented a significant immigrant stream around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Finally, Argentina has always been profoundly divided along two interacting axes. One has been the struggle over the national character as defined by its great port city, Buenos Aires, and the hegemony of Buenos Aires is contested by interests distributed elsewhere in the country—in opposition to the tendency to equate Buenos Aires with Argentina. The other axis is somewhat more complicated: the opposition between elite culture and popular culture. Since the return of democracy in 1983, alternative sociocultural ideologies have done much to democratize Argentine culture. In the final analysis, the most important observation that one can make is that Argentine literature in the 21st century plays a central role in conversations about Argentine society and about the individual and collective national experience.