Declamation Fever: Poetry Recitation and Mass Culture in Buenos Aires, 1900–1946

Abstract

Declamation, or the performance of poetry, condenses a key theme in Argentine mass culture of the 1920s and 1930s: the tension surrounding cultural democ-ratization. In the early twentieth century, poetry recitation was heralded as a means of shaping language use and introducing students to a castizo vision of national culture. After the 1910 Centenary, enterprising declaimers plied their craft on stage and at conservatories, training upwardly mobile young women in this supposedly refined art. Simultaneously, the culture industry made recitation recordings and manuals accessible to aspiring middle-class Argentines. This incor-poration of recitation into mass culture threatened aesthetic and political controls over the practice, with commentators lambasting the industrialization of poetry, and tacky reciters violating authorial rights, ruining texts with melodrama, and producing sentimental poetry. In the 1930s, government decrees would again subordinate declamation to a conservative, castizo version of national culture. The case of declamation, largely ignored within analyses of Argentine culture, both shows how criticisms of the democratization of cultural production were often rooted in gender and class and prefigures subsequent debates about control over cultural production and interpretation