Feet Notes: The Fancy Footwork of Josefina Ludmer on the Gauchesca

Abstract

Josefina Ludmer's El género gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria (1988) was a key work at a time when Hispanic Studies was opening to critical theory, and remains one of the most suggestive and theoretically sophisticated texts in the discipline. In addition to highly originalreadings of selected gauchesca poems, a genre that is a cultural cornerstone in the River Plate, Ludmer engaged issues of national identity at two crucial sites, the geo-political boundaries of the state and the physical body of its subaltern members, well before these became common concernsin the field.This essay approaches Ludmer's theoretical contribution from the question of her obtrusive footnotes. The notes upend the text in various ways, thus enacting the same rebellion from below that Ludmer discerns in the gauchesca itself.Having discussed the dialogical relationestablished by Ludmer between the gauchesca and the ideology of the Argentine nation-state, the essay then seeks to enlarge the dialogue. The Romantic poetry of Esteban Echeverría, has long since been displaced by the gauchesca as an embodiment of Argentine identity. The proposal ofa sub-genre crucial to both suggests a means for recuperating Romantic poetry for current discussion of national identity in Argentina.