Indias blancas, negros febriles: Racial stories and history-making in contemporary Argentine fiction

Abstract

With the start of the new millennium, Argentine readers appear to have developed a taste for a new kind of racial storytelling. Faithful black servants pining for their white mistresses, white captive women falling for their indigenous captors, and enslaved “Hottentot” princes seducing white socialites are some of the unlikely characters populating a new crop of historical fiction, set mostly in Argentina's turbulent nineteenth century. The corpus of stories spotlighting the lives, loves, and tribulations of nonwhite Argentines is expanding rapidly, primarily through novels aimed at adult audiences but also in short story collections and youth literature. Some of these works have won critical acclaim and prizes, and others – largely ignored by the literary establishment – have become mass-market bestsellers. The popularity of these works in present-day Argentina is striking given the efforts of past generations of Argentine politicians, thinkers, and writers to set their nation apart, racially and culturally, from its neighbors. This project itself rested substantially upon a particular kind of racial storytelling – historical, political, or literary narratives that, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, idealized or asserted Argentina's homogeneous whiteness and Europeanness as part of a “civilizing” process. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, proponents of this “white legend” of Argentine racial history declared indigenous people and Afro-Argentines to have disappeared through war, disease, or peaceful assimilation. Throughout the twentieth century, celebrations of Argentina as a “perfectly white” country of immigrants “descended from the boats,” a “melting pot” of primarily European ethnicities, came to enjoy widespread acceptance among Argentina's urban educated sectors. The notion of Argentine whiteness and exceptionalism has also been indirectly reinforced by what we might call a “black legend” of Argentine racial history. This critical counter-narrative, embraced at different times by historians, politicians, ethnic activists, and other public figures, provides a dark (rather than rosy) vision of Argentine whiteness: it sympathizes with the indigenous and Afro-Argentine victims of nineteenth-century “civilizing” campaigns and denounces the violence and discrimination that led to their “extermination” or “genocide.” Yet this newer crop of tales offers a different kind of racial storytelling, paralleling the recent rise in Argentine public life of what I call “brown legends” of Argentine racial identity.