LANCTOT, BRENDAN. Beyond Civilization and Barbarism: Culture and Politics in Postrevolutionary Argentina. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2014. iii + 446 pp.Nineteenth-century Argentina has long been understood in terms of a binary opposition between tradition and modernity, incarnated in the forms of the ruling Federalista party and its opponents. Led by the caudilllo Juan Manuel de Rosas and having their base in the ranchers and mestizos of the countryside and the AfroArgentine population of Buenos Aires, the Federales defended and economic nationalism. Their opponents, meanwhile, consisted primarily of Buenos Aires's white commercial elite, which sought greater and economic ties between their country and Europe and the United States. The civil conflict that erupted between the two groups in the period between 1829 and 1852 would be immortalized in the pages of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's canonical Civilizacion y barbarie (1845), a work that lends its name to the polemic between modernity and tradition that continues to shape the field of Latin American studies to this day.As its title suggests, Brendan Lanctot's penetrating and original Beyond Civilization and Barbarism: Culture and Politics in Postrevolutionary Argentina seeks to loosen the hold of Sarmiento's foundational binary on Southern Cone studies. Inspired by Ricardo Piglia's (Notas sobre el Facundo. Punto de Vista 8 [1980]: 8-15), Julio Ramos's (Desencuentros de la modernidad en Latina: literatura y politica en el siglo XIX. 1989. Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2009), and Diana Sorensen's (Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996) poststructuralist readings of Sarmiento's canonical text, Lanctot extends these authors' theoretical gaze beyond the work of the sanjuanino writer and towards archival sources, paying particular attention to little-studied pro-Rosas writers. Comparing the Rosistas to their opposition among the well-known intellectuals of the Generation of 1837, Lanctot problematizes the traditional dichotomy between the groups by mapping the shared discursive sphere in which they debated one another. The critical paradigm that such a reading proposes suggests] that politics in postrevolutionary Argentina consisted not of a clash between a vestigial colonial worldview and an ideology imported wholesale, if belatedly, from the metropolis. Rather, both sides engaged in a decidedly modern dispute over efforts to configure and control fledgling governing bodies and subjects (11).Thus, demonstrating a particular interest in the creation and interpellation of political subjects through cultural forms [which] imagined, elicited, and conditioned popular involvement in competing hegemonic projects throughout postindependence Latin America (12), Lanctot seeks to understand the place of the Argentine pueblo in the nineteenth-century sphere. The book argues that nation-state formation in the region consisted largely of the class's discursive efforts to interpellate the masses. Building on the recent interest that Latin Americanist historians have shown in the protagonism of the popular classes in nineteenth-century nation-building, Beyond offers a productive departure from the reigning paradigms of nineteenth-century Latin American literary studies, which have tended to focus on the foundational fictions, historical novels, and cronicas urbanas of the lettered elite, or the periodical culture of the middle classes.Chapter I, Writing, Affect, and the Portraiture of Power, focuses on the ways in which representations of Rosas were used to create the affective bonds needed to unite the masses and secure the Federalista regime's hegemony. Providing a rare look at descriptions of Rosas by Federalista authors, Lanctot analyzes two 1830 biographies of the caudillo: a poem by Luis Perez, written in popular dialect, and a more cultured essay by Pedro de Angelis. …