Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Notes on the contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: The shades of the nation
- PART I HISTORIES OF RACE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
- PART II RACE AND NATION IN THE NEW CENTURY
- 8 African descent and whiteness in Buenos Aires: Impossible mestizajes in the white capital city
- 9 The savage outside of White Argentina
- 10 Between foreigners and heroes: Asian-Argentines in a multicultural nation
- 11 Indias blancas, negros febriles: Racial stories and history-making in contemporary Argentine fiction
- Epilogue: Whiteness and its discontents
- Collective bibliography
- Index
11 - Indias blancas, negros febriles: Racial stories and history-making in contemporary Argentine fiction
from PART II - RACE AND NATION IN THE NEW CENTURY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Notes on the contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: The shades of the nation
- PART I HISTORIES OF RACE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
- PART II RACE AND NATION IN THE NEW CENTURY
- 8 African descent and whiteness in Buenos Aires: Impossible mestizajes in the white capital city
- 9 The savage outside of White Argentina
- 10 Between foreigners and heroes: Asian-Argentines in a multicultural nation
- 11 Indias blancas, negros febriles: Racial stories and history-making in contemporary Argentine fiction
- Epilogue: Whiteness and its discontents
- Collective bibliography
- Index
Summary
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.
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- Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina , pp. 289 - 317Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016
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