Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures – serie

In the final months of 2001 the state of Argentina came close to collapse, as government, banking and social order all broke down. The Argentinazo - civil unrest to some, a democratic uprising to others - had a seismic impact on how the country saw itself, its history and its future. The sense that boundaries had been broken enabled new approaches, not only in making sense of current events but also in forging an alternative way forward.

In the post-Crisis period, a revitalized sense of historicity became a crucial mobilizing impetus, along with a new model for society: horizontalism, a non-vertical model of social and political organising grounded in mutual respect and co-operation. This sea-change in attitudes was reflected in the cultural life of the decade which followed, as artists and activists explored multiple new subjectivities of citizenship. In this rich and broad-ranging study, Brigid Lynch traces the cultural legacy of the 2001 Argentine Crisis through representations of historicity and horizontalism in literary fiction, journalism, films and television drama.

Brigid Lynch is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London.

‘On one such occasion, he stopped in front of the mirror and looked at himself very carefully, trying to discover on his discoloured face anything, any sign that would denounce the black race. He observed himself well, separating his hair at the the roots, stretching the skin on his cheeks, examining his nostrils and teeth; finally he flung the mirror onto the dresser, consumed by an immense and fathomless dissatisfaction.’

An age of freak shows, sexual pathologies and scientific racism, the late-nineteenth century saw doom-laden predictions made about the future of Europe’s cultural and economic periphery, supposedly beset by endemic licentiousness and darker skin. Querying the widespread view that Naturalist literatures reinforced such prejudices, David J. Bailey charts their playful travels around the Lusophone world, where a perceived breakdown of family, nation and empire both confirmed and threatened the authority of European ‘science’. Drawing on queer and postcolonial theory, contemporaneous thought, and encompassing a range of extraordinary and often humorous texts, from scandalised tales of pederasty to the biting social critiques of Eça de Queirós, Bailey uncovers a dynamic, transatlantic network of Portuguese and Brazilian writers who, in compelling and remarkably similar ways, resisted the devastating implications of ‘scientific’ approaches to life and love at the fin de siècle.

David Bailey is a Lecturer in Portuguese Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester.