1. Why Nation and Narration?
Difference between Nation and Country?
"Imagined Communities" (Benedict Anderson)
Homi Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration
Foundational fictions (Doris Sommer)
2. Overview of texts for this topic
Independence 1810s & 1820s (1898 for Cuba & Puerto Rico)
Independence texts
El matadero (Esteban Echeverría - 1871 [1841])
Facundo (Domingo Faustino Sarmiento - 1845)
Slave emancipation text
Sab (Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda - 1841)
20th C texts
Spanish-American War 1898
Ariel (José Enrique Rodó, 1900)
Calibán (Roberto Fernández Retamar, 1971)
El laberinto de la soledad (Octavio Paz, 1959)
3. Historical Context: Argentina
See David Rock, Argentina 1516-1982
16th & 17th C - River Plate territories
Colonial Argentina
Modern Argentina
Part of Viceroyalty of Perú
750,000 Indians (compare 25 million in Central Mexico)
3,000 Spaniards
25 cities founded in 16th C in the region
18th Century
Split between country & city (Buenos Aires)
Bs As is merchant centre (silver from Potosí)
Countryside: basic agriculture, little transportation
International rivalries
British try to oust Spanish
Establishment of Viceroyalty of River Plate
19th Century
British defeat of Armada 1804-05 (Trafalgar)
British invasion of Bs As (1806) (failed)
Napoleon invades Portugal & Spain (1808)
Fall of Seville (1810), second week of May
Independence: 25th May 1810
Post-independence struggles
Loss of territories (Bolivia, Paraguay)
Frictions between Bs As and hinterland exacerbated
Emergence of Unitarians and Federalists
Rise of cuadillismo
Independance Wars / Civil War - till 1820
Unitarians vs Federalists
1826: Rivadavia vs Caudillos (Juan Facundo Quiroga)
Rise of General Juan Manuel de Rosas
Rosas' regime
Exile of Unitarian intellectuals: Sarmiento / Echeverría etc.
Mazorca
4. Civilización v. barbarie
Generation of 1837
Post-Enlightenment concepts of liberty / equality / democracy (influence of French Revolution)
Spirit of European Romanticism
Byron, Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, Chateaubriand (Atala)
Hypostatization of landscape as sublime (freedom, immensity, escape from claustrophobic, unenlightened society, or, later industrial modernity)
Problem in applying this to Argentina
Dilemma
Rosas was a dictator, but with a popular power base
Attitude towards the populace
In order to denigrate Rosas, the Men of 37 had to denigrate the people
Racism
Depiction of Federalists as uncouth, racially mixed rabble
Binary oppositions (black-and-white thinking)
Civilization = City / Barbarism = Countryside
Binary oppositions tend to undo themselves: one term depends on other
Construction of myths of nationhood always depends on exclusion of some other
Ambivalent construction runs through these texts
Powerful way of reading these texts: tease out the unsustainability of the oppositions presented
Deconstructive reading of the instabilities at the heart of the oppositions which construct the nation
From nation to dissemination
In the end, the Nation is a powerful fictive construct
Janus-faced ambivalence of language and Janus-faced discourse of the nation
5. El matadero
Slaughterhouse as allegory of Rosas' regime
The judge of the slaughterhouse holds la suma del poder
The state run as a cattle ranch
The ambivalence of History
From outset, the text ambiguously claims and eschews historical discourse
Is the text claiming to be historical (historia as history), or fictive (historia as story)? Or both at once?
Claims he will not begin with Noah's Ark, but proceeds to narrate an epic flood of Biblical proportions
The nation is narrated in "the epistemological gaps that the non-science of history leaves open" (Sommer, 76)
Hybridity of genre
Historical account?
Political satire?
Racist propaganda?
Picaresque fascination with low-life?
Costumbrismo (observation of customs, description of people, recording of popular speech)?
Unstable allegory
The tormented Romantic (free-spirited) Unitarian is compared to wild animals and to the bull slaughtered earlier
The Unitarian takes on contradictory attributes of civilización and barbarie
The allegory collapses into a forced and unconvincing moral ending
About
Title
Nation & Narration 1: Context, Concepts and El matadero
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Author
Dr Geoffrey Kantaris
Version
26
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