Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity

by Christina Civantos

Overview

Between Argentines and Arabs is a groundbreaking contribution to two growing fields: the study of immigrants and minorities in Latin America and the study of the Arab diaspora. As a literary and cultural study, this book examines the textual dialogue between Argentines of European descent and Arab immigrants to Argentina from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s.

Using methods drawn from literary analysis and cultural studies, Christina Civantos shows that the Arab presence is twofold: "the Arab" and "the Orient" are an imagined figure and space within the texts produced by Euro-Argentine intellectuals; and immigrants from the Arab world are an actual community, producing their own texts within the multiethnic Argentine nation. This book is both a literary history—of Argentine Orientalist literature and Arab-Argentine immigrant literature—and a critical analysis of how the formation of identities in these two bodies of work is interconnected.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791482469
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	06/01/2006
Series:	SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	283
Sales rank:	943,573
File size:	490 KB

About the Author

Christina Civantos is Assistant Professor of Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

INTRODUCTION Interwoven Histories, Interwoven Identities

PART I The Arab Gaucho: Historical Fictions and Fictional Histories

1. Sarmiento: The Gaucho-Bedouin Barbarian and the Performance of Barbarism

2. Lugones's El Payador and the Legacy of Moorish Blood

3. Hallar and Yaser Custom-Build the Fictions of the Nation

Coda: Menem's Self-Stylization as Arab Gaucho

Part II Writing the Orient to Write the Self

4. Euro-Argentine Orientalisms, before and after the Watershed of Immigration

5. Arab Argentine Re-Presentations of the Orient: On the Border between History and Fiction

Coda: The Arab/Argentine Knot, into the 1990s with Morandini's Take on Menem

Part III Performing Mother Tongues: Language, Morals, and National Affiliation in the Formation of Arab Argentine Identities

6. Discursive Copies, Discursive Differences: The Disruption of the Performance of Argentine National Language and Identity

7. Another Dissonant Performance of Argentineness: Provincial Argentine Polyphony in the 1960s

8. Performing an Other Tongue: Language-Based Arab Identity and the Displacement of Pure Arabic

IN CLOSING The Immigrant and the Orient in Literary and Cultural Studies

Notes
Bibliography
Index