International History

""Argentina’s Partisan Past is a study about the production, the spread and the use of understandings of national history and identity for political purposes in twentieth-century Argentina. It analyses how nationalist views about what it meant to be Argentine were built into the country’s long drawn-out crisis of liberal democracy from the 1930s to the 1980s.

Eschewing the notion of any straightforward relationship between cultural customs, ideas and political practices, the study seeks to provide a more nuanced framework for understanding the interplay between popular culture, intellectuals and the state in the promotion, co-option and repression of conflicting narratives about the nation’s history. Particular attention is given to the conditions for the production and the political use of cultural goods, especially the writings of historians. The intimate linkage between history and politics, it is argued, helped Argentina’s partisan past of the period following independence to cast its shadow onto the middle decades of the twentieth century. This process is scrutinised within the framework of recent approaches to the study of nationalism, in an attempt to communicate the major scholarly debates of this field with the case of Argentina.

The book is written for both students of Argentine history and those interested in the ways in which nationalism has shaped our contemporary world.

Reviews:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8599787
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35047
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2012.00560_9.x/abstract""
http://hahr.dukejournals.org/content/93/1/146.full.pdf+html

This article contributes to debates about fascist influences among Argentina’s guerrilla groups of the 1970s. From the overall perspective of developments in Argentine nationalism, it traces back the history of the far-right Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista and Tacuara and assesses their significance as the nuclei from which later guerrillas came. Based on police reports and periodical publications from the period in question (c.1937–c.1973), it makes some generalisations about the collective biographies of militants. While not contradicting the widely held view that originally fascist groupings played a role in the emergence of Argentine guerrillas, the article introduces some nuances into this argument. Particular emphasis is given to the role of Peronism and the Cuban Revolution as facilitators of changes in Argentine nationalism.

The article explores the connections of various forms of nationalism in Argentina with Arab countries and pan-Arabism, focusing on the 1960s. Contrary to much of the existing scholarship on Argentine nationalism, it maintains that nationalist ideas and movements were not necessarily undermined, but frequently fed by transnational exchange. Analyzing how cultural analogies between Argentina and Arab countries were construed on the basis of pre-existing notions of Argentina as a Hispanic country, the article eventually arrives at broader theoretical considerations about the advantages and predicaments of transnational history.

Este libro analiza la interacción entre el nacionalismo y la política de la historia en la Argentina del siglo XX. Ambos conceptos, el de "nacionalismo" y el de "política de la historia", son objeto de debate, pero el segundo es más sencillo de definir. La mayoría de los historiadores coincidiría en afirmar que el conocimiento histórico es un medio fundamental en las luchas por el poder político. De allí se sigue que, consciente o inconscientemente, las interpretaciones de la historia suelen producirse, difundirse, apropiarse y utilizarse para fines políticos. Con "política de la historia" se remite a las formas en que se escribe y moviliza la historia con el objeto de afectar la distribución del poder político en una sociedad. Desde luego, las ideologías en cuyo nombre se hace ello varían, pero como las narrativas, los mitos y los símbolos históricos son la materia a partir de la cual se interpretan las identidades nacionales, muchas políticas de la historia se hallan integradas en los debates sobre qué constituye aquello que podríamos llamar los rasgos esenciales de un Estado-Nación determinado. Dicho de otro modo, no toda política de la historia es nacionalista, pero todos los nacionalismos profundizan en el pasado de la Nación como base de reivindicaciones políticas actuales.