A Stranger in My Own Land: Sofía Casanova, a Spanish Writer in the European Fin de Siècle (review)

Abstract

reviews j 127 focuses on images of Argentina in the novels of Judith Katz and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The eighth, ''The Outlaw Jews of Buenos Aires,'' continues the analysis of Singer and Katz, showing how they (and earlier, Sholem Aleichem) grapple with the presence of Jewish groups in ''white slavery'' and prostitution in Argentina early in the twentieth century (also the subject of a well-known historical study, Donna Guy's Sex and Danger). The ninth, ''Dirty War Stories,'' focuses on international representations of the military dictatorship of 1976-1983, with particular attention to Lawrence Thornton's Dirty War trilogy (of which the first novel, Imagining Argentina, was the best known), Douglas Unger's Voices from Silence, and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Quinteto de Buenos Aires; an eloquent final section concerns V. S. Naipaul's essay ''The Return of Eva Peró n.'' The tenth, ''Violent Exclusions,'' analyzes films such as Robert Duvall's Assassination Tango, Wang Kar-Wai's Happy Together, and Martin Donovan's Apartment Zero, showing how these works explore the connections between sexual repression and state violence. The final chapter, ''The Persistence of Memory,'' continues this exploration of cinematic representations by looking at Alan Parker's Evita (and the much earlier Down Argentine Way and You Were Never Lovelier); the final pages sum up the ways in which Argentina is represented as familiar and other in works by Blasco Ibáñez, Dominique Bona, and several recent films on tango.Kaminsky's work is polemical in the best sense of that term. She grapples with the ways in which familiar explanations are inadequate, looking at things from different angles. Even as early as Reading the Body Politic her account of the uses of feminist theory in the field of Latin American literature grappled with linguistic and cultural difference, though ultimately the kind of gender analysis that she argued for, and the word género itself, did come to the fore in work on the topic in Latin America. In recent work, she brings layers of complexity to her discussions of sex, gender, sexuality, national identity, and linguistic self-fashioning. Kaminsky once again in Argentina: Stories of a Nation reveals her intellectual curiosity and wide-ranging knowledge, bringing together texts and problems that no one had thought to bring together before; she finds connections, and explores tensions, in a way that I can only call eloquent.