Argentina’s Partisan Past: Nationalism and the Politics of History(11 Liverpool Latin American Studies)

Argentina’s Partisan Past is a challenging new study about the production, the spread and the use of understandings of national history and identity for political purposes in twentieth-century Argentina. Based on extensive research of primary and published sources, 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 a valuable resource to both students of Argentine history and those interested in the ways in which nationalism has shaped our contemporary world.

Table of Contents:
List of acronyms Glossary Introduction I. Argentina’s two pantheons: from mitrismo to revisionism 1. Mitrismo, Argentina’s “official” history 2. The Nueva Escuela and the Centenary Generation 3. Nacionalismo, populist nationalists and the emergence of historical revisionism II. Between co-optation and opposition: Peronism, nationalism and the politics of history, 1946–55 1. Prelude to Perón: nacionalismo and the military, 1943–46 2. Intellectuals, nationalism and the Peronist state 3. Peronism and the pantheon of national heroes 4. The effects of Peronist nationalism III. The deepening polarisation: the proscription of Peronism and its politics of history, 1955–66 1. Intellectuals and the rise of left-wing revisionism 2. The politics of history under the Liberating Revolution 3. Frondizi’s “integrationism” and the emergence of Peronist-nationalist youth groups IV. The apogee of revisionism: nationalism, political violence and the politics of history, 1966–76 1. Nationalism and history in the Onganía regime 2. History narratives and the rise of middle-class student Peronism 3. The return of Peronism: revisionism’s victory? V. New narratives for a new era? Shifts, decline and resurgence of nationalist constructions of the past since 1976 1. Nationalism and the proceso 2. The rise of irredentism and the decline of partisan nationalism 3. Nationalism and democratisation: laying revisionism to rest? 4. The accommodation and resurgence of revisionism under Menem and the Kirchners Conclusion Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Michael Goebel is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (lecturer/assistant professor) of Global History at the Free University Berlin and John F. Kennedy Fellow at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University.

Review :
'An original and excellent piece of work.' David Rock, University of California, Santa Barbara