Intersecting tango : cultural geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900-1930 / Adriana J. Bergero ; translated by Richard Young.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bergero, Adriana J., 1953-

Series:

Illuminations (Pittsburgh, Pa.)

Illuminations

Language:

English

Spanish

Subjects (All):

Buenos Aires (Argentina)--History--20th century.

Buenos Aires (Argentina).

National characteristics, Argentine.

Buenos Aires (Argentina)--Social conditions--20th century.

Physical Description:

x, 476 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2008]

Language Note:

Translated from the Spanish.

Summary:

In the early part of the twentieth century, Buenos Aires erupted from its colonial past as a city in its own right, expressing a unique and vibrant cultural identity. Intersecting Tango examines the city at this key moment, exploring the sweeping changes of 1900-1930 to capture this culture in motion through which Buenos Aires transformed itself into a modern, cosmopolitan city.

Taking the reader through a dazzling array of sites, sources, and events, Bergero conveys the city in all its complexity. Drawing on architecture, photography, newspaper columns, schoolbooks, "high" and "low" literature, private letters, advertising, fashion, and popular music, she illuminates a range of urban social geographies inhabited by the city's various classes and groups. In mining this vast material, Bergero traces the profound change in social fabric by which these diverse identities evolved, through the processes of modernization and its many displacements, into a new national identity capable of engaging modernity.

In her interdisciplinary study of urban development and cultural encounters with modernity, Bergero leads the reader through the city's emergence, collecting her investigations around the theme of the tango, the defining icon of Buenos Aires. Multifaceted and original, Intersecting Tango is as rich and captivating as the dance itself.

Contents:

The jockey club

Palaces and residences

Parks, plazas, and Calle Florida

Passages, public spaces, and cultural crossings

Theaters and cafés

Conventillos

Paradigms and deviations

Work, the body, and dislocations of identity

Chains of desire

Palaces of temptation

Beauties, femmes fatales, tramps, vamps, and vampires

Rags and rejects

Reaffirming old paradigms

New alliances, old causes

Putting out fires

Fractured identities and economic dislocation

The garçonières and the sex of power

In-between identities, peripheral sexualities

The weak, the violent, and the tearful

Barrios and melodramas : of love and consternation

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 441-456) and index.

ISBN:

9780822943181

0822943182

9780822959854

0822959852

OCLC:

182735980

Publisher Number:

40015601553

Online:

Contributor biographical information

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