Beyond the Argentine Interior: Space, Place, and National Identities

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The Argentine Interior has often been relegated to the margins of national history. Discussion of economic change, political openings, and ideological shifts often focus on developments in Buenos Aires with the assumption that rural areas and small towns of the hinterlands merely replicate, or adapt patterns forged in the capital. The papers in this panel address this problematic from a variety of angles—from prison reform as colonization, to imagined landscapes as social utopias, to charismatic ties as political memory—to emphasize not only the centrality of the “Interior” to national history, but also the absence of any single “Interior.” This panel shifts the focus away from Buenos Aires to understand how local dynamics, remote landscapes, and fragile sovereignties challenge the image that Argentines painted of themselves throughout the twentieth century.

Sub Track

• History and Historiography

Session Organizer

• Javier Cikota, Bowdoin College

Chair

• Javier Cikota, Bowdoin College

Discussant

• Mark A Healey, University of Connecticut

Individual Presentations

• Long-Distance Charisma: Peronist Identities in the Argentine Interior after 1955 - Christine J Mathias, King's College London

• Soft Discipline and the Open Door Prison: Peronist Penal Reform in the Capital and Interior - Ryan C Edwards, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

• The Argentine Switzerland: Forging an Attractive Landscape in the Northern Patagonian Andes, 1910-1930 - María de los Ángeles Picone, Emory University

• “Turkish Fillets:” Cannibalism as frontier anxiety in Patagonia, 1905-1910 - Javier Cikota, Bowdoin College