In recent years, academic interest in Argentina's racial dynamics – and, especially, in the traditional image of the country as homogeneously white – has continued to grow, partly as a response to the public debates about national identity that have been taking place in the country after the 2001 crisis. Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina constitutes a timely addition to these academic and public discussions. The volume's main argument is that Argentine whiteness can be seen as a variant of mestizaje, since it also proposes one single authorised modality of national belonging, one that is not fixed or definitive but ambiguous enough to include most of the population regardless of phenotypical variation and racial origins. Although it could be argued that this in itself does not constitute a major innovation in studies of race in Argentina, the diversity and quality of the volume's contributions make it an indispensable resource for Argentinists and, more broadly, for scholars working on race in Latin America.

The introduction by the volume's editors succeeds in the challenging task of providing a succinct yet convincing summary of Argentina's complex history of racial relations. The following chapters are grouped into two sections: the first part, which is primarily historical in outlook, deals with case studies from the twentieth century. The second part, which focuses on current processes, brings together anthropological and cultural and literary studies. The editors’ decision to concentrate on twentieth-century and contemporary issues and not include contributions that look at the nineteenth century is a sensible one. Although undoubtedly the legacies of the nation-building era have continued to shape Argentina's racial relations up to the present, this period has traditionally been the primary focus of academic attention. The result of this is what the editors call ‘the “missing twentieth century” in the study of race in Argentina’ (p. 14); that is, a slight deficit in studies of racial issues from the 1930s onwards, which this book seems to contribute to reducing.

The first chapter, by Sandra Deutsch, examines how Jewish immigrants negotiated their position vis-à-vis the notions of whiteness and Europeanness favoured by the nation-building elites, social reformers and cultural nationalists. Oscar Chamosa's and Rebekah Pite's contributions, in turn, look at the development of criollo culture through mass publications (cook books, tourist guides), focusing on how they positioned the mestizo populations of the north-west both at the centre and in the margins of the nation. In their respective chapters, Matthew Karush and Lea Geler shift the attention to the multiple and unstable meanings of blackness in the Argentina of the twentieth century – a period in which Afro-descendants were declared officially ‘extinct’. María Eva Rodríguez's chapter centres on indigenous populations in Patagonia in the aftermath of the ‘Conquista del Desierto’ – the nineteenth-century military campaign through which the national state annexed the territories in southern Argentina then under indigenous control – and demonstrates how state and scientific discourses contributed to the alleged ‘disappearance’ of Tehuelche people. Peronism's complicated relationship with race and, particularly, its simultaneous impugning of Argentina's whiteness and reinforcement of homogenising narratives is successfully analysed, from different yet complementary angles, by Ezequiel Adamovsky and Eduardo Elena. Elena's diachronic study, which spans from the 1940s up until the Kirchners, is particularly illuminating. Gastón Gordillo's chapter is probably the most successful in support of the book's claim to break new ground in the study of race in Argentina. It proposes an original reading of Argentine whiteness as ‘an affective and geographic formation’ (p. 243), thus opening up interesting areas of debate (the visceral aspect of racism, the limitations of ideology and discourse to explain social dynamics). The main problem with Gordillo's approach is that it tends to present affect and discourse as incompatible. It would nonetheless be more productive to see racial configurations as shaped by both ideology and affective dispositions. Chisu Teresa Ko's chapter proposes a very sophisticated analysis of Asian-Argentines – a collective often sidelined in academic and public discussions – through an approach that combines sociology, literary and cultural studies. Finally,Paulina Alberto's chapter engages with historical fiction in contemporary Argentina by examining issues of racial mixture.

Overall, Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina offers a very comprehensive assessment of Argentina's dynamics of race and nationhood in the past 100 years. The volume explores different forms of racial identity (white, black, indigenous, negro, Asian-Argentinian) and addresses their shifting valences, as well as their relationships with other social mediations (gender, class and regional background). The general conceptual framework used by the authors clearly positions the volume within the North American tradition of studies of race in Argentina – a tradition in which analytical categories like whiteness or blackness are much more explicitly deployed, and more attention is devoted to the relation between phenotype and race. That it closes with an epilogue by George Reid Andrews, whose pioneering work in the 1970s partly shaped this approach to the analysis of Argentina's racial formation, is a clear indication of this. At the same time, the book also establishes productive dialogues with the work produced, from different but complementary angles, by Claudia Briones (see her contribution to José Nún and Alejandro Grimson (eds.), Nación y diversidad (Edhasa, 2008)), Alejandro Frigerio (see his chapter in Gladys Lechini (ed.), Los estudios afroamericanos y africanos en América latina (CLACSO, 2008)) and Rita Segato (in Alteridades históricas/Identidades políticas (Universidade de Brasilia, 1998)).

Two critiques could be made: firstly, the volume slightly struggles when it comes to dealing with the complexities of the negro identity (partly the result of being closer to this aforementioned North American approach). Given its uniqueness in the Argentine case and its centrality in the country's political dynamics in the past 60 years, more explicit attention to and engagement with what means to be negro in Argentina would have strengthened the volume. The second critique is that most chapters begin with a summary of Argentina's history of racial relations and discourses similar to the one offered in the Introduction. This entails that the book becomes repetitive at times – though this is a problem only if one were to read it from cover to cover. In sum, Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina constitutes an excellent addition to the growing body of work on race in Argentina and will likely become a reference in this field.