In early 1914, Charlie Chaplin appeared alongside Ford Sterling and Fatty Arbuckle in the one-reeler Tango Tangles. It was Chaplin's sixth comedy for Mack Sennett's Keystone studios; although his Tramp figure had debuted a month previously in Kid Auto Races at Venice, Chaplin had not yet sufficiently merged with his creation for the audience to have particular expectations of his character, and indeed here he appears without his soon-to-be-trademark moustache. The film's humor is broad, and its plot remarkably simple. Three men vie for the attention of a hat-girl, bouncing back and forth between dancing with her and fighting one another, in sequences that are so energetic that the dancing and the fighting occasionally switch places: in one memorable sequence, a rival plants a kiss on Charlie's lips; in another, Charlie retaliates by presenting his rear, cheekily taunting his opponent.
It has been suggested that none of this has any particular connection to tango—that the relation stops at the handily alliterative title, which does of course provide an index of tango's sudden and massive international popularity in the years preceding World War I. But the film in fact harmonizes remarkably well with the characteristics of the dance as unpacked by a series of tango scholars, from its frictional gender and class relations, through its demarcation of the shifting spaces of popular culture, to its actual bodily movements—the hip-thrusts, the collisions. And indeed in its physical and sociological equation of dancing and fighting, it not only hints at tango's roots in African dance and its reworking in turn-of-the-century Argentina as social disturbance; it also reminds us that art itself is the product of conflict. Or, as Florencia Garramuño puts it in her graceful and pugnacious Primitive Modernities: Tango, Samba, and Nation, culture—particularly a self-consciously national culture—is “the figurative embodiment of a fistfight” (7). The particular cultural battle that Garramuño traces here has to do with the establishment of national symbols for the postcolonial sites of Argentina and Brazil in the early twentieth century—battles involving not only ethnic and economic alliances and tensions within the two nations themselves, but also pulling in an internalized foreign gaze. In other words, a sense of how these nations-in-reformation were being viewed from Europe, and how their modernizing self-presentation both entangles itself with and disentangles itself from the metropolitan embrace.
The classically received story of tango has it arising in the brothels of Argentina and Uruguay in the late nineteenth century, arousing only contempt among local cultural elites, traveling to Europe to makes its fortune in Paris, and returning home “civilized” to widespread acclaim. Over the past two decades, serious scholarly work has explicitly countered this narrative, doing so partly by adopting a provocatively mobile stance with relation to the object. For instance, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (1995), by the U.S.-based Argentinean dance ethnologist Marta Savigliano, deploys a variety of voices, from the academic to the performative to the sarcastic, moving playfully and ironically between prose, lyric, and drama to tell an often caustic, always mesmerizing story of tango's enmeshment in processes of exoticism abroad and class conflict back home. In Paper Tangos (1998), Julie Taylor, an American ethnologist who spent the formative years of her training in Buenos Aires, narrates her immersion in tango during the dictatorship period, through an ostensible outsider's moving meditations on politics and the personal. Finally, Robert Farris Thompson's Tango: The Art History of Love (Reference Thompson2005) presents the U.S. historian's painstaking recovery of the African and Afro-Argentine roots of the genre's dance, music, and lyrics, revealing its history to be much more grounded in textured cultural encounters from the 1850s to the present than we might have imagined.
Primitive Modernities situates us in a moment when, like Chaplin in 1914, the tango had met with a certain degree of success, but its features were not yet so fixed as to render them immobile. Garramuño's central question is how tango (and samba, as a secondary figure to be explained in a moment) moves from being rejected at home for its perceived “primitivism” to its acceptance at home precisely on the basis of that recognizable primitivism. In other words, how does tango come to be accepted as a national stereotype, in accordance not with the logic of European exoticism, but with the logic of national modernization, which of course carries its own portion of self-exoticization? (The Irish parallel of Riverdance springs to mind.) Hence the book's arresting title, which is designed to pull the reader up short to reflect upon her reading position: from Argentina, from abroad, from within or without the logic which consecrates or denigrates, and questioning where, indeed, that logic is located. (The fact that this book is itself a translation of Modernidades primitivas, published by Fondo de Cultura Económica in 2007, adds to this layering effect.) What are the cultural mechanisms, in other words, through which a rejected motif becomes the national motif par excellence both at home and abroad? Garramuño addresses these questions in a number of essay-length chapters that approach tango from different angles and in its various forms, paying attention to its multiple appearances in the cultural repertoire: as dance, as music, as text, as artwork, and even, in a moment crucial to tango's definition at home and throughout the Spanish-speaking world, as the basis for an early local film industry.
Insisting that the space where national culture is defined is itself webbed with class, ethnic, geographic, even international tensions, Garramuño thus offers us a prismatic view of not one but two national cultural symbols—tango and samba, for Argentina and Brazil, respectively. Her decision to place them in reflective relation, tracing how their respective national modernities emerge in both concert and conflict with European modalities, is designed to offset any temptation to see either one as an essential image for either nation; instead, we are reminded at once relentlessly and lightly of the historical process of construction of national forms. In the process, in what seems almost an elegant aside, Garramuño offers a sounding of the relationship between comparative and Latin American studies, proposing quite convincingly that we sidestep an exclusive focus on any phenomenon to study how it emerges in parallel to similar phenomena in other spaces.
And those spaces, as becomes clear as Garramuño's arguments unfold, are far from discrete. One of the striking contributions of the book, which links back to the relation between comparativism and Latin Americanism while hooking cultural studies into its orbit, has to do with its mapping of cultural circulation in the early years of the twentieth century, its argument that trajectories leave their imprint on forms (87). Tango and samba (in its earlier form of maxixe, or in their shared roots in Afro-Cuban habanera) travel to and connect with audiences (publics, participants, receptive and transformative artists) elsewhere in part because they participate in a much broader circuit of performances and borrowings on the move through Europe and the Americas in these years, which offer different possibilities for reimagining local forms through the lens of the international or the cosmopolitan. Garramuño offers the specific example of Darius Milhaud's importation of Brazilian music back to Paris in the 1920s, or the arrival of Igor Stravinsky's rhythmic experiments to Argentina through culture-consuming “beef-barons” years before Stravinsky himself came to visit. She might also have referred to Vaslav Nijinsky, who—as part of the Ballets Russes—visited the River Plate region twice, in 1913 and 1917, on his second visit becoming embroiled in pipe dreams for an Argentinean ballet on indigenous themes alongside local artists emboldened by the provocative experiments with Russian primitivism in Le sacre du printemps, which they had seen on their own visits to Paris. The turn to the local, in this Argentinean episode, is at once nationalizing and cosmopolitan.
This kind of comparative cultural particularism is germane to Garramuño's project, and it is of enormous generative importance for thinking about the twists and turns of modernism and modernization across a broad geographical stage. For while she chases tango and samba through novels, poems, artworks, and films to map out the local ethnic, class, and gender tensions at stake in their depictions, she is always careful to connect them to debates (or figurative fistfights) taking place in the international arena. Part of her contribution is thereby to create new critical and theoretical circuits, bringing, for instance, theorists of nationalism (Tom Nairn), postcolonialism (Partha Chatterjee), and modernist temporality (John Osborne) into conversation with Brazilian and Argentine cultural theorists, avant-garde writers, musicians, and artists. Indeed one of the hidden vectors of the book is its engagement with theories of the avant-garde as understood—in their breaks but also in their enmeshments—in Latin America and Europe, and particularly, in the understudied entanglement of each one with popular culture. Perhaps for this reason, some of the most beautiful and satisfying moments (in a book filled with them) involve analyses of artworks: artworks that reflect at once on local popular culture and on European engagements with them, stepping both toward and away from the outside world to trace out their own avant-garde primitivisms.
