Challenging Whiteness and Europeanness in Argentine Cultural Production

Argentina has a tradition of disavowed racism, with dominant narratives of the nation as racially homogenous due to mass European migration and the supposed disappearance of Indigenous, Black and mixed-race peoples. We argue that the arts have enabled critiques of the subtle ways that race is written into national identity. We analyse race and cultural production in Argentina from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first, when critiques emerged of discourses of nationality articulated mainly around Europeanness. There are explicitly anti-racist expressions by Afro-descendant and Indigenous creators, but, because of Argentina’s specific racial formation, we focus on cultural products by working-class artists (mostly mixed-race people subject to an elusive yet systematic racism) and their white middle-class allies, who together have fostered strategies that, despite not being explicitly anti-racist, have contributed to addressing structural racism. These multiple forms of artistic expression illustrate the shifting valences of race in Argentina in which racial diversity at times goes from invisibility to a hypervisibility that mobilises, among the white middle and upper classes, paranoid fears about the Other that justify repression, but which also allow affective alliances in the face of racism.