Between Argentines and Arabs

Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity

Christina Civantos

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780791466025, 9780791466018
• eBook ISBN: 9780791482469
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Between Argentines and Arabs is a groundbreaking contribution to two growing fields: the study of immigrants and minorities in Latin America and the study of the Arab diaspora. As a literary and cultural study, this book examines the textual dialogue between Argentines of European descent and Arab immigrants to Argentina from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. Using methods drawn from literary analysis and cultural studies, Christina Civantos shows that the Arab presence is twofold: "the Arab" and "the Orient" are an imagined figure and space within the texts produced by Euro-Argentine intellectuals; and immigrants from the Arab world are an actual community, producing their own texts within the multiethnic Argentine nation. This book is both a literary history—of Argentine Orientalist literature and Arab-Argentine immigrant literature—and a critical analysis of how the formation of identities in these two bodies of work is interconnected.