Tango, Samba, Modernity and Nation. It takes more than two

FLORENCIA GARRAMUÑO

Harvard Review of Latin America

Harvard University

Lugar: Cambridge, Boston; Año: 2007 vol. VII p. 5 - 7

As long as the need to construct a national culture coincided with the need to become a modern nation, this changing primitivism paved the way for the construction of a simultaneous national, primitive and modern culture. The historical condition for the modernization of a Latin American culture is inscribed in these convoluted relations: if the nationalization of a cultural form previously considered primitive presented some contradictions to modernization, these contradictions end up being negotiated by the proposition of a primitive and modern form as an alternative type of modernity.  The article analyzes the construction of tango and samba as national symbols for Argentina and Brazil in the light of these problems.