Print (and broadcasting) capitalism in times of crisis: the quest for a unified language market in Buenos Aires, 1935-1943

SESNICH, LAURA; ENNIS, JUAN ANTONIO

Murten

Workshop; Gloto[economía]política. Language under Capitalist (Trans) Formations; 2018

Université de Fribourg, Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Dpartement des Langues et Littératures

As classic works such as Anderson (1983) describe it, it is due to the expansion of print capitalism that modern national states come into being such as we know them, and together with them modern national languages, so as the debates and controversies around their foundations, mastering and administration.Our analysis will be focused on the further development from print capitalism to media capitalism in a time where broadcasting acquires a massive dimension, reaching every home and turning thereby into a massive means of communication, and therefore also a battlefield for language ideological issues. Along the late 1930s and early 1940s, what we nowadays know as Hispanofonía stands before a deep crisis, when the aftermath of Spanish Civil War moves the centre of intellectual life and print industry definitely from the Iberian realm to the Americas, being Mexico and mainly Buenos Aires both then outstanding editorial and intellectual irradiating points for the Spanish-speaking communities.In this context, some intellectual figures in Argentina began to question the role of the Argentine State (or the lack of it) in the organization and cultural leading directives of the cultural industry products which, due to their massive dimension, represent both a risk and as much as an useful strategy in the pursuit of an unified Spanish language.Some of the texts we are going to work with are the group of three articles published by Amado Alonso in 1940 in the Argentine newspaper La Nación about Argentina?s new leading role in the Spanish-speaking publishing market and its responsibility concerning Spanish language improvement, later published in 1943 as a book alongside with some other Alonso?s works by the Spanish Cultural Institution. Also in 1943 was published Social function of broadcasting by the historian Pedro de Paoli, in which he describes the then current broadcasting state of affairs and denounces the alleged poor cultural level of Argentine broadcasting and the need of an official guidance from both the Argentine State and the intellectuality.Although the main focus of the corpus we are going to work on mainly concerns language-ideological debates in Argentina, we shall take also into account another texts produced in Madrid, Mexico or Bogota, closely related to them.