Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Preface INTRODUCTION Interwoven Histories, Interwoven Identities PART I The Arab Gaucho: Historical Fictions and Fictional Histories 1. Sarmiento: The Gaucho-Bedouin Barbarian and the Performance of Barbarism 2. Lugones's El Payador and the Legacy of Moorish Blood 3. Hallar and Yaser Custom-Build the Fictions of the Nation Coda: Menem's Self-Stylization as Arab Gaucho Part II Writing the Orient to Write the Self 4. Euro-Argentine Orientalisms, before and after the Watershed of Immigration 5. Arab Argentine Re-Presentations of the Orient: On the Border between History and Fiction Coda: The Arab/Argentine Knot, into the 1990s with Morandini's Take on Menem Part III Performing Mother Tongues: Language, Morals, and National Affiliation in the Formation of Arab Argentine Identities 6. Discursive Copies, Discursive Differences: The Disruption of the Performance of Argentine National Language and Identity 7. Another Dissonant Performance of Argentineness: Provincial Argentine Polyphony in the 1960s 8. Performing an Other Tongue: Language-Based Arab Identity and the Displacement of Pure Arabic IN CLOSING The Immigrant and the Orient in Literary and Cultural Studies Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author

Christina Civantos is Assistant Professor of Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami.

Reviews

"Civantos makes a huge and pioneering contribution in her reading of lesser-known texts by major writers, and in her studies of the large number of Arab-Argentine writers who have often slipped out of the Argentine literary canon. The list of writers Civantos has disinterred from the dust of literary history, many of them Arab-Argentine, is truly dazzling."