Argentina's Partisan Past: Nationalism and the Politics of History

Argentina's Partisan Past is a challenging new study about the production, the spread and the use of understandings of national history and identity for political purposes in twentieth-century Argentina. Based on extensive research, drawing on both archival and published sources, the book analyses the ways in which nationalist views about what it meant to be Argentine were built into the country's long-drawn-out crisis of liberal democracy from the 1930s to the 1980s.

Eschewing the notion of any straightforward relationship between cultural customs, ideas and political practices, the book provides a more nuanced framework for understanding the interplay between popular culture, intellectuals and the state in the promotion, co-option and repression of conflicting narratives about the nation's history. Michael Goebel gives particular attention to the conditions for the production and the political use of cultural goods, especially the writings of historians. The intimate linkage between history and politics, he argues, helped Argentina's partisan past of the period following independence to cast its shadow onto the middle decades of the twentieth century. This process is scrutinised within the framework of recent approaches to the study of nationalism, setting the case of Argentina within the context of current scholarly debates in this field. Argentina's Partisan Past will be a valuable resource to both students of Argentine history and those interested in the ways in which nationalism has shaped our contemporary world.