Realities and Fictions of Argentina

The dichotomy Civilisation vs Barbarism has been one of the guiding fictions of Argentinian cultural history since 1845, when Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilisation and Barbarism was published. Written at a time of cultural crisis, this founding essay established a fundamental binary that would rule the rest of Argentina’s history until today. The students will analyse the opposing sides and examine the peculiar dividing mentality created by the intellectuals of the country in the 19th century, which framed the first idea of Argentina. Its ideological legacy is in some sense a mythology of exclusion rather than a unifying national idea, a recipe for division rather than a consensus pluralism. Through a variety of readings and online activities, the subject invites you to explore, and contextualise globally, the realities and fictions that inhabit Argentina: a two-sided country, a place of contradictions.