Latin American Critical Book Review

Civantos, Christina. Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab

Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006.

Orientalism was a term coined by the postcolonial theorist Edward Said to describe the reduction of Middle Eastern or East Asian culture to a kind of exotic literary trope. Said discusses this development mainly in relation to European powers and their colonial possessions, but Christina Civantos in her 2006 text Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Identity examines the phenomenon of Orientalism specifically in a Latin American context. Argentina was one of the most ethnically diverse societies of Latin America. The debate over colonialism, Nationalism, Orientalism took on a unique character in the country because of its cross-section of identities. European, Indian, and Arabs were all determined to create their unique subjectivity in relation to the nation.

The history of Arabs in Argentina is a fairly little-known part of the nation's past, but by examining the dual claims of Euro-Argentineans and Arab Argentineans over the native figure of the gaucho, Civantos presents a kind of case study of the difficulty of pinning down the question of what or who is really Argentinean. The wandering, footloose cowboy herding cattle on the plains seemed to be a...

As a historian, Civantos is specifically interested in how Arab immigrants in Argentina were at times restricted from entry, restricted in their commercial activities, yet also made use of the available identities provided by the new nation with great enthusiasm, such as the 'gaucho' or the cowboy.
Fostering an identity independent from colonialization was important to many prominent Argentinean writers, and they mined the past to do so. However, no one can access the past in a pure fashion, rather how we see the past, and how the gaucho was perceived, was invariably affected by the nationalist projects of the different authors and refashioners of Argentinean identity. Civantos gives most detail to the authors Sarmiento and Lugones, whom she characterizes as in search of some sort of 'essential' Latin American identity, as distinct from the identity of immigrants to Argentina, including Arabs.

Sarmiento himself had traveled in the Middle East, and engaged, according to Civantos, in an Orientalist reading of Arab culture even apart from Argentinean literature. Like many before him, Sarimento was in particular fascinated by the figure of the gaucho in his own nation, whom he saw as kind of a nomadic, primitive representation of…