Buenos Aires

by David William Foster

Since the nineteenth century, Buenos Aires, the largest city of Spanish-speaking South America, has been one of the continent's major cultural centers. David Foster analyzes a standard aspect of Argentine culture, the tango, but with attention to gender issues; he looks at theater in terms of its interpretation of Argentine social life; the "dirty realism" of Enrique Medina provides a focus for marginal, subaltern, and suppressed sectors of the urban landscape; and gender emerges again in his discussion of photography (highlighting the work of Sara Facio, one of the city's great feminist artists), of Jewish ethnicity and immigrant culture, and of lesbian and gay identity in public spaces. Combining an eclectic dimension in its research (Foster is willing to analyze such ephemera as slogans, catch-phrases, and the decoration of public transportation) with a breadth of scope (the book encompasses history, literature, anthropology, architecture, and cultural politics), Buenos Aires will e