Daniel James, a preeminent historian of the Argentine working class and Peronism, has fundamentally transformed how we understand Latin American labor history. The publication of his first book, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class (1988), revolutionized the historiography by attempting to understand the significance of the Peronist movement to the working class, rather than through political narratives that condemned it as fascist or celebrated it as unproblematically liberatory. This groundbreaking approach established a new standard for analyzing popular politics.

James’s methodological innovations have proven equally transformative. His second monograph, Doña María’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (2000), subjected a five-hundred-page interview transcript with a former meatpacking worker to a probing meditation on oral history as historical method, and 25 years after publication, it remains essential reading in graduate seminars on oral history. His recent collaboration with Mirta Lobato, Paisajes del pasado: Relatos e imágenes de una comunidad obrera (2025), is the culmination of decades of research on the meatpacking town of Berisso and demonstrates his pioneering use of photographs as primary sources. James has also coedited influential collections, including The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers (1997) and Capitalism and the Camera (2021).

Born in England in 1948 to Communist parents, James earned his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics before teaching at the University of Brasilia, the University of Colorado, Yale University, Duke University, and Indiana University, where he served as the first Bernardo Mendel Professor of Latin American History. His influence extends through his mentorship: he chaired 14 dissertations whose authors now hold positions at major universities in the United States, Argentina, Canada, and New Zealand.

The following interview, conducted over 3 days by four of his former doctoral students, explores James’s life, historiographical contributions, methodological innovations, and his commitment to graduate teaching. The original transcript exceeded 45,000 words; we have condensed it substantially while preserving James’s extemporaneous reflections.

I lived in Shepparton, a very upper middle-class area about 20 miles at the end of one of the main ramales that went into Waterloo, in part of what they called “Stockbroker Belt.” My parents moved there because it was near a factory. My parents married in 1947. My father was a prisoner of war for 5 years. He was taken prisoner at Dunkirk in 1940, and he was released by the Russians about 80 miles to the east of Berlin.

My mother was born in 1924 and is from the northeast coast of England. The mines there are right on the seashore, and the tunnels that follow the seams of coal are under the seabed. My maternal grandfather was killed in about 1931. The roof collapsed. My mother was one of fourteen children, and she only knew seven of them because the others had died by the time she grew up.

My mother goes down south when she’s about twelve years old to work as the maid at the lowest rank. She ran away with the butcher’s boy. When the war breaks out, she lies about her age to join the army. For her, the war was the best thing that could have happened. She told me that it was the first time she ever had guaranteed meals and clothes. The first time she had shoes that didn’t have holes in them was when she joined the army. After the war when he meets my mother, my father gets a job in a metalworking factory that made dental equipment.

The difference between me and my schoolmates was that my father and mother both joined the British Communist Party. He came from a mining family in South Wales. He had one uncle who was very influential in his life, who went to Spain and fought in the International Brigade and was one of the first Communists in this mining village. His own father, a miner, wouldn’t allow him to go down the pits. My father was going to be the one who went to grammar school.

It’s about books. We had books everywhere. They were by Marx, Lenin, Marx and Engels, and actually Stalin as well. For the party you had to have a knowledge of history, basic working-class history, basic communist history. You’re training militants, and you have to know the arguments, and you have to win. My father would come home from the factory, and he was doing these correspondence courses in Marxist economics.

My father’s two newspapers were The Daily Worker, which was the Communist daily, and the Financial Times. His argument was that you get the Financial Times, because, unlike the other bourgeois newspapers, the bourgeoisie doesn’t lie to itself.

The other thing I recall very strongly was it gave me, from early on, a strong sense of internationalism. The first clear memory I have of a political moment was in 1953, and that would mean I’m five years old. Sometime in the summer we’re driving to Wales with one of my father’s comrades from the same factory. I can recall this atmosphere of complete depression in the car. It’s the Rosenbergs. It’s the day that they’re executed in New York. It was as though it was a death in the family.

At eleven years of age, you had this thing in England called the 11-plus, and depending on how you did in these exams, you either went into the secondary modern where your school career ended at age fifteen, and you went to work, or you went into a grammar school, and that could end up as a path to university.

I grew up in a house that read books. My father drilled me for like 4 months, preparing me for these exams. None of my real group of friends went to grammar school. So when I’m eleven years old, I go to a grammar school, which is physically a long way away and different. And that leads me to Oxford eventually.

I remember him arguing politically. Again, going back to the idea that you had to win the argument, and there was none of this “oh, yes, I understand your point of view.” You go for the jugular when you can.

My father and I never grew apart. I obviously became a Trotskyist. What else am I going to become when I’ve got a Stalinist father? (chuckles)

Our main competitor was the Communist party. So that gets translated into my home. My mother would beg me, she said, “Please don’t talk about politics,” because I was ruining Sunday lunch.

By the way, increasingly I think my father was right on most of the main arguments that we had. I realize that the sort of arguments I make in Resistance and Integration about the need to understand the power of the bureaucracy, although I’m not sure I realized it at the time I was writing it, was a sort of settling of accounts with my father.

Funnily enough, I got on best with the richest, the ones who came from these public schools like Eton. I had no trouble with them because they just naturally assumed that they were born to run the world, and they didn’t have to prove it to you. I have to say, the people I had more problems with were these lower-/middle-class, grammar-school boys. For them, Oxford was social mobility.

But when I say culturally ineffective, there comes a point when I would go home to my parents’ house to visit, and I would run into these former school friends because their families still lived on that estate. I’d run into them, and you just have less and less to say.

So when I bring friends home my mother would cook these wonderful meals and they would have wine. And then afterwards my father would say, “would you like to hear some music?” And he’d put on opera. So they’re in the midst of total cognitive dissonance. They come home expecting to find this guy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, rolling his own cigarette, and drinking beer out of a glass. And they find this guy.

I didn’t feel that shame. My father was enormously intent on me getting to Oxford. It’s almost as though he was pushing me.

There’s another moment of this after I graduated. I didn’t have a job. I go to Wales for my cousin’s wedding, and I meet one of my old friends from my childhood in Wales. And he’s telling me that they’re opening up a lot of opencast mining. I remember my father picking up, and I said, I’m thinking of not going back to live in Oxford. And there’s this silence at the other end. And it’s a silence that I could feel, the disapproval and anxiety. It was almost at this moment that I realized that it was his worst nightmare. He had left Wales to get away. And his son, after going to Oxford, is going to go back.

I think it was my first or second History Workshop when I saw E. P. Thompson in front of this absolutely packed room, there must have been 250 people. He was a magical performer. The climax of the performance involved him reading a letter from an agricultural worker, written in the 1780s or 1790s, describing the destruction of the commons. You could have heard a pin drop.

A lot of the papers were actually being done by Samuels’s students. These students were workers. They had got the time off to go to Ruskin from their jobs because their unions negotiated these contracts. So you’re also, for the first time, not looking at some Oxford don with his pipe. You’re looking at men and women, and I could recognize them because they look like my father or mother, and they look like all my father’s friends and comrades. So they were recognizably workers, and they were doing stuff about socialist themes in history.

It was a very intoxicating mix. The first time I really came across oral history was in those sessions at Ruskin. And of course, you had this charismatic guy who’s overseeing all this: Raphael Samuel, with whom, by the way, I shared a jail cell one evening.

And I was beginning to read a little on Cuba, without understanding it very much. And then I met a guy, an economist at one of the Oxford colleges who had developed an interest in Cuba, and he got hired by the Cuban government to go there at the time of the great 10-million-ton sugar harvest in 1970.

So I then started hanging out more at the Latin American Studies Center, where there were a number of Argentines by then. Ernesto Laclau was there, Ezequiel Gallo was there. I think Laclau has his moment on the road to Damascus, and he decides that he doesn’t want to study Argentine sheep farming and wants instead to become a world-famous philosopher. I went to see him. His article on the Cordobazo had just come out in New Left Review. I remember him giving me a copy of the article. I had no idea what the hell any of that was about.

And then I get to do the MA in Latin American Studies at the University of London. I was enormously lucky in that I had two professors, John Lynch and Richard Moseley-Williams, who were teaching courses and were Argentinists. My interest in Peronism really comes from the political scientist Moseley-Williams at LSE.

For various reasons, I found Peronism, despite its sui generis, uniquely Argentine nature, strangely familiar, especially from a working-class point of view. It wasn’t done consciously at the time, but the whole thing in Resistance and Integration about the union bureaucracy is a rewrite of what I’d learned from my father’s side, and in my relationship with my father.

Obviously, if I was going to do anything in history, it was going to be oriented toward labor. Labor history, especially again filtered through the History Workshop.

It was a learning process. I remember the first serious book I read on labor. It happened to be hanging around the library at the Center for Latin American Studies in Oxford. It was Roberto Carri’s book, Sindicatos y poder. First of all, it took me a long time to read, because my reading in Spanish was not very good.

But I found what I wanted to do, especially when I got to Argentina to do the research. I think that Alberto Belloni, meeting Alberto, gave me this confidence, because suddenly I recognized in Alberto a certain worker prototype. He was like my father in many ways. Except he was of the opposite political persuasion within the left. But he was an autodidact, he was an organic intellectual. Both of them, my father included, ultimately reject the Marxist notion of false consciousness.

I didn’t know anyone, but I could just tell that this military government was hanging on by its fingertips. It had no legitimacy. It was also an extraordinary cultural moment as well. I remember going to Córdoba in the winter of 1973. Lynn and I hitchhiked to Córdoba. And then I went to Luz y Fuerza to see if it would be possible to speak to the compañero Tosco. I’m standing in line to get to the office and I said to the guy: “I’m English, and I just wanted to talk to Compañero Tosco, but I’m not sure where to find him.” So the guy looks over there, and he says, “Well, there he is,” and I turn around and he is in line in his overalls. He’s just come from his shift. This is the guy the military considered to be one of the two or three most dangerous people in Argentina.

And I got to know the guy who ran it, and so he would allow me to take it out and use it as a library, so I would take stuff out and go home, annotate it, or photocopy it, and then take it back the next day. And the last thing: it was an advantage to be a foreigner. I’ve often said this. Because they didn’t take you seriously. Especially in those years when politics was in everything in Argentina. Whereas, who was I? A British guy who didn’t know anything.

So in October she goes back to Philadelphia, and we had left some sort of agreement. I then went to Philadelphia from Argentina. And then I go back to England finally in mid-1974.

I decided I had to write it. I wrote it. We would put Nick to bed, and then literally, I wrote most of that dissertation between the hours of about seven o’clock and as long as I could stay awake, which is one of the main reasons that it’s an awful dissertation. I would like to take it off the shelves of the University of London and burn it.

I eventually arrived in Brasilia via Rio. Gentil picked me up and sitting in the car he turns around and says, “oh, by the way, would you have any problem teaching sociology?” Because he said there was a little probleminha with getting the contract out of the history department. What am I going to say? I’ve got my two bags, my wife and child are waiting anxiously to come down. That’s how I got to teach sociology. So I taught essentially labor sociology because I could do that.

I ran out of counting how many sons and daughters of generals were in my classes. And they were all radical revolutionaries: the higher the general, and father, the more revolutionary they were.

I loved Brazil. I think I was lucky as well to get there at a particular moment. I went back to the United States because I got this job offer, for 1 year in Colorado.

The only reason why I was marketable was that I already had two articles. I had the article on the Peronist left and I had the other one on the Congress of Productivity and rank and file. I was competing against people such as Barbara Weinstein or Florencia Mallon, who were ready to get their first books out. And all I’ve got is this abomination of a dissertation which I don’t even want to look at.

Emilia Viotti da Costa was the advisor of all of those people who I had been losing out to. She hired me [at Yale] and the first thing she said was, “James, you have to understand one thing: you have no chance of getting tenure here,” which is true, but it was a shock to be told that early on in the process. “First of all,” she said, “you will have no mentors here. You have no protectors here.” She said, “because of me, they don’t like me.” Well, they don’t like her, because she sued them to get tenure. But she’s basically telling me: “In this world, you need a protector. You need a sponsor. You don’t have anyone.”

It’s the source of a certain form of alienation within the US academy. In the book that Arlene put together for my retirement, one of the things that is quite common in some of the comments is that some people would make reference to the fact that I was very excitable, that I would get outraged by something. I realized what’s being described is a form of behavior that violates certain fundamental tenets, and one of them has to do with argumentation, which I inherited from my father.

You mobilize your resources for debate. I learned this from my father. But finger pointing was part of his arguing. It’s the sort of thing I’m sure he did on the shop floor. And if you take something seriously, then it’s what you do. You are what you are, in a way, especially when you’re 31. When you get to the States, you’re sort of basically formed, aren’t you?

And I say that as well, with a full recognition that the best thing you can be in United States in academia is British, because they love the Brits, to a disgusting level.

In many ways any critique of a leftist present and possibility would have to come to terms with a process of defeat over at least the last 40 years. And at this stage it’s probably a more catastrophic defeat than past defeats.

Whether or not I believe in a revolutionary transformation in the more classical Marxist sense, you always want to keep that open as a possibility, and that might be the “utopian” possibility of the future. But your priorities change. I personally, and this is not something I would have said for many years, give far more priority to the fact that the left needs to come to terms with a whole set of dangers implicit in an emerging authoritarianism that is rooted in new technologies.

My utopia hasn’t changed. In a sense, it’s a notion that for better or worse, let’s call them working people, would be able to take control of their lives and find forms of collective organization that can guarantee basic human rights. You could find it in the Peronist Constitution of 1949. When you get to my age, my default mode intellectually is Marxism. That’s the first thing I reach for when I’m thinking about a social or political phenomenon. And that’s not going to change. But there’s an increasing pessimism on my part that it can then be translated into institutional and collective organizational forms that would lead to a freer society.

Part of my utopia draws on anarchism as well. In Argentine terms, for example, the real problem with anarchism wasn’t that it was wrong in the 1930s. It was right. But at the wrong time. Every single thing they said about the dangers that would follow on the emergence of large-scale industrial unions. It was right. It’s just that it doesn’t help being right. You need to be right at the right time, and they were right at the wrong time.

So, in this situation, “grupos de afinidad” are those relationships that survive this form of politics. In the anarchist conception of the “grupo de afinidad” there was no sense of ideological conformity. It’s just people united by a common ethical approach to what they ultimately wanted out of life.

The first time I started thinking more seriously about the influence of Thompson on me was when I started to develop a certain sort of critical approach to certain things. In his later interventions in historiography, he takes on Althusser in a way that forecloses the possibility of a serious engagement with philosophy or theory; it’s a fundamentally closing-down gesture.

Thompson comes across as a country squire—he’s living in this house that his parents bequeathed him, where he always lived. So I began to have some doubts about that. And yet, when finally, quite late in his life, they finally publish his book on William Blake, it’s these incredibly sophisticated readings of Blake’s writings and literature and art. So Thompson is always there, but I don’t think I cite him in Resistance and Integration.

And I start reading. I read Laclau. I remember I had a boring bus ride into campus at Yale, and I would read Laclau on the bus. I’m reading that and finding it very interesting. I read Gareth Stedman Jones for the first time, because he had published his book on languages of class. So the whole linguistic thing is there. So that introduction is, as you say in Argentina, a “brocha gorda.” Each brushstroke is really one of those readings, and Bourdieu is in there. Raymond Williams is in there. These are all things I’ve read from 1982 to 1985.

But what it does is that it creates a complicated book. There are two parts, because in a way, there’s the introduction, which I think is probably 70% of what people remember. I don’t know how many people pay attention to my brilliant analysis of the union bureaucracy.

But that’s why: it’s because I take an unusable manuscript or an untransformable manuscript, one that can’t be transformed easily into a book, and I put a new front piece to it and I put a new back end to it. And then I cut down and edit the middle. In part, it’s because I can’t recreate the things that motivated me in 1972, 1973, 1974. It was largely a dissertation motivated by industrial sociology as it existed in Britain in those years.

The funny thing is that I had only a restricted interest in Perón himself. I was once referred to as “el peronólogo James” by an Argentine academic. I was sort of outraged because I thought I have never been a peronologist. I’ve only ever read one biography of Perón, other than La Novella de Perón. In that sense I’m not a peronologist. In fact, I’m interested in a limited set of things that do involve Peronism as a movement, as an institution. But I’m not interested in Perón personally.

After the book comes out in Argentina in 1990 they had a book launch without me because I couldn’t come down from the United States. And so there’s Héctor Palomino, Juan Carlos Torre, and Ricardo Sidicaro. So, Hector always used to tell me that they were talking about me. And Sidicaro says something like well, you know, I don’t know what happened. “I think what happened with James was that he met Alberto Belloni, and he just bought Alberto Belloni’s whole version of this.” And so Juan Carlos Torre tries to defend me. But they’re all talking about me in the past tense. So Héctor Palomino gets up, and he says something like, “I think we ought to make clear that this is not a posthumous book, that Daniel James actually is alive and exists. He’s just not here.”

I just went to see Doña María, and I talked to her. And then I went back 6 months later, eight months later, and she had died. So all of a sudden I had this idea of tidying up the manuscript, asking her questions, all that sort of thing. She’s dead. I’m left thinking what the hell to do. And it took me another six years of reading to figure out what you do with her oral history because I collected it, and I collected the Correale manuscript. I had done that without a macro project.

The first paper I wrote was for David Montgomery’s faculty seminar. This becomes part of that chapter, “Listening in the Cold,” about the interview that goes wrong. So that’s the first rough draft. From Yale’s intellectual environment, I took linguistic philosophy, some Derrida, and Raymond Williams. And at Duke I’ve got Alberto Moreiras and the whole of Jameson’s literary studies program, many of whom were also blended into the Latin American Studies Center, because in some way or other they also worked on Latin America.

My initial idea was to divide it by themes, but to put paragraphs before each theme of exposition. But in the end, I just stopped doing it because I decided that it was on the assumption that I wanted the book to be primarily a contribution to the history of Peronism. And I realized that wasn’t what I wanted the book to be. The book is a series of meditations on oral history seen through the lens of a particular Argentine person with a specific background and history.

Let’s go back to the Latin American labor history workshop which spans the two decades in which Resistance and Integration and Doña Maria are produced. The Labor History Workshop was really like a “grupo de afinidad.” It was a consistent collection, because there were people who went to this conference every year for 10 or more years. We were all at more or less the same stage in our academic professional development, and we were all motivated by a general commitment to labor history.

We had enough money to go out and get some good pizza in New Haven, and that was it. But really, it’s because of John. I’ve been very lucky to collaborate with people—Kevin here is another example—who are far more dedicated and motivated to organize than I am. And we build up this group, and it coincides with the “giro linguístico,” and it coincides with a real emergence of, let’s say, feminist history, gender history. Barbara Weinstein, Mike Jiménez, Deborah Levinson, Jeff Gould, John Soluri, Mark Healey, and many others were active in this.

And I do it mainly by subjecting ideology to a critical lens, to take the different ways in which ideology can be appropriated, transformed, mimicked, focusing especially on the various strategies that the subaltern, or in this case, industrial workers, use. I agree that it is an ideology-centered book. I think that’s also one of the reasons why Raymond Williams was influential, because Williams offers a possibility with concepts such as “structure of feeling,” to bridge that gap from ideology to subjectivity. And then Doña María is undoubtedly moving toward subjectivity.

The transition to the last book, you have to bear in mind, started in 1994. Hector Palomino jokingly said to me, after reading a couple of drafts: “You know, if you continue along like this, you’re gonna have a major achievement, you would have written a history of the ‘Cuna del Peronismo’ that doesn’t have any Peronism in it.” And he’s right! In the introduction, we say, “Even in the Cuna del Peronismo, you cannot reduce human beings, human agents, human subjects, to the history of a movement, no matter how powerful, however influential, however popular it is in purely electoral terms.” That very fact freed us to be fully engaged in subjectivity.

It’s there in Doña María. Oral history of working-class populations, of the poor, probably requires a whole set of conjectures. You mark it linguistically. In part, it’s a cover-your-ass thing. It’s a hedge-my-bets.

But it’s also a genuine part of an emerging historical methodology. Although even in something like John French’s biography of Lula, where he has the most complete archive of a labor leader, when it comes to crucial parts, he’s got to use his imagination. About the politics of cunning, he doesn’t have archival proof. Lula’s not writing memos that said, “Well, I’m gonna adopt a cunning strategy.” He doesn’t have that. But he still has to ultimately make that leap into the future and he does it brilliantly. He’s a fine, fine historian. He’s constructing it with an extraordinary archival armature sustaining it. But in the very center, that’s a series of subjective assumptions. He links it to a working-class vernacular culture that emerges in industrial São Paulo, and which is brought almost certainly from places such as the northeast of Brazil and then adapted as lessons of how you survive. But at the heart of it, at the end it’s still a conjecture. And it’s still in that sense an educated guess, an incredibly educated guess in John’s case, and in our case, we don’t have that luxury that he had archivally. Now you either dismiss those documents or you…

If you do oral history, it’s almost inevitably what you end up doing. Memory is a series of guesses about your own past, and what you remember. But I think probably the newer thing that we did in Paisajes was to also include the world of photography. Vernacular photography also blends into the world of material objects, because photographs are material objects.

For example, we are trying to imagine what it is that Julian is seeing when he sees this photo of Emiliano. It’s a group photo. Emiliano is taking photographs. He’s not a good photographer, but he’s a conscious photographer, and he sends this photo. At that moment you finally have to imagine. And we imagine, we project onto that. What is it he’s seeing? Julian doesn’t need recognition. He needs personal engagement. He needs affect.

We know the detail about how they worked in the field together before they both emigrated, and we know that Emilio taught him to read and write. So, we’ve got those little fragments, they’re little threads. Maybe it’s even more fragile. But it offers you something. Otherwise, you’ve got very little, if you want to make it about subjectivity.

The other thing, I think, with me and the history discipline, is also the sort of work I do. The only book of the three that is a general book is Resistance and Integration, right? It’s clear that my preference after that has been to go into a form of microhistory.

It’s also that fundamental difference between Hobsbawm and Thompson. Hobsbawm is at 25,000 feet. Thompson is the opposite, and I suppose that may be why I have always preferred Thompson. It’s my style of history. I like being there [in Berisso]. The other influence of Benjamin, apart from memory and all the other things that are in the book, is this idea of the monad.

So, in a way, especially in an international city such as Berisso, which it is, despite its poverty, its history, is an international history, you’ve got a reproduction of the world. And I think that also is part of my style of history. So I did Doña María and now this book. And I think that’s a personal choice.

It’s obviously a way of dealing with a fragmentary archive. And it’s there in Benjamin, only for him, it’s the operating concept of the whole Das Passagen-Werk. Epistemologically, it’s a much bigger thing for Benjamin. And Mirta took the time to read Sergei Eisenstein and his distinct categories of montage.

Taking those risks, if you like, for us, is what makes it interesting. But I can see, yeah, are there limitations? You know, it’s also on the premise that you can ever get some sort of complete historical reconstruction.

Freud really thought that you could get to the bottom and uncover a complete memory, and in a sense he then collectivizes that. I’m not sure I agree with that. But my point is that in a sense, I’m an anti-historicist, and I would agree with Benjamin that that’s a failed premise. We’re looking at vernacular. We just think it’s worth it. And it’s also a personal choice, because it’s also what makes history worth doing.

And that’s almost a libidinal question. It’s what moves you. It’s what gives you joy. It’s what gives you pleasure. I often said to grad students as they’re starting, there’s no point in suffering this unless you really, really want to do it, unless it meets a need, and I mean by that again, an emotional, libidinal need within you. Because otherwise, who would put up with this.

I think the writing of history is a moral enterprise ultimately. It goes back, I suppose, to the continuing influence of Thompson. Ultimately “the rescuing from the enormous condescension of posterity” is a moral claim.

I’m 31 when I first started teaching at Yale. So I felt I was among not equals, but it was a shared sort of thing. The one thing I learned from her very early on was, actually, if you’re going to do it, you need to want to do it, and you need to be prepared not to resent the amount of time it takes to be a good graduate advisor. That means learning to listen and to speak judiciously. You’ve got to put in your work. You’ve got to actually like it.

What made it so interesting at Duke was something that I couldn’t really do at Yale: I could actually now teach these cross-pollinated seminars. So I would teach seminars with Alberto Moreiras. The first time we did a thing about film, actually on Argentine film. Neither of us knew anything about it. So then there’s this broad group of students from outside the history department. Doña Maria wouldn’t be what it is as a book, good or bad, without this experience of teaching these interdisciplinary seminars at Duke.

I don’t know. I’m fascinated that of all my books, Valeria, you would say that about Resistance and Integration, because it’s my most sociological and conventional sort of book. I suppose it has always mainly been about relationships, which is, I think, why, since Resistance and Integration, I’ve focused almost exclusively on knowable communities, because you can establish these sorts of relationships and know these people. And this doesn’t mean that you necessarily establish an intimate relationship with all the people that you are involved with. But it does initially mean that you have to care. I do have interest in people. And where does it come from? I don’t know. I’ve always been pretty gregarious. I’ve enjoyed people.

I grew up in an atmosphere of working-class sociability. A pub was fundamental. It wasn’t primarily a place to go and get a drink. They were primarily social places. And because of the structure of a pub, you could be sitting next to anybody, and almost by definition, you’d end up in a conversation with them.

You would exchange ideas, and I think that’s probably part of my openness to people and my general liking of people.

The Work of Mourning is, I think, a great book. It’s a series of eulogies that he had to give in the death of friends. And of course, ultimately, very soon after he is added to that list. But it’s a profound meditation.

So why wouldn’t I put that on there? I don’t know that every student is going to find something. A lot of students might well think, “Jesus, this is not going to help me write my thesis on the nineteenth-century imperial bureaucracy,” or whatever. I can’t guarantee that, but it’s worth the try.

Constructing syllabi is challenging, especially nowadays with all these new sorts of sources and or platforms and forms of archive. I felt that in a way, this was one of the obvious reasons to retire. I thought, “it’s sort of the right time,” especially with the whole AI issue. This is really the time to get out. I don’t want to deal with this or teach Zoom classes. To me it was purgatory.

I suppose I always just wanted to sustain interest and sustain passion for the group, for grad students, to the extent that I personally can do that.

I thought that the main driving force was to help grad students, in those many long, dark nights of the soul when you doubt what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it. What’s the point? If you don’t have interest and you don’t have passion, then it’s impossible to write a good thesis.

The thesis doesn’t itself need to be absolutely fabulous. But if you’ve done a good thesis, informed by real passion and a real respect for serious critique, then you’ve got a really strong chance of producing something good.

Villaflor was picked up in 1980, and the rest of the group was picked up very quickly as well. And they’re extraordinary photos.

I think they probably are thrown out, part of the death flights. So, these are photos in extremes. Really, they are people in extremes.

The most fascinating for me is one of the women whose photo has this thing underneath that says “Ida.” She’s there in a housecoat. You know the sort of coat that you put on when you’re doing the cleaning in the house. She is standing there in this, and she’s got slippers on. And she’s older. Clearly, she’s like easily in her late 50s. You can tell by their faces what they’ve been through. Look in their eyes, and they know what’s going on. They know why they are photographed. I’m fascinated by her because I don’t know why she’s there. Is she part of the Villaflor group? Was she?

She possibly looks like a poor, working-class housewife in her setting. So anyway, those photos have always interested me. And then my interest in them was renewed recently when we were reading Didi-Huberman. He has a series of books where he examines a variety of photos. It’s a very Benjaminian look, but it is not exclusively so, and he’s just a fantastic writer. And that inspired me a little, the relationship between photography and politics.

Now that I have the time, I’d like to dive into this more. When I’m back in Argentina, I want to explore it further. The information on this should be in the archive in La Plata, as all of this clearly took place in the Greater Buenos Aires area. Then there’s the legal case. I could track down Villaflor’s daughter, who I think is still in Uruguay, and there’s the whole fascination with the family—they’re an extraordinary family. So maybe that would be part of it as well. The idea is to do a sort of visual study, but one that is deeply embedded in its historical context.

That’s number one.

Number two relates to something I did last year: a memorial speech for Alberto Belloni when his Paris archive finally arrived in its entirety. They organized an event in CEDINCI, and three or four of us who knew him spoke. I wrote something for the occasion, it was the first time I had really thought of him as a subject of analysis. I interviewed him back in 1973. I have about four or five tapes of those interviews, but I never really used them much.

He was an intimate friend, and it’s difficult to think analytically about close friends, just as it’s hard to analyze family. I had never approached him in that way over all these years. So, I started considering how I might do that. For the presentation, which was about 25 minutes, I explored different ways of thinking about him. One of them was as an organic intellectual, an autodidact. He clearly belongs to that group. There’s a substantial bibliography in Argentina on this topic.

But he’s been doubly exiled. It’s not just the final exile in Paris. He had also previously been exiled from the working class, his working-class roots and environment in Rosario.

He comes to Buenos Aires. So he’s an exile. It’s not the same sort of exile. It hasn’t had the same emotional connotation or anything like that, because it’s partly an exile he chooses, in a non-coercive way, because he’s attracted to life in Buenos Aires, where he’s free from the routines of working in a factory, in this case. And free from the union routine. Now, it’s partly coerced because, you know, he’s being threatened with death by the “62 Organizations.” In fact, I even found, in 1977, 1976, after he goes into exile, he asked me to go and see his mother in Rosario and explain to her what’s happened and why they’ve gone into exile. And she puts me up for the night together with another friend of Alberto’s, Jorge Montgomery. I am sleeping on the floor and just before I go to sleep, I happen to reach in and pull out some of these loose papers and one of them is a little envelope that says, in handwriting, “Te hacemos boleta, bolche de mierda.” (We will kill you, shitty bolshevik). I couldn’t believe I had found this. He probably even forgot it was in his Archive. This was uprooting from a working-class environment, taking him out of his element. But in part it’s a liberation for him, where he can be a worker-intellectual. And in Buenos Aires he can go to dinner with Ricardo Carpani, and he can meet up with Spilimbergo and all these sorts of things.

But he is still an exile, right? And then, he was also a collector. Which is obvious, of course, because that’s what he dedicated his life to. Certainly, the last 30 years that he lived in Paris as well. And of course, Benjamin is ever present when you want to talk about collectors. But part of this is again conjecture. Because I never asked him these questions. We would spend days wandering around Paris because he knew Paris absolutely, intimately. He knew much better than the tour guides, he knew all the little things, and he knew all the history, and he would take me to all these places. And we were talking. I never thought of sitting down and putting a microphone in front of him and saying so, why do you collect all of this? And what is the meaning of the collection? Right? It’s just something he did, it’s almost like this obsessive hobby he had. And so now I regret it.

We’re back to educated guesses. And we’re back to Benjamin and what he might offer us, and I suggest at the end certain crucial ways he does differ from the classic Benjaminian collector. So I thought it would be nice. I’d like to amplify it, especially now that the archive is there. And so I could judiciously use the archive. I don’t want to write a biography of Alberto Belloni. But I thought it would be interesting to write an In Memoriam sort of thing.

So those are the two things I would do and I think they’re doable. And they provide enough pretext to go back to Buenos Aires, which is crucial. I’m writing for the honorary degree. I actually said the Doctor Honoris Causa is meaningful to me for many reasons, but one crucial reason is that it is actually the University of Buenos Aires that’s giving it to me. And that involves my relationship and my sort of passion for the city. And I sometimes say half-jokingly that the main motivation, the underlying leitmotif of my academic career, my research career has simply been to get back to Buenos Aires as often as I could, and get paid for it.