A core piece of Argentine national identity is the long-held belief that the nation is somewhat whiter than the rest of Latin America. This pigmentary shade would locate its citizens closer to Europe than to the rest of the region, if not geographically, at least in the pastiche of progress and civilisation associated with the Europe. The economic and social collapse of December 2001 broke this racist assumption from the outside. It did so not by questioning the features of the ‘Argentine race’, let alone the very idea of race as a meaningful classification, but by exposing the end of the long agony of its most prosperous and inclusive past. By becoming poorer, Argentina also became darker. In The Darkening Nation, Ignacio Aguiló explores Argentine cultural production in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis, the culmination of a decade of neoliberal reforms, zooming on in how different artists reflected upon (and in many different ways produced) the association between racial assumptions and the country's prosperity.

The author's main argument is that the 2001 meltdown induced questions of national belonging, a concern crystallised through the discourse of whiteness (under threat) and expressed in the rise of middle-class racism against immigrants and the poor. Cultural production reflected upon this phenomenon of the blackening, Africanisation or Latin Americanisation of Argentina, frequently by questioning the notion of a white nation and by developing alternative approaches to its significant Other, whether Afrodescendants, Indigenous, Bolivian immigrants, or negros villeros (inhabitants of the urban slums). In its six chapters, the book analyses a vast array of cultural artefacts produced in Argentina after the country's economic collapse of December 2001. Aguiló focuses mostly on the literary work of three authors (Fabián Casas: ‘Asterix, el encargado’ [‘Asterix the Caretaker’], in Los lemmings y otros [The Lemmings and Others]; César Aira: La villa [Shantytown]; Washington Cucurto: Cosa de negros [Black Folks’ Stuff] and other writings), two films (Bolivia, directed by Adrián Caetano, and Copacabana by Martín Rejtman), three visual artists working on the images and myths of Amerindians (Gaby Herbstein's calendar Huellas [Traces], Leonel Luna's La conquista del desierto [The Conquest of the Desert], which is a re-interpretation of an iconic nineteenth-century painting, and the public interventions of the Grupo de Arte Callejero [Group of Street Artists]), and the rise of the cumbia villera (shantytown cumbia) musical genre (mostly around the figure of Pablo Lescano). The introduction provides a useful (if somewhat detached from the rest of the book) guide to the main concepts used by the author.

Race always has a slippery origin, and in Argentina it is no exception. Caetano's Bolivia, for example, shows the discrimination and exploitation suffered by immigrants from neighbouring countries in Argentina. Yet most comments about the film (including some by the director) seem to denounce racism while leaving untouched racialisation as a natural classification. Nevertheless the film, as Aguiló also points out, does expose the social mechanisms and discourses that turn the main character, Freddy, into an individual who can be classified as a Bolivian immigrant. In the end, what many of these cultural artefacts propose is to focus on these ‘others’ in order to question the very idea of whiteness. This approach is present in works like Cucurto's Cosa de negros, an almost diabolical party in which the end of the crisis gives form to perpetual white fears of an invasion by immigrants that is both a culmination and a victory: ‘Everything was party, dance, alcohol, sex, happiness. The Nonsense Productive Revolution Republic was waning slowly, like a shooting star. Soon nothing would be left’ (p. 73; ‘productive revolution’ was one of Carlos Menem's presidential campaign slogans in 1988–9). While some of these artists reflect on the discourses that complain about how the country became darker with the crisis, others show how the darkness just become more visible. This is the case with cumbia villera, that, much like hip-hop in its early days, turns an external stigmatisation into an identity to be celebrated. The author analyses how the genre (from its production and distribution to its lyrics) presents villa inhabitants and their ideas as a contestation against the society that excludes them, yet also as a demand to be incorporated into some form of inclusion.

Drawing on Loïc Wacquant's analysis of neoliberalism as ‘an articulation of state, market and citizenship that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third’ (‘Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism’, Social Anthropology, 20: 1 (2012), pp. 66–79, here p. 66, italics in original), Aguiló's work is an original analysis of the much-studied area of race and national identity in Argentina. Post-2001 cultural production in Argentina was so rich and densely loaded with meanings about the crisis that it deserved a close look like the one offered in this book. While the discussion about race seems more relevant than ever in this case, the author's argument sometimes gets entangled in the perennial, and not always relevant, question of whether racial classification precedes, justifies or overlaps with class, or vice versa. The author suggests that his argument ‘breaks with previous scholarship’ that has considered race as, primarily, ‘a reflection of class’, yet his own argument seems to confirm that, indeed, racialisation in Argentina correlates with exclusion more than with anything else, which explains why ‘many young people, who were not necessarily villeros but were experiencing the social and economic effects of the crisis [the author doesn't say so, but we can assume that these are people who describe themselves as white], self-identified with the cumbia villera subculture’ (p. 143). The author criticises the ‘downplayed and rarely acknowledged racialisation of pibe chorros’ (p. 151) [another stigmatisation running in parallel with the negro villero]. Yet, there seems to be substantial work by other scholars in that direction (some of them mentioned by the author, including Gabriel Kessler). Recognising racialisation as part of a wider set of mechanisms that reproduce exclusion and social hierarchies does not necessarily entail the assumption that racism plays the same role in any context in which it exists. And in the case of Argentina, as most of the artefacts analysed by Aguiló suggest, the 2001 crisis brought up, above all, the discussion and criticism of racial language as part of a mighty fear about the upward social mobility of the lower classes. Many years after the crisis and the period studied by Aguiló, those same fears are not only prevalent: they have become the core of the political identity of a new right-wing administration that proposes another round of neoliberal reforms as a way to restore whiteness (and the European ‘progress’ associated with that imaginary) to the country. This discussion, like most of the others presented in the book, is probably more relevant today than ever.