Considering that the bulk of historical scholarship in Argentina continues to focus resolutely on national history, Martín Bergel's book about Argentine intellectuals’ attitudes towards the ‘Orient’ in the interwar years should be welcomed by anyone wary of methodological nationalism. In gauging the analytical mileage that can be wrenched from relating Edward Said's work to Argentina's intellectual history, the book fills a gap in our knowledge of South-South relationships. The study also helps us understand better the intellectual groundwork on the basis of which Argentina, a few decades later, became a figurative part of the ‘Third World’. Bergel's well-chosen subtitle suggests as much. In tracing what he calls ‘inverted Orientalism’ (that is, positive references to the ‘Orient’ in the 1920s) he ultimately illuminates ‘the origins of Third Worldism in Argentina’ – or ‘an emerging tricontinental “we”’, as the introduction puts it (p. 17).
In six chronologically organised chapters Bergel reconstructs how the anti-oriental racism prevalent among nineteenth-century Argentine thinkers such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento gave way to a fascination with the ‘Orient’ that was strongest among anti-imperialists. As the book persuasively shows, World War I and the ‘decline of the West’ that Oswald Spengler – who was widely read in Latin America – famously diagnosed in its immediate aftermath proved decisive catalysts in this turnabout (pp. 128–35). Fatigue with European ‘civilisation’ went hand in hand with orientalist enchantment, as evidenced in the French writer Romain Rolland's celebration of India's ‘spiritualism’. These discourses reached Argentina chiefly via Europe, especially France, so that the book contains few examples of direct exchange between Argentina and any country between Morocco and China. Tellingly, the lengthy stint in Argentina of the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore in 1924 – of which Bergel offers a fine analysis – was unintentional. And in an ironic twist, the person proudly hosting the illustrious guest in Buenos Aires, the writer Victoria Ocampo, elsewhere made a point of being the chic spearhead of Argentina's cultural Europeanisation.
European detours or even origins notwithstanding, Bergel argues that ‘inverted orientalism’ à l'argentine was more than a pale reflection of what was going on in Europe. In fact, he shows how Said's old thesis that orientalism allowed Europeans to navigate their own identity was even truer for Argentina: Sarmiento infamously likened Algerian Muslims to Argentine gauchos, whereas anti-imperialists of the 1920s sympathised with the ‘awakening of the Orient’. The fascinating chapter 3 delineates how a group of intellectuals in Buenos Aires in the mid-1920s construed parallels between their own latinoamericanismo and anti-imperialist unrest in the ‘Orient’, enlisting none other than the Moroccan rebel Abd el-Krim, who in a message to his ‘beloved brothers’ wrote that ‘the heroic Moroccan people struggle for the same ideals that inspired Miranda and Moreno, Bolívar and San Martín’ (p. 153). The implication of this rhetoric was that there was some sort of international of ‘oppressed peoples’ to which Argentina belonged by virtue of being a part of Latin America. Both orientalism and its 1920s inversion, Bergel's central argument holds, provided opportunities to negotiate whether Argentina was part of the ‘West’, or rather of the ‘rest’ that later became the ‘Third World’.
The book is firmly rooted in Argentine intellectual-history debates and focuses primarily on what Argentine intellectuals made of the ‘Orient’. Middle Eastern immigrants, who according to Christina Civantos’ Between Arabs and Argentines had an idea or two to spare on orientalism, are all but absent, as are the objects of Argentines’ orientalist fantasies. Yet, in transposing Said's thesis into the unfamiliar terrain of Argentina, Bergel excels at exposing the postcolonial blind eye towards areas that do not fit the East-West dichotomy so central to Said's reasoning. Like their counterparts in other Latin American countries, Argentine intellectuals could never quite settle on the question of whether their country belonged to the ‘West’ or not. And when a chorus of anti-liberal Catholics championed Argentina's ‘Western’ (or ‘Occidental’) traditions – as analysed in chapter 6 – theirs was not quite the ‘West’ of liberal imperialism that today's postcolonial scholars have foremost in their minds.
Even though this is a book primarily written for an Argentine audience, it is also understandable for students with little previous knowledge of Argentina's history; and thankfully free of jargon. Moreover, it effectively situates Argentine intellectuals in their wider Latin American context – for which Bergel's parallel career as a Peruvianist comes in handy. Chapter 5 reveals a similar ‘inverted orientalism’ in the writings of Vasconcelos, Haya de la Torre – who called his APRA the ‘Guomindang of Latin America’ – and Mariátegui. Incidentally, this foray to the North made me wish for further reflections on the rationale of focusing on Argentina. Did ‘inverted orientalism’ in Argentina differ substantially from that of other Spanish American countries? The impression that arises from this study is that it did not and that the intellectual movement that Bergel describes was rather a region-wide affair. Much of the book in fact deals less with Argentina than with Buenos Aires-based intellectuals, not all of whom were Argentine. Chapter 5 also underlines that ‘inverted Orientalism emerged closely linked to the latinoamericanismo of the period’ (p. 233) in that both were interlocked with an anti-imperial impetus. Rather indirectly, then, the book also tells us something about how Argentina became a part of Latin America.
In sum, this is an inspiring, well-researched an elegantly written study of a hitherto neglected subject, which will surely redirect the way in which we think about Argentine intellectual history. It further benefits greatly from its author's agnosticism towards the narcissism of the little differences between different intellectual-history ‘schools’. Bergel's analysis of the material conditions facilitating the discourse he examines therefore ties seamlessly into the thrust of an interesting and compelling argument.
