Review of Isabella Cosse, Mafalda: historia social y política (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014)
Descrição do Produto
Book Reviews art in the aftermath of socio-economic and political violence and in the strengthening of international human rights networks. Université de Montréal J. Lat. Amer. Stud. ().
CYNTHIA E. MILTON
doi:./SX
Isabella Cosse, Mafalda: historia social y política (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, ), pp. , $.; £., pb. Isabella Cosse’s book on Argentina’s most famous comic strip, Mafalda, created by Quino (Joaquín Salvador Lavado), is an impressively researched study of the social life of a cultural product. Recounting the history of the strip and its eponymous protagonist from their first appearance in the mid-s right up to Mafalda’s presence as a huge inflatable doll celebrating the election of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in , Cosse looks at the comic both on and beyond the page. The book is divided into five chapters. The first two chapters recount the history of the strip during the period of its publication from the mid-s until , when Quino stopped drawing Mafalda at a time when the political situation in Argentina was becoming increasingly divided between the revolutionary Left and the authoritarian Right. As Cosse points out, by the mid-s Mafalda’s politics had become anachronistic. Using close analysis of a selection of strips (many of which are helpfully reproduced), Cosse successfully demonstrates how, up until that point, Mafalda engaged in highly contemporaneous and sharply humorous fashion with Argentine current affairs. In particular, Cosse stresses, during this period Mafalda both interpellated and acted as a voice for the Argentine middle class. The third chapter turns its attention to the globalisation of the strip during the same period, with particular focus on Italy, Spain and Mexico. Cosse argues that Quino’s transnational success was a result of the way that his humour surpassed ‘national, social and generational’ boundaries to ‘illuminate the human condition’ (). Chapter returns to the Argentine context but looks at the life of Mafalda during the – dictatorship and the subsequent return to democracy. Cosse recounts the intriguing post-dictatorship speculations about what would have happened to Mafalda had she grown up. Quino’s own polemic suggestion that she would have been one of the disappeared only fuelled the perception that Mafalda was representative of the combative younger generations of the s and s (). In the final chapter, Cosse looks further at the more recent trends in the globalisation of the strip and the manner in which Mafalda has become a myth, open to ongoing historical resignifications. In the first half of the book, Cosse’s analysis is very effective at demonstrating the generational tensions evident in the specificities of Argentine middle-class politics during the s and s. As she points out, there is a ‘lack of studies that explain the contradictory stance’ between, on the one hand, the middle class as being located on the side of ‘moral crusades and the “antisubversive” struggle’ and, on the other, its contribution to the political ‘radicalisation of the young’ during the s and s (p. ). Likewise, she draws attention to the intriguing ways that Mafalda has been used, and reworked, by both Left and Right for the promotion of particular ideological positions. In the second half of the book Cosse is slightly less focused in terms of her argument about Mafalda and the middle class. According to Cosse, Mafalda offered a focal point of nostalgia and resistance ‘for the middle
http://journals.cambridge.org
Downloaded: 25 Jan 2016
IP address: 86.156.95.252
Book Reviews classes in different countries, whose material conditions of existence and whose identities, forged thirty years earlier, were becoming fractured’ (p. ). Mafalda, she adds, came to represent ‘a sensibility that tied together ideology, aesthetics and subjectivity in the face of the neoliberal drive’ (p. ). Perhaps, however, Cosse could have explored in more depth the precise nature of the nostalgia and resistance she suggests the Argentine middle classes found in Malfalda during post-dictatorship neoliberalism. Did that nostalgia for that earlier period, one expressed by Quino himself (p. ), include a longing for the armed struggle that so divided the middle class? And how, moreover, do the tensions between pre- and post-dictatorship generations play out in terms of Mafalda when remembering the s and the s? In that sense, Cosse highlights how, in France, Mafalda was caught between those who criticised an overly romantic portrait of the s and those who wanted to ‘reclaim the “spirit” of with the celebration of collective action, the libertarian ideal and the utopian imagination’ (p. ). More of such observations could have been helpful in unpacking the differences between expressions of collective action in the s and the s, and the differences between resistance and middle-class nostalgia in Europe and in Latin America. Nevertheless, Cosse’s study of Mafalda does, as she sets out to do, throw light on the highly contentious nature of Argentine culture, society and politics over the past thirty years, particularly in terms of the country’s middle classes. She is also very convincing in demonstrating some of the ways that a highly Argentine creation was able to transcend national boundaries and speak to people around the globe, not least as a result of the portable nature of Quino’s humour and perceptivity. As a result, Cosse’s highly readable book makes an extremely valuable contribution to the growing fields of scholarship on both the middle class and comics. University of Manchester J. Lat. Amer. Stud. ().
JAMES SCORER
doi:./SX
Allan Charles Dawson, In Light of Africa: Globalizing Blackness in Northeast Brazil (Toronto and Buffalo, CA, and London: University of Toronto Press, ), pp. viii + , $., pb. In his book In Light of Africa, Allan Charles Dawson engages with ideas of Africanness and blackness as they are shaped in north-east Brazil. Although Dawson uses as a main case study the State of Bahia (traditionally known as the ‘African’ heart of Brazil), the author describes how ideas of blackness are constructed transnationally in a dialogic relationship with Africa. He contends that, while mainstream and dominant ways in which black identities are structured over-exploit ‘Africa’ and certain kinds of African-derived culture, the realm of Bahian blackness is better characterised by heterogeneity, escaping a unifying and essentialising logic. To make his point, Dawson carried out fieldwork in Bahia (both in the city of Salvador and in the inland region of Sertão) and in West Africa, interviewing a number of individuals such as African entrepreneurs of ‘African’ culture in Salvador, candomblé practitioners, black activists and street vendors. The book is useful as an introduction to blackness in Brazil (in Bahia particularly) for people who are not familiar with the topic or the geographical context. Reflecting on blackness as a heterogeneous field, and pointing out its formation in relational and transnational terms is certainly relevant. I agree with Dawson’s argument that
http://journals.cambridge.org
Downloaded: 25 Jan 2016
IP address: 86.156.95.252
Lihat lebih banyak...
Comentários
