Horizontalism and Historicity in Argentina: Cultural Dialogues of the Post-Crisis Era

Organised by the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS)

In the final months of 2001, the state of Argentina came close to collapse, as government, banking and social order all broke down. In a series of large-scale protests in December 2001, citizens came out on the streets not only to voice their opposition to the failure of the state, but also to articulate a desire for an alternative future. The Argentinazo, as the uprising became known, had a seismic impact on how the country saw itself, its history and its future. The sense that boundaries had been broken enabled new approaches, not only in making sense of current events but also in forging an alternative way forward.

In the post-Crisis period, a revitalized sense of historicity became a crucial mobilizing impetus, along with a new model for society: horizontalism, a non-vertical model of social and political organising grounded in mutual respect and co-operation. This sea-change in attitudes was reflected in the cultural life of the decade which followed, as artists and activists explored multiple new subjectivities of citizenship. In the recent monograph Horizontalism and Historicity: Dialogues of the Post-Crisis Era, Brigid Lynch traces the cultural legacy of the 2001 Argentine Crisis through representations of historicity and horizontalism in literary fiction, journalism, films and television drama. Using the book as a starting point, this discussion will consider the legacy of the 2001 crisis twenty years on, and the continued potential of these events in Argentina today.

Speakers:
Carlos Gamerro is a writer and scholar from Argentina. His published works include the novels Las Islas (1998, The Islands, 2012), El secreto y las voces (2002, An Open Secret, 2011) and La aventura de los bustos de Eva (2004; The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón, 2015), Cardenio (2016) and La jaula de los onas (2021) among others, and the essay collections Ficciones barrocas (2011), Facundo o Martín Fierro (2015) and Borges y los clásicos (2016). On Twitter, he is @carlos_gamerro

Cara Levey is a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at University College Cork. Her research interests include activism and cultural production related to memory and human rights in the Southern Cone of Latin America, and transnational second-generation activism in diasporic communities in Europe. On Twitter, Cara can be found at @CaralouiseCara