On the Limits of Populism: New Historical Narrative and Infantile Political Subjectivity in “Pink Tide” Argentina.

Abstract

My dissertation explores the ways in which the hegemonic Left in Argentina, as part of a new 21st century wave of south American Leftist governments –also known as the pink tide–, legitimize their power on a new official historical discourse. By exploring a variety of cultural media about former leader Eva Peron, I argue that this new historical narrative justifies Cristina Kirchner’s presidency and its Peronismo, by revealing a hidden dynastic relation between the two leaders. This invocation, originally created during the 1990’s to delegitimize neoliberalism, is now being put into work to rebuild a new consensus and spiritual unity of populist politics after the 2001 economic crisis, producing a discursive strategy that recreates the same hierarchical and homogenizing structures, and its voiceless (infant) political subjectivity. In the first two chapters I examine Abel Posse’s novel La pasión según Eva and Carlos Desanzo’s film Eva Perón: la verdadera historia that challenge neoliberalism with a romantic writing of history, with the goal of re-constructing a new Peronism either by restoring the original Peronista welfare state from 1940s and 1950s as in Posse’s novel, or by accomplishing the Peronista socialist resistance agenda from the 1970s as in Desanzo’s movie. Then I analyze Tomás Eloy Martínez’s novel Santa Evita, claiming that it questions neoliberalism this symbol to approach to the past in a way that allows us to imagine the possibility of building an alternate political community beyond the affective bond that charismatic populism produces between its members. In the second part of the dissertation, I show how the figure of Eva was reused after the 2001 in order to legitimize a present populist leader as if she were the incarnation of the spirit of former. Here, I analyze museums such as Museo Evita and Museo del Bicentenario and María Seoane’s film Eva de la Argentina: de una bandera a la victoria, all produced in 2010 to celebrate the country’s Bicentennial anniversary. I argue that the historical discourse helps to reproduce a specific affective bond between leader and people, foreclosing the possibility of building a horizontal society.