Full Description
From its earliest manifestations on the street corners of nineteenth-century Buenos Aires to its ascendancy as a global cultural form, tango has continually exceeded the confines of the dance floor or the music hall. In Tango Lessons, scholars from Latin America and the United States explore tango's enduring vitality. The interdisciplinary group of contributors-including specialists in dance, music, anthropology, linguistics, literature, film, and fine art-take up a broad range of topics. Among these are the productive tensions between tradition and experimentation in tango nuevo, representations of tango in film and contemporary art, and the role of tango in the imagination of Jorge Luis Borges. Taken together, the essays show that tango provides a kaleidoscopic perspective on Argentina's social, cultural, and intellectual history from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries.
Contributors. Esteban Buch, Oscar Conde, Antonio GÓmez, Morgan James Luker, Carolyn Merritt, Marilyn G. Miller, Fernando Rosenberg, Alejandro Susti
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction / Marilyn G. Miller 1
1. Lunfardo in Tango: A Way of Speaking that Defines a Way of Being / Oscar Conde 33
2. Borges, Tango, and Milonga / Alejandro Susti 60
3. Picturing Tango / Marilyn G. Miller 82
4. Tango, Politics, and the Musical of Exile / Antonio GÓmez 118
5. The Return of the Tango in Documentary Film / Fernando Rosenberg 140
6. "Manejame como un auto": Drive Me Like a Car, or What's So New about Tango Nuevo? / Carolyn Merritt 164
7. Contemporary Tango and the Cultural Politics of Música Popula / Morgan James Luker 198
8. Gotan Project's Tango Project / Esteban Buch 220
Glossary 243
Works Cited 247
Contributors and Translators 267
Index 269
