Meridiano intelectual transatlántico: España en la configuración del campo de producción cultural argentino (1900-1950)

This dissertation analyzes the different nuances of the participation of Spanish cultural agents of the Argentinean field of cultural production between 1900 and 1950. It takes as its articulating element the metaphor of the meridian as conveyed in the well-known article “Madrid, Spanish-American Intellectual Meridian” (1927), which encompasses the on-going tensions between agents of the two fields for the imposition of a cultural and economic centrality, specifically between the 1920s and the advent of Peron’s first government, a period of nationalist rise in Argentina and socio-political turmoil in Spain. In particular, the study focuses on central works by travellers, correspondents and exiles –José Ortega y Gasset, Corpus Barga, Oliverio Girondo, Roberto Arlt, Francisco Ayala and Luis Seoane— which formulate the idea of Spain as geopolitical coordinates beyond its quality of cultural or historical entity. The experience of displacement rendered in these products adds another layer of intricacy to the identity question, either via reducing its categorization to a neo-colonial dichotomy, or multiplying its variants with the Galician immigrant. These works problematize a panhispanic spiritual alliance, both for its political repercussions, as well as for the estrangement they reflect when the displaced subject is faced with the new field as an unsatisfactory familiar ground. This dissertation points to the political implications of the reconstruction of these transatlantic agents´ symbolic exchanges which affect current conceptualizations of Spain and Spanishness. Thus, this reflection aims to explicate the efficiency of the utilization of a neo-colonial rhetoric in negotiating within the contemporary transatlantic political terrain.