“Argentina te incluye”: Asians in Argentina's Multicultural Novels

Abstract

This article examines the construction of Asians in two contemporary Argentine novels, Un chino en bicicleta (2007) by Ariel Magnus and María Domecq (2007) by Juan Forn. The novels emerge from Argentina's recent “multicultural turn” that has produced an increased visibility of ethnic minorities previously marginalized by a dominant discourse that had insisted on the nation's whiteness. In this context, they also belong to a group of novels published post-2001 that attempts to challenge Argentina's foundational fictions through an unprecedented protagonism of racial others. This article examines how Asian-Argentines are being imagined and represented along changing notions of nationhood and within Argentina's emerging multiculturalism. Furthermore, by analyzing the two novels’ hyperbolic orientalism and deliberate fictionality, this article argues that they offer a critique of a multiculturalism that continues to grant unequal power to the dominant culture.

Keywords:

• Argentina
• Asian-Argentine
• Juan Forn
• Ariel Magnus
• multiculturalism
• multicultural novel
• national identity
• national narratives
• race
• whiteness

Notes

¹For an analysis of Flores de un solo día and Gaijin, see Hagimoto.

²In the decade following the 2001 economic crisis and the perceived “failure” of the nation, Argentines began to question dominant narratives of Argentina as the “whitest” and therefore “most modern” nation in Latin America. According to Ezequiel Adamovsky, the crisis “opened up a new space for renegotiating the definition of the Argentinean ethnos” (343), which culminated in the bicentennial celebrations of 2010 when these efforts reached official state discourse (363). For detailed discussions on the shift in racial paradigm in bicentennial Argentina, see Adamovsky and Ko.

³For an analysis of the representation of China in Argentine exoticism in the 1980s and 1990s as an exploration of contemporary artistic expression, see Holmes. On the use of exoticism in the 1980s as a challenge to the predominance of self-referential realism in Argentine literature, see Montaldo. For Montaldo, Jorge Luis Borges's dictum to avoid “color local” in his seminal essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición” unwittingly triggered a realist literature that avoided “los elementos ficcionales de una fabulación” (105). Montaldo argued that the use of highly self-conscious and contained exoticism in the 1980s inaugurates a new dimension in Argentine literature to point to the very fictional function of literature in lieu of its claim to “truth” (112). In this sense, although the novels analyzed here—María Domecq and Un chino en bicicleta—have a literary precedence in the deliberate exoticism of the previous generation, these novels have a distinct desire to question the place of Asians in the Argentine context.

⁴Since 2012, the Instituto Nacional contra la discriminación, la xenofobia, y el racismo (INADI) has conducted an annual campaign called “Argentina te incluye.” The campaign travels to major tourist sites throughout the summer to distribute antidiscrimination materials. Simultaneously, through its YouTube channel (webINADI) the institute disseminates videos of racial sensitivity that identify and portray an array of discriminated racial others. I have argued elsewhere that despite the laudable intentions of these videos, they risk essentializing race as visible and biological. See Ko 2529–30. Interestingly, although webINADI features a multiplicity of discriminated others—from Afro-Argentine to indigenous peoples, recent immigrants, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals, and senior citizens—Asians are not mentioned or depicted.

⁵See, for example, Andrés Di Tella's Fotografías (2007), Herman Szwarcbart's Un pogrom en Buenos Aires (2007), and Hernán Belón's Beirut Buenos Aires Beirut (2011).

⁷Jorge Takashima is a real-life Argentine actor of Japanese descent, most recognized for his role in the popular comedy show Cha Cha Cha from the 1990s. Incidentally, he played the role of “el hijo japonés” in the skit “Los cubrepileta” in which he was a Japanese son inexplicably born to a quintessentially Italian-Argentine family. Many of the skits centered on the family's comical efforts to pretend he was not Japanese.

⁸For a review of the debates on multiculturalism and recognition, see Smith.

⁹See Murphy 13–29 and Modood.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chisu Teresa Ko

Chisu Teresa Ko is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Ursinus College. Her research focuses on racial discourses in nineteenth-century and contemporary Argentine culture.