Chapter 21 - Sarmiento: Politics, Culture, and Spectacle

Summary

Domingo F. Sarmiento was a nineteenth-century Argentine writer whose ideas and literature have had a wide-reaching and important impact on both the national and continental stage, particularly the opposition between civilization and barbarism, as formulated in his book Facundo (1845). This chapter poses that almost all of Sarmiento’s work can be understood through the tension between the short-term impact of politics and the long-term impact of literature, be it in the years of his exile in Chile, in the time of his presidential candidacy, or throughout his journalistic work. Also, it proposes a reading of Sarmiento’s trajectory and his most important literary production (1845 Facundo, 1849 Viajes, and 1850 Recuerdos de provincia) not only in relation to the different circumstances in which he lived but also in light of his particular representation of modern phenomena related to the spectacle and the attention of the masses. In this way, it seeks to offer a nuanced perspective of a fundamental Argentinian author and to engage in new dialogues and frame the contradictions within the romantic environment in which Sarmiento participated and the modernization to which he aspired.