Buenos Aires : perspectives on the city and cultural production /

Since independence, the image of Buenos Aires as "Goliath's Head" (see Ezequiel Martinez Estrada's La Cabeza de Goliath, 1940) has been propagated successively in high literature, tango lyrics, and film. Rarely, however, has the largest city in South America been subject to such a diverse and challenging analysis of its postmodern geography as that proposed here. In a series of eight interconnected "perspectives," Foster (Arizona State Univ.) investigates the interrelativity between contemporary social existence and cultural production in that dynamic, cosmopolitan center. This multilevel appraisal slides from the comic strip Mafalda to gender issues in tango dance and poetry; moves between the neogrotesque theater of Roberto Cossa and Ricardo Talesnik to Enrique Medina's "dirty realism," as exemplified in the characterization of the Peronist boxer Jose Maria Gatica (Gatica, 1991); provides a focus for certain marginal and suppressed sectors of the urban landscape (Jewish ethnicity and public lesbicogay identities); and negotiates feminine space (from Eva Peron to contemporary popular icon Maria Elena Walsh via the Madres de Plaza de Mayo), skillfully highlighted in Sara Facio's photography. Up-to-date, informed, and often provocative, this title is a blueprint for cultural studies of interest to researchers/faculty and armchairs travelers alike. K. M. Sibbald; McGill University