Between local and global: identity, crisis and regional labels around tango

Abstract

Tango is an artistic manifestation that emerged during the last two decades of the nineteenth century in the Río de la Plata basin. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tango has undergone various local, (inter-) transnational, regional, and global processes of mobility and mediation, which have led to the proliferation of new and increasingly diverse cultural hybrids. This study aims to analyze different uses of the label “Rioplatense tango,” created through regionalist discursive systems and reinforced in response to various economic and representational or national-organizational crises between the 1980s and 2020. The proposed methodology relies on a genealogical-discursive and historiographical analysis of cultural policies, institutions, and products, as well as of musicological studies on tango. The central hypothesis is that such labels function as regionalist geocultural ideas, whose practical resources and concrete realities are materialized through projects, budgets, audiences, and commercial circuits serving the purposes of representing and organizing nationalist ideological and political differences. All of this is produced, funded, and distributed by private companies or international organizations with the participation of various nation-states, both for profit and to revalorize national symbols that reinforce mechanisms of organization, domination, normalization, and the perpetuation of diverse cultures within a specific region. Finally, the study suggests that a decolonial mode of listening –embodied in non-hegemonic (local) phenomena, corporealities, and spaces– may disarticulate or reconfigure dominant epistemologies, concepts, and labels.