National Dreams, Worldly Visions: Argentine Magazines in the 1920s

This essay tells of the stories, networks, rivalries, and intertwined trajectories of four Argentine magazines, left and avant-garde: Proa, Martín Fierro, Insurrexit, and Revista de Oriente, which, in their own unique ways, rocked the Buenos Aires cultural scene. It charts the magazines’ embryonic identities in an age of revolution, when small collectives of writers and activists spread radical and reformist ideas, formal experimentation, and a vernacular revival. Even though national imaginaries served as a crucial fulcrum for the magazines’ cultural and literary identities, it shows that those at the helm simultaneously steered them towards the wider waters of world literature. Inasmuch as they realised that the intricate question of cultural identity could only be resolved dialectically, facing both inwards and outwards, through the relationship between Argentina, Latin America, and the world.