Going “Against the Grain”: The (Re)configuration of Argentine Comics as a Field of Restricted Production in the Face of Increasing Globalization, 2001–2019

Abstract: The present article poses that twenty-first-century Argentine comics that win awards and have earned a (modest) place in cultural institutions but struggle to sell a few hundred copies are not the result of a downfall. They are instead the achievement of a long symbolic operation that deliberately goes “against the grain of market trends” to (re)construct an autonomous comic field in the wake of the demise of the last “golden age” publisher. Through two sets of intertwined and simultaneous processes (deindustrialization and “shelfification,” and patrimonialization and state patronage), the medium became less an object of cultural commerce and more one of culture, which is supposed to be preserved, fostered, and endowed. By the nature of said processes, anchored by a doxa that pitted national versus foreign and art versus market, a new generation of artists, mostly women, were at first left out of the historically masculinized field that frowned on the influence of Japanese manga in their work. In conclusion, Argentina’s case offers a concrete example of the effect that an increasingly globalized trade has on a cultural industry at the periphery and the agency with which local actors adapt (or not) to those asymmetrical circumstances.