Post-National Tangos: Exile and Cultural Legitimation in El pretexto de París (Jorge Asís, 1985) and Informe de París (Paula Wajsman, 1990)

This article examines two novels that drew on the themes and tropes of tango to depict Argentine exile in Paris in the aftermath of the 1976–1983 dictatorship: Jorge Asís’s El pretexto de París (1985) and Paula Wajsman’s Informe de París (1990). These novels fictionalized Paris through the lens of Argentine culture to present controversial standpoints regarding issues that were heatedly debated at the time, such as the figure of the exiled intellectual and human rights activism. Moreover, both Asís and Wajsman designed their main characters and self-representations as authors by reimagining the gender archetypes of tango in the Parisian context. A cultural form particular to the Río de la Plata, tango allowed them to challenge the paradigm of the Latin American author favored in Europe during the 1980s, which was commonly associated with political commitment and the figures of the Boom. On the one hand, Asís reappropriated the opportunism and artfulness of the compadrito through a sexualized use of language that allegorized his masculine conquest of literary prestige. On the other hand, Wajsman reimagined the figure of the milonguita to reaffirm her independence as a woman and subvert gendered and neocolonial forms of cultural recognition.