Literary critic Adriana Bergero has set herself an extremely ambitious goal in the book Intersecting Tango: to reveal the overlapping “maps” of modernity that defined the culture of early twentieth-century Buenos Aires. Her approach recalls David William Foster’s study of a more contemporary period of porteño culture in Buenos Aires: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production. Like Foster, Bergero is interested in the city not just as a location or backdrop but as a space that constitutes subjectivities. She proposes to explore this rapidly changing city through its “imaginaries, through the theoretical convergence of urban geography, sensorial geography, cultural studies, gender studies, and social history” (p. 6). The result is a wide-ranging and somewhat unwieldy work that nonetheless reveals to the reader a fascinating variety of social texts.
Intersecting Tango contains 20 chapters divided into three parts: Urban Ceremonies and Social Distances, Muñecas Bravas of Buenos Aires,...