Abstract
This article attempts to demonstrate how forced migrations, ideologically or economically driven and caused by political state violence in Argentina, have had paradoxical effects both in terms of the institutionalization and the professional development of agents working in the field of literary studies: In exile, agents accumulated scholarly, symbolic, and social capital that would be drawn on by the state institutions that incorporated them upon their return to Argentina. Even when agents did not return, they contributed from abroad to the institutionalization and/or internationalization of literary studies in Argentina. The first section sets out the main methodological research decisions on which this article is founded as an explanation of how I put together my database. Building on this database, the second section describes the forced migrations of Argentinian agents working in the field of literary studies. Finally, using this data, certain patterns are drawn as regards the exiles and the returns of different groups of agents.
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Notes
- 1.
This concept emerges from the courses Bourdieu taught at the Collège de France between 1989 and 1992. Bourdieu refines his concept of state based on a complex formulation that unfolds along three lines. First, he articulates the ideas of Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Émile Durkheim to define the state as having a monopoly on legitimate physical and symbolic violence; second, he shows that it would be sufficient to mention ‘symbolic’ violence as an instrument for enabling physical violence; third, he shuns both the demonization and the underestimation of the field of the state. This, he says, is but one more field in tension with others—the media, religion, the economy, politics, the military, education, science, intellectual life, art, publishing, etc.—in the struggle over the distribution and exercise of power. In short, Bourdieu designs a subtle heuristic instrument for analyzing the complex network of powers (Bourdieu 2012).
- 2.
- 3.
I refer to International Cooperation in the Social Sciences and Humanities: Comparative Socio-Historical Perspectives and Future Possibilities (INTERCO SSH), a project directed by Gisèle Sapiro between 2012 and 2017.
- 4.
Pascale Laborier has remarked on the “porousness” (2019, p. 43) between these kinds of migrations in an article specifying how to distinguish them and operate with them methodologically.
- 5.
Faced with certain decisions by the new government from December 2015, we began to distinguish between a first period of post-dictatorship (1984–2003) and a second (2015–2019): These decisions involve reversals of human rights and policies regarding labor, education, health, science, technology, communication, international relations, economy, security, etc.
- 6.
The interview template is included in the first report produced within the framework of this research, which is available online (Gerbaudo and Fumis 2014, p. 259).
- 7.
Agents had the option to respond orally or via email (in the former case the interviewer recorded the conversation and then transcribed it). All the interviewees had control over the final draft.
- 8.
For the concept of ‘story’ (its limited probative scope and its importance in adding complexity and nuance to the results derived from quantitative analysis), the distinction between the concepts of ‘consultation’ and ‘interview,’ and a justification for providing the names of the agents interviewed and consulted as part of this research project, I point the reader to an open access text available online (Gerbaudo 2018).
- 9.
According to Jacques Derrida, ‘domiciliation’ is one of the conditions for labeling a text as an ‘archive’: There is no archive without a place of consignation (Derrida 1995). Another condition is the text’s preservation in a permanent medium. Only some of the documents consulted for this research comply with at least one of these conditions, and only rarely with both. Added to this is the relative unreliability of certain sources. For example, the number of entrants into literature courses during certain periods differs depending on whether the information was provided by the university itself (when it had the data) or the Ministry of Education. Another obstacle was the deliberate or accidental destruction of documents and the lack of data on certain sections: This necessitated painstaking reconstruction of the information in the tables of our first report. For example, to reconstruct the number of students entering the literature program of the National University of the Littoral, each student’s dossier had to be reviewed individually for the ‘Student Body’ section (Gerbaudo 2014, p. 34). For these reasons, we present the data contained therein as a ‘draft’ version (Gerbaudo 2014, p. 18).
- 10.
Migrations caused by ideological and economic factors are recorded as ‘political’: Economic decisions made by the state are not neutral (Bourdieu 2017).
- 11.
Pascale Laborier (2019) highlights the heuristic power of the methodological decision to sequence the time periods and to attempt to establish population sub-groups in order to characterize and then compare agents’ careers.
- 12.
The population studied is part of a larger sample of all the agents matching the criteria outlined in this section.
- 13.
I use the term ‘solicit’ in the Derridean sense of ‘to question,’ ‘to place in doubt,’ ‘to shake the foundations of.’
- 14.
Figure 1 was developed by the author from a database created with the curricula vitarum of 181 field agents. The figure specifically refers to 14 of 51 countries where the mobility of the sample agents from G1 to G5 is recorded. The ‘Other’ category includes the 37 remaining countries to which the agents occasionally traveled: Cuba, Peru, Ecuador, the Netherlands, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Belgium, China, Japan, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Norway, Portugal, Poland, Australia, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, Russia, Romania, Finland, Ireland, Estonia, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Bolivia, Bosnia, Israel, Paraguay, Panama, Guatemala, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa, Iceland, and India.
- 15.
Pascale Laborier’s methodological observation on the importance of cross-referencing the agents’ personal documentation, publications, and interviews in order to “fine-tune the appraisal of individual situations” (2019, p. 42) is updated by cases such as Romano Sued’s and, as we shall see further on, Noé Jitrik’s: Only such data-crossing as proposed by Laborier allows inferences to be drawn, for example, about the ‘forced’ nature of these migrations. It is important then to have more than one interview and/or consultations that refer back to it in order to obtain information on events that the agents avoid calling to mind, usually for traumatic reasons.
- 16.
In ‘Los que se van, los que se quedan (apuntes para una historia de la crítica argentina)’ [Those that Go, Those that Stay (Notes towards a History of Argentinian Criticism)], a paper read at a conference in 2009 and included several years later in the book La seducción de los relatos. Crítica literaria y política en la Argentina [The Seduction of Stories: Literary Criticism and Politics in Argentina], Jorge Panesi mentions this tension between so-called ‘internal exile’ and exile per se. Panesi’s text refers to “the recent criminal history of Argentinian institutions that truly divided intellectuals—and not only intellectuals—into those who left and those who stayed, as if there could have been any other possible response to a military state that fettered lives and borders” (Panesi 2018, p. 47). Panesi revisits and takes issue with those who have produced the benchmark bibliography around this tension which permeates the fields of literature and literary studies in Argentina (Sosnowski 1988; Beceyro 1991; Viñas 1998; Fernández Bravo et al. 2003; Molloy and Siskind 2006).
- 17.
I use this term in the complex sense given by Pierre Bourdieu (2000). This involves a consideration of both economic capital as well as cultural, social, and symbolic capital.
- 18.
The researchers that are part of CONICET’s Scientific Researcher Career Stream in the Adjunct, Independent, Principal, and Superior categories must submit their work as well as their individual research projects for evaluation every two years. In the case of Assistant Researchers, the evaluation is annual.
- 19.
This field of research runs through his most important publications. It is also the area in which he educated the disciples of his intellectual endeavors (collected volumes, research, networks, etc.). Among the graduate students whose doctoral theses he supervised and who subsequently became leading authorities in the field were Celina Manzoni (G1), María Coira (G2), Roberto Ferro (G2), Julio Schvartzman (G2), Aymará De Llano (G2), Susana Cella (G3), and Gonzalo Aguilar (G4).
- 20.
The National University of Rosario (UNR) was founded in 1968 as an offshoot of the National University of the Littoral (UNL). The Rosario pole, unavoidable in any analysis of the institutionalization of letters in Argentina, duly passed from the UNL to the UNR.
- 21.
Data elicited in response to the following question in the semi-structured interview with 150 agents: “Which texts would you like to have written? Or in other words, which texts had the greatest impact on your work, or you admired the most? Why?” (Gerbaudo and Fumis 2014, p. 259).
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Gerbaudo, A. (2024). ‘Desire Is Born Out of Collapse’: The Paradoxical Consequences of Forced Migrations (Argentina, 1958–2015). In: Dakhli, L., Laborier, P., Wolff, F. (eds) Academics in a Century of Displacement. Migrationsgesellschaften. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43540-0_6
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