Acceso usuarios
Allison E. White
The unstable division between civilization and barbarism, as presented in Do-mingo Sarmiento’s Facundo, becomes more ambiguous in his Viajes por Europa, África y América. Sarmiento finds himself unable to enter Parisian society but attempts to integrate into Algerian society by imitating the same figure he previ-ously denounced: the gaucho. Being among the Algerians allows Sarmiento to see the gaucho as the essence of his own Argentine self, even as the gaucho raises contradictions within his identity. As part of this process, Sarmiento creates an overlapping space between the Orient (as he sees North Africa) and the Argentine pampas. This hybrid geography, born from the texts of travel writing as much as Sarmiento’s own lived experiences, forms the setting of a short story written a century later, Jorge Luis Borges’s “El Sur.” As the main character travels into the Argentine periphery, the translation of the 1001 Nights leads him into a textual, anachronistic pampas framed by Orientalism. Whereas Orientalism points to the margins for its European writers and readers, for Sarmiento and Borges, it reveals the marginality of the Argentine self
