Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (review)
backdrops for foreign fantasies: Alan Parker's Evita (1996), Sally Potter's The Tango Lesson (1997), and Carlos Saura's Tango, no me dejes nunca (1998). Malva's critiques are significantly less nuanced and self-reflexive than Diaz's, and while certainly Madonna's screen evocation of Evita's political persona is accurately perceived as "appropriation," Malva's outright refusal to imagine any non-Argentine representations of tango as anything but hegemonic and manipulative seems to blind her to some of the weirder and more interesting ironies in these films. In particular, she seems unable to accommodate the ways in which tango has attracted queer meditations on the choreographed nature of sexuality. This is an implicit subtext of Potter's film—but I wonder what Malva (or Savigliano) would make of a more explicit rendering of this in, for example, Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together (1997).