(Re)discovering America in Buenos Aires: the cultural entrepreneurship of Waldo Frank, Samuel Glusberg and Victoria Ocampo

Abstract

Waldo Frank’s first visit to Buenos Aires in 1929, organised by the Jewish editor Samuel Glusberg ( Enrique Espinoza), was to impact greatly on the two hitherto epistolary friends, as well as on the aristocratic salonnière Victoria Ocampo, leading to profound changes in the Argentine intellectual field. A glance at the cultural politics practiced by these three ostensibly dissimilar ‘American’ figures, brought together by Frank’s fateful lecture tour, will highlight the pivotal role that these cultural agents played, through the intellectual networks in which they circulated, in creating a polycentric ‘American’ space that transcended national, regional, and territorial paradigms and which necessarily implied the construction of a concomitant (Latin) American consciousness. The text will show how, as their individual vital projects blended into their collective cultural enterprises, the three succeeded in articulating their personal circumstance with the creation ofintegrated inter– and intra–American cultural spaces, where the cohesiveness of a perceived cultural identity or experiential commonalities, of aesthetic or political affinities, held more sway than barriers of nation, ethnicity or gender.