Working on the edges. Tango and antigenre: on oppositions and passage

Abstract

The style of a period, not exactly a style, but an interplay of many stylistic operators, is an interesting site to observe the emergence of self-conscious ‘anti-genres’ through a rhetoric of irony and self-irony. Translation and transposition –viewed as the pursuit of a conversation in different languages— offer, for example, a new perspective on tango and its contrasted historical moments, insofar as its three semiotic components have come to aggregate three different ‘cultures’ that dialog between them, beyond social, ideological and other fractures: while the dance component has constantly remained explicitly sensual and erotic, the lyrics changed from funny and vulgar to melancholic, and the instrumental music around the glorified bandoneon, became the site for all kinds of experiments. This anti-generic cross-cultural negotiation is cosmopolitan enough to have acquired world audience and practice.