Reinterpretación cultural e intervenciones críticas de la izquierda nacional: Jorge Abelardo Ramos y Juan José Hernández Arregui

Abstract

In the context of the interventions lead by left intellectuals in Argentina during the Fifties, emphasis is given to those interventions related to the reinterpretation of culture by the national left. With Crisis y resurrección de la literatura argentina, Jorge Abelardo Ramos begins a series of critiques that Juan José Hernández Arregui resumes with Imperialismo y cultura. On the basis of anticolonialist, anti-imperialist and revolutionary ideas, the essayists question the cultural establishment while developing a Marxist perspective of the nation. The article focuses on the analysis of these texts which, as part of the offensive against intelligentsia, began a demystifying critique. This aimed at revealing the role that intellectuals and writers played as spokespeople of the liberal tradition, until that moment. In several ways, this programme produces a cultural shift in the historiographic revisionism by means of the transfer of their hypotheses and reading premises into the analysis of literature.