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Public Planet Books
Paper Tangos
Tango. A multidimensional expression of Argentine identity, one that speaks to that nation’s sense of disorientation, loss, and terror. Yet the tango mesmerizes dancers and audiences alike throughout the world. In Paper Tangos , Julie Taylor—a classically trained dancer and anthropologist—examines the poetics of the tango while describing her own quest to dance this most dramatic of paired dances.
Taylor, born in the United States, has lived much of her adult life in Latin America. She has spent years studying the tango in Buenos Aires, dancing during and after the terror of military dictatorships. This book is at once an account of a life lived crossing the borders of two distinct and complex cultures and an exploration of the conflicting meanings of tango for women who love the poetry of its movement yet feel uneasy with the roles it bestows on the male and female dancers. Drawing parallels among the violences of the Argentine Junta, the play with power inherent in tango dancing, and her own experiences with violence both inside and outside the intriguing tango culture, Taylor weaves the line between engaging memoir and insightful cultural critique. Within the contexts of tango’s creative birth and contemporary presentations, this book welcomes us directly into the tango subculture and reveals the ways that personal, political, and historical violence operate in our lives.
The book’s experimental design includes photographs on every page, which form a flip-book sequence of a tango. Not simply a book for tango dancers and fans, Paper Tangos will reward students of Latin American studies, cultural studies, anthropology, feminist studies, dance studies, and the art of critical memoir.
Taylor, born in the United States, has lived much of her adult life in Latin America. She has spent years studying the tango in Buenos Aires, dancing during and after the terror of military dictatorships. This book is at once an account of a life lived crossing the borders of two distinct and complex cultures and an exploration of the conflicting meanings of tango for women who love the poetry of its movement yet feel uneasy with the roles it bestows on the male and female dancers. Drawing parallels among the violences of the Argentine Junta, the play with power inherent in tango dancing, and her own experiences with violence both inside and outside the intriguing tango culture, Taylor weaves the line between engaging memoir and insightful cultural critique. Within the contexts of tango’s creative birth and contemporary presentations, this book welcomes us directly into the tango subculture and reveals the ways that personal, political, and historical violence operate in our lives.
The book’s experimental design includes photographs on every page, which form a flip-book sequence of a tango. Not simply a book for tango dancers and fans, Paper Tangos will reward students of Latin American studies, cultural studies, anthropology, feminist studies, dance studies, and the art of critical memoir.
- GenresAnthropologyHistory
160 pages, Paperback
First published May 21, 1998
3 people are currently reading
50 people want to read
About the author
Julie Taylor
92 books8 followersJULIE TAYLOR writes about teen relationships for magazines such as Cosmo Girl, Jump, Teen, and YM. She is also author of Franco American Dreams, which is currently being made into a feature film. Julie lives in Hollywood, California.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 30, 2012
Paper Tangos is bittersweet. It is beautiful to the point of being painful: its writing, its brilliant little flipbook pictures, its tango verses. It doesn't have a clear structure or line of argument, rather it breathes of melancholy, talks of being a stranger among strangers - and even more so at home (and what does "home" refer to, anyway?), of everyday life violence, of nostalgia for what is lost and what could have been, of profound sadness that can never be cured. Reading it is a constant promise of a papercut deep inside.
Exile is absence, and death, a prolonged absence.
Who amongst us has not died a little?
The country we left no longer exists.
Tangos: The Exile of Gardel
Fernando Solanas
(42)
Could the book have been better? Yes, at least as an anthropological piece. It could have provided its readers with broader background of the twentieth-century Argentinian history, the coup, the Junta's rule; engaged into discussion with other academic writings on dance and its meaning - not just for the sake of citation but to distinguish what is specific to tango from what it shares with many other dances (see Taylor's argument about "code language," for instance - I believe tango is not unique here). The relationship of tango and violence, tango and gender (im)balance, tango and national identity - all of these themes could have been explored in more detail, with more insights from people other than the author. Finally, the book could have been less idiosyncratic, less personal, less disrupted - and, I'm afraid, dead. I am so glad it didn't go this way. I will always prefer imperfection to death - one of the things I realized while reading it.
"This text itself, then, is contradictory, performing the eruptions with which it deals." (120) Indeed. It should also be noted that Julie Taylor has approached the dangerous, blurred line of becoming a native much closer that most academics would feel comfortable with. This also might have contributed to the lack of "normal" structure in her book: the closer you are to your "subjects," the more difficult it becomes to view them as Other and analyze their experiences or their lives from a safe distance. Perhaps you can only write of them indirectly, through discussing your own experience of dancing your pain, your frustration, your fear, - and yes, your love.
Paper Tangos is one part ethnography, one part memoir, one part mourning song, and two parts love letter to Buenos Aires and the tango. Stir well. Or don't. Voila!
"Buenos Aires. Arbitrary city like all cities… But seen from Argentina, once there, a definitive point on the map… Arbitrary point, but not absurd. Not absurd in my life like Villazon, Bolivia, or La Quiaca, Argentina – where once I thought I might die and where the thought made me desperate a the absurdity of dying for nothing in places that were nowhere to me. It was not that I thought I might die in Buenos Aires: Rather, it was in Buenos Aires that I knew for the first time that I shall die." (58)
I know this feeling.
Exile is absence, and death, a prolonged absence.
Who amongst us has not died a little?
The country we left no longer exists.
Tangos: The Exile of Gardel
Fernando Solanas
(42)
Could the book have been better? Yes, at least as an anthropological piece. It could have provided its readers with broader background of the twentieth-century Argentinian history, the coup, the Junta's rule; engaged into discussion with other academic writings on dance and its meaning - not just for the sake of citation but to distinguish what is specific to tango from what it shares with many other dances (see Taylor's argument about "code language," for instance - I believe tango is not unique here). The relationship of tango and violence, tango and gender (im)balance, tango and national identity - all of these themes could have been explored in more detail, with more insights from people other than the author. Finally, the book could have been less idiosyncratic, less personal, less disrupted - and, I'm afraid, dead. I am so glad it didn't go this way. I will always prefer imperfection to death - one of the things I realized while reading it.
"This text itself, then, is contradictory, performing the eruptions with which it deals." (120) Indeed. It should also be noted that Julie Taylor has approached the dangerous, blurred line of becoming a native much closer that most academics would feel comfortable with. This also might have contributed to the lack of "normal" structure in her book: the closer you are to your "subjects," the more difficult it becomes to view them as Other and analyze their experiences or their lives from a safe distance. Perhaps you can only write of them indirectly, through discussing your own experience of dancing your pain, your frustration, your fear, - and yes, your love.
Paper Tangos is one part ethnography, one part memoir, one part mourning song, and two parts love letter to Buenos Aires and the tango. Stir well. Or don't. Voila!
"Buenos Aires. Arbitrary city like all cities… But seen from Argentina, once there, a definitive point on the map… Arbitrary point, but not absurd. Not absurd in my life like Villazon, Bolivia, or La Quiaca, Argentina – where once I thought I might die and where the thought made me desperate a the absurdity of dying for nothing in places that were nowhere to me. It was not that I thought I might die in Buenos Aires: Rather, it was in Buenos Aires that I knew for the first time that I shall die." (58)
I know this feeling.
October 8, 2013
This book had the occasional lovely insight about tango that I resonated with, but most of the time I didn't understand what was going on or what she was talking about. Another reminder that tango means different things to different people. I do get that the vagueness was somewhat intentional (see her explanation that the book itself is a "tango on paper"), but it felt like reading someone else's diary account of a hazy dream (or nightmare). It feels private, personal, and not meant to be accessible or understood.
"To write about the tango, to write about violence has not been writing at all." - if you like writing like this, you'll love this book. If you don't, skip it.
"To write about the tango, to write about violence has not been writing at all." - if you like writing like this, you'll love this book. If you don't, skip it.
May 7, 2009
Ack. I wanted to love this, and did enjoy her descriptions of tango and tango culture in the first half. The second half unfortunately devolved into a personal psyche exploration with a Lot more personal detail of the author's life than I was looking for, and more self-centered discussion. Should have stopped reading part-way through.
March 22, 2022
The ending was nice, but it wasn’t my favorite.
April 6, 2024
I think the concept of the book is fascinating. I am not certain the concept was fully achieved. I personally have a limited amount of experience with dance, but I have some, and that seemed to help me to understand a bit about what the author was describing. It lands at being rather vague and stewing with emotions, which may have been the goal.
When I first read this book, it was for a college course and it was a terrible choice for the course objectives. In a state university in the US, my course was about Latin America. This book was chosen as course material so that we could understand some of the more recent history of Argentina, but this book rarely ever touches on concrete things, and operates as if the reader is at least aware of the bigger pieces of that history, which the course also failed to provide.
This book explains little beyond the complicated feelings and perceptions that get roiled into human experience. I know on my first reading, I understood even less of it than I did on my recent re-read. It’s possible that this was the exact goal of the author with this book: vague feelings rather than concrete histories.
I suppose the lasting impact of reading this book is that I now watch Tango dancing on YouTube with an interest in catching nuances of feeling and motion.
It is not a historically informative piece.
When I first read this book, it was for a college course and it was a terrible choice for the course objectives. In a state university in the US, my course was about Latin America. This book was chosen as course material so that we could understand some of the more recent history of Argentina, but this book rarely ever touches on concrete things, and operates as if the reader is at least aware of the bigger pieces of that history, which the course also failed to provide.
This book explains little beyond the complicated feelings and perceptions that get roiled into human experience. I know on my first reading, I understood even less of it than I did on my recent re-read. It’s possible that this was the exact goal of the author with this book: vague feelings rather than concrete histories.
I suppose the lasting impact of reading this book is that I now watch Tango dancing on YouTube with an interest in catching nuances of feeling and motion.
It is not a historically informative piece.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews