The Tango in Translation: Intertextuality, Filmic Representation, and Performing Argentine Tango in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes representations of the Argentine tango by the U.S. media utilizing Farzaneh Farahzad’s theory of “translation as intertextual practice” and Lawrence Venuti’s theory of translated “adaptations.” I argue that the juxtaposition of Latin American and European cultural stereotypes within filmic representations of the tango has created and reinforced a highly racialized master discourse (Said Faiq) that continues to influence how the Argentine tango is perceived in the United States today. Because cultural translation occurs between a hegemonic culture and a marginalized culture, representations of the tango in the United States both create and reinforce a master discourse that inextricably ties the tango to an exoticized and eroticized Latin “Other.” I conclude by discuss how the racialized and sexualized narratives discussed throughout this paper are integrated into contemporary performance of the tango. I draw on ethnographic research with tango communities throughout the United States to illustrate how 20th century filmic representations of the tango continue to motivate, influence, and inform how, when, and why the Argentine tango is performed by U.S. dancers and musicians. Films analyzed include Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Some Like it Hot, Last Tango in Paris, and The Scent of a Woman, as well as a variety of lesser-known films and television advertisements. Although a large variety of 20th century films feature the tango, the films discussed in this paper were selected for analysis due to the frequency with which they are referenced by tango aficionados and contemporary tango dancers, musicians, and deejays performing throughout the United States today.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".