Cinema, Literature and Tangos. Narcotic Representations in Art During the First Decades of the 20th Century (Argentina)

Abstract

Around 1910 there was a shift in the hegemonic global discourses on narcotics, which implied a transition from a positive assessment of their medicinal-sedative effects to a negative one, in which they came to be considered a fundamental threat to social cohesion. The same process also implied that their possession-use-consumption became heavily regulated or openly prohibited in most Western nation-states, including Argentina. The aim of this paper is to examine the representations of narcotic substances that were produced or may have been projected in Argentina during the first decades of the twentieth century from different artistic manifestations - literature, cinema and the musical lyrics of tangos - in relation to narcotic substances, evaluating whether they produced relatively homogeneous discourses that were consistent with a global discursive shift, or whether art offered nuances and/or narrative alternatives.