María Rosa Oliver, el comunismo y la cultura argentina

Abstract

This article focuses on the Argentine writer María Rosa Oliver (1898-1977) between the 1930s and 1960s. Born in an Argentinian elite family and forced to move in a wheelchair due to a childhood illness, she was a founding member of the magazine Sur and a well-known communist “fellow traveler”. This text analyzes her career considering the political and social contexts that made her political commitment possible and defined it, while articulating the local scale to international ideological climates. This article states that her social and cultural dispositions allowed her to develop a type of cosmopolitan commitment particularly useful for the functions of cultural diplomacy that communism required in various periods. Taking her memories and personal papers as the main sources, a brief presentation of her performance in feminism, antifascism and communism is made to highlight her place in a network of local and transnational relationships and sociabilities, within which her class origin and political choices are not contradictory.

Keywords

• Cold War
• intellectuals
• communism
• Oliver (María Rosa)
• anti-fascism
• transnational activist networks