Robert Lehmann-Nitsche and His Unpublished Study on Tango and African Languages in Argentina, Around 1900

Abstract

This article is about Robert Lehmann-Nitsche and the study of his unpublished corpus of documents on tango and African languages in Argentina, collected around 1900 and donated to the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (IAI) in Berlin. Following Pablo Cirio’s location of this material in the IAI catalog, and its subsequent analysis, the present research takes a new look at these documents in the published work of Lehmann-Nitsche, especially in his book Textos eróticos del Río de la Plata. Six specific cases are analyzed: tango, cambá, tumba, milonga, kilombo and mucama, for their social resonance and their contribution to the study of the Afro-Argentine culture of the colonial trunk. This culture, often underestimated by the local academic orthodoxy until the end of the 20^th century, is approached through bibliography, archival sources and ethnographic approaches.