Geoffrey Kantaris & Rory O’Bryen 
Latin American Popular Culture 
Politics, Media, Affect

A wide range of essays which provide new conceptualizations of popular culture while linking it to both its long history and some of its most exciting contemporary forms.


Popular culture has always represented a fulcrum within social, cultural and anthropological discourses in Latin America. Often imagined as representing a challenge to the dominant cultural paradigms of the ‘lettered city’, it has repeatedly been mapped onto political, economic and even libidinal boundaries – between country and city, between folk and street, between the ‘masses’ and elite national/political structures. Yet at the turn of the 21st century, concepts such as the ‘folk’, the ‘popular’, the ‘mass’ and the ‘multitude’ have exploded in the face of new cultural and informational technologies, putting cinematic, televisual and cybernetic manifestations of popular cultureat the forefront of social processes.

In order to address the fragile contemporaneity of popular culture in Latin America, the essays in this collection engage with a wide range of cultural phenomena, from forms of mass political experience in the Colonial and Independence periods, to the modern-day emergence of street art, blogs, comic books and television, as well as the recycling of refuse as art, the marketing of santería to tourists, and the filming of poverty in the favela. In so doing, they explore the diverse regimes of affect that both sustain and destabilize national symbolic orders, and chart the novel mediations between the national and the global in a see-sawingclimate of conflicting economic and political ideologies.


Geoffrey Kantaris is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge.


Rory O’Bryen is a University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge.


Contributors: Francisco Ortega, Joanna Page, Stephen Hart, Erica Segre, Jesús Martín Barbero, Lúcia Sá, Chandra Morrison, Claire Taylor, Andrea Noble, Ed King.

Table of Content

Introduction: The Fragile Contemporaneity of the Popular – Geoffrey Kantaris

And Where Are the People? Genealogies of the
Pueblo during the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries – Francisco Ortega

Folk Tales and Fabulation in Lucrecia Martel’s Films – Joanna Page

How Popular is Cuban Popular Culture? – Stephen M. Hart

‘El convertible no convertible’: Reconsidering Refuse and Disjecta Aesthetics in Contemporary Cuban Art – Erica Segre

Narratives of Identity and Media Genres – Jesús Martín Barbero

Filming
Favelas: Space, Gender, and Everyday Life in
Cidade de Deus and
Antônia – Lúcia Sá

Colouring Pollution: ‘Cleaning’ the City and ‘Recycling’ Social Values in Sao Paulo Street Art – Chandra Morrison

Blogging from the Margins: Grassroots Activism and Mass Media Forms in the
Hiperbarrio Project – Claire Taylor

Affect, Politics and the Production of The People: Meditations on the Río Magdalena – Rory O’Bryen

The Politics of Emotion in the Mexican Revolution: The Tears of Pancho Villa – Andrea Noble

Memory and Affective Technologies in the Argentine Comic Book Series
Cybersix – Ed King

List of Contributors – Geoffrey Kantaris

About the author

STEPHEN M. HART is Professor of Latin American Film, Literature and Culture at University College London.