From Pancho’s Hankie to Pablo’s Hippo: An Interdisciplinary Tour of Latin American Popular Culture

Kantaris and O’Bryen have edited a brilliant volume that makes excellent use of the academic reader’s precious time. The impressive range of material, drawn from Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, entertains and informs. From the ambiguities of Cuban art in a global market to the authority-confounding “reverse” graffiti in São Paulo, this book covers culturally intriguing topics without simplification of their possible “popular” nature. Excellent photographs support the discussions when helpful. All serious academic libraries should own this book.

The introduction supplies a masterful, if thickly written, overview of the popular. Kantaris and O’Bryen reinforce their theoretically solid thirty-eight page text with an extensive bibliography, ranging from William Rowe and Vivian Schelling’s Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (1991) to thought by Gramsci, Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, among many others. Next, Francisco Ortega’s dazzling first chapter recovers the various etymologies of el pueblo, a concept subject to significant change. Ortega argues that Christian religion, urban geography, and political voices inform just a few of the documented incarnations of the pueblo. His concluding remarks on spectrality as characteristic of the “people” unsettle with the observation that “emancipation” is “produced as a social impossibility” (64). The remaining ten articles fall into three sections, “Politics,” “Media,” and “Affect.” My review organizes these texts by nationality.

Two pieces contemplate Argentina. Joanna Page’s wonderfully intriguing article on Lucrecia Martel’s films ducks the prevailing approach to Martel’s work. Page overcomes the reader’s initial objection that Martel’s work is not popular but “arthouse.” The critic’s luminous alternative examination of patternings in the films, inspired by Bergson and Deleuze, searches for “relations” rather than “essences,” and thus offers an exciting approach to Martel’s cinema. The last piece in the volume, by Edward King, studies the Argentine comic book series Cybersix, created by the writer Carlos Trillo and artist Carlos Meglia, and first published between 1993 and 1999. King harnesses Bernard Stiegler and Deleuze’s differing notions on affect to study the conflicted character Cybersix, an unhappy android in a “chaotic and depersonalized end of the century,” who is hunted by the former Nazi doctor Reichter. According to King, the character arc developed for the protagonist “stages the anxious process of coming to terms with the increasing externalization of memory in technological systems” (273). This timely concern extends far beyond a graphic novel, although King carefully respects the context supplied by the detailed plot. Cybersix suspects that all her memories may be programmed by her nefarious creator, and thus the reader and character focus “on the repeated attempts and repeated failures to ‘capture’ or narrativize the realm of affect” (277). Clearly, King challenges the idea that comic books fail sophisticated readings.

Three additional pairs of articles feature the popular in Cuba, Brazil, and Colombia. Stephen Hart contemplates Cuban santería from the complexities of a double economy and points out the existence of a third, “supernatural economy” that intersects with the “money economy,” itself bifurcated between the Cuban peso economy and the more lucrative CUC/tourist economy and its “peso convertible” (worth 24 Cuban pesos). In a parallel study of “Refuse and Disjecta Aesthetics,” Erica Segre returns to the multiple currencies of the Cuban economy and shows how “convertible” art tests the limits of the transferable, in terms of the local environments that feed a global art market. The specialist and nonspecialist alike will find Hart’s and Segre’s perspicacious analyses of great interest.

Turning to Brazil, Lúcia Sá writes on the points of contact between two favela films, Antônia and Cidade de Deus. This culturally sensitive analysis points out that neither film makes good on its “documentary orientation”: Sá argues that Antônia’s answer to the all-male barbarity portrayed in Cidade de Deus is a sanitized, women-centered version of daily life and popular culture, “which ironically reinforces...