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Reviewed by:
  • Latin American Popular Culture. Politics, Media, Affect ed. by Geoffrey Kantaris and Rory O’Bryen
  • Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste
Kantaris, Geoffrey, and Rory O’Bryen, eds. Latin American Popular Culture. Politics, Media, Affect. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2013. 300 pp.

The main concern of this volume is to trace the evolution of the role of popular culture in an increasingly globalized Latin America, where the relevance of the nation-state seems to have diminished and the local appears to have gained further traction. In the introduction, editors Kantaris and O’Bryen do a competent job chronicling its analysis, from its genealogies to the present. Jon Beasley-Murray, Néstor García Canclini, Gilles Deleuze, William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Alberto Moreiras figure as constants throughout most of the theoretical framework. Subsequently, the book is divided into three sections—politics, media, affect—each providing related examples of the pertinence of popular culture in the corresponding area. As is customary in collections of this nature, the collected essays tend to focus more on relations than on actual social, cultural, and political formations.

The first portion of the book centers on the political, highlighting the definition and practice of a popular subject. It comprises four articles. The initial one, judiciously written by Colombian scholar Francisco Ortega, sketches the emergence of the “people” in northern South America as a discursive figure, illustrating its complex conceptual formation and its consequences for our time. In it, setting the pace for the following articles, Ortega covers conscientiously the history at the beginning of the nineteenth century within which the notion of “popular” was produced, clarifying that it is only by paying heed to the multiplicity of its meanings that the emergence of the people as a political subject will be rendered possible. Joanna Page follows with a detailed analysis of the work of Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel. Basing her argument on a process of fabulation, she issues a reading that prioritizes the construction of stories (Page’s emphasis) over their acts of representation. After all, as she so adeptly manages to underline, Martel is less interested in exploring marginalization than in turning a critical eye at her own social context, focusing on the becoming-other of the majority (instead of discriminating between popular and elite art). In this way, she avoids fetishizing the popular as foundation for resistance or patronizing it as an instrument for the passive consumption of ideology. Next comes Stephen Hart’s chapter on two particular cases of Cuban popular culture: Julio García Espinosa’s Aventuras de Juan Quinquín (1967) and the practice of santería. Hart’s object is to examine the extent to which these texts, as part of popular culture, are co-opted by the revolutionary value-system or whether they manage to escape its hermeneutic grasp. In his view, thanks to the proficient use of humor, García Espinosa manages to get away with murder: by embracing Cuban popular circus culture, his film serves as vehicle for the energy of the people. On the other hand, having benefitted from its association with the exploited classes, santería has a harder time repressing especulación, the way in which fellow Cubans branded accompanying luxury and spending during the Período Especial. Despite this setback, its practices have continued to offer access to a second-level economy. In “El convertible no convertible,” Erica Segre compiles an impressive inventory of Cuban art, illustrating how this practice has been affected by the economic policies of the island’s regime. Her prose is verbose and baroque, perhaps too much to [End Page 196] excuse the lack of a single, unifying theoretical thread. At times, her style proves too sequential.

Quite appropriately, the segment on media opens with a masterly chapter by renowned theorist Jesús Martín Barbero. While he discusses key changes in the mapping of cultural identities in traditional forms of culture, ways of understanding identity and national memory, and urban cultures, given the impact of globalization, Barbero’s main contention is that this so-called “return” of identities has brought about an impoverishment in genre and narrative. Lúcia Sá’s...

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