Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina by Matthew B. Karush (review)

Culture of Class is one of the better-written books in Latin American media studies. Matthew B. Karush argues that radio broadcasting and cinema in the 1920s and 1930s fueled class divisions in Argentina, a division exploited in the 1940s by Juan Perón, a general turned populist, authoritarian president. Karush makes his case convincingly, using a wide variety of media and traditional archival sources. He also discusses other important themes connected to his thesis: class formation, the transnational marketplace, the process of creating media productions, and the use of culture in nation building

Karush’s work joins a growing body of English-language historical literature on radio and cinema in Argentina and other countries in Latin America. These works include Joy Hayes’s Radio Nation (2000), Bryan McCann’s Hello, Hello Brazil (2004), Robert Howard Claxton’s From Parsifal to Perón (2007), Paul A. Schroder Rodríguez’s Latin American Cinema (2016), and my own Radio in Revolution (2016). Karush’s work is most similar to McCann’s in that they both focus on the marketplace in creating media culture, and how populist politicians played on that culture.

Peronism, the political movement formed around Perón and his wife Eva—a former film and radio actress—was a powerful force in Argentina. Because the movement was so influential, scholars have given it abundant attention. What separate’s Karush’s work from other books about Peronism is that it is a cultural study, combining cultural history with film studies and the Gramscian tradition. Most of the scholarship on Peronism before Culture of Class focused on the political and economic underpinnings of the phenomenon. Karush, however, argues that “populism in Argentina was not merely a product of industrialization or a reflection of labor politics; it was also the outcome of a particular pattern of mass cultural production” (p. 179).

Technology and Culture readers will find little in Karush’s work about the actual technologies of radio and cinema. There is a section on film stock, and the attempt of the U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs to withhold this stock as a way to punish Argentina for not pledging its unequivocal allegiance to the Allies during World War II. There is some discussion of production processes and studios, but in general Karush analyzes artistic content, media producers, and consumers, not the mediums themselves or the technologies that make them possible.

Karush nonetheless excels at what he set out to do. Exploring movies including Las luces de Buenos Aires (The Lights of Buenos Aires, 1931) and Los tres berretines (The Three Whims, 1933), and radio programs such as Chispazos de tradición (Sparks of Tradition, 1931), Mujeres que trabajan (Women Who Work, 1937), Karush demonstrates that Argentine cultural producers and consumers turned to foreign influences, but also to narratives that celebrated Argentina’s poor as nationally “authentic” and that criticized the wealthy as corrupt. This trend made Argentine radio and cinema a divisive force. He contrasts this reality with the more nationally unifying media productions in the United States that downplayed class animosity.

Whereas cinema and radio were mostly the products of the marketplace in 1920s and 1930s Argentina, Karush points out that this changed during the 1940s. On 4 June 1943, a military junta, including Perón, overthrew President Ramón Castillo. With the aid of thousands of workers, Perón took the presidency in 1946. The military and Perón drastically increased state intervention in media. By 1947, the Perón administration had taken over the radio industry. It likewise took on a much more supervisory role in cinema. But Karush argues, contrary to scholars before him, that this state intervention did not dramatically change the trends already under way in radio and cinema programming content. He concludes that “In its binary moralism, its emphasis on class harmony and national unity, as well as its...