Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect ‐ by Kantaris, Geoffrey and O'Bryen, Rory

Kantaris, Geoffrey and O'Bryen, Rory (2013) Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect, Tamesis (Woodbridge), xiii + 300 pp. £65.00 hbk. As these editors note, despite recent works, the complexities of ‘the popular’ within Latin Americanists' toolkit, rather than enlightening discussion on Latin American popular culture, have highlighted its exhaustion. This compilation is therefore framed by the need for new lines of enquiry to address ‘the dynamic field of connections and interruptions [García Canclini's intermediation] […] on which the new mappings of “popular” culture proposed in this book are operating’ (p. 16). Within this context, the book makes a compelling case for rethinking popular culture from three interrelated angles: politics, media and affect. The ‘Politics’ section sees the ‘popular’ as the product of intellectual and political labour demanding a reflexive engagement with its history. Ortega addresses genealogies of the pueblo in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while Page focuses on Lucrecia Martel's recent filmography's use of fabulation (Bergson, Deleuze) to reposition the artist, whose creativity comes from the fabulation in which all people engage (p. 78), addressing the quandary of the intellectual ‘speaking for’ the people. Hart's chapter, on the 1967 Cuban film Las Aventuras de Juan Quinquín and santería, sees one as popular culture's successful integration into a new value system (the Revolution) and the other as presenting a multi-layered picture, especially since, in the early 1990s, capitalist elements questioned that value system. Although Hart rightly attributes importance to the film's (and Cuban culture's) use of humour, the chapter might have benefited from a deeper analysis of its intricate uses in Cuba, from carnival (Bakhtin) to the (here neglected) choteo. Segre's chapter, on refuse and disjecta aesthetics, examines the work of Cuban artists from the new freedom of the 1990s' ‘Special Period’ to earn convertible currency to its effects on visual practice, as in the 2008 Cubanos convertibles exhibition; it is a tour de force but, for non-specialist readers, needed a brief overview of the Period (ignored throughout) and an explanation of the 2008 ‘unprecedented crisis in the recruitment of established artists to occupy teaching positions’ (p. 123). The ‘Media’ section comprises chapters on film, street art, blogging and narratives of identity. The first is an unpublished Martín Barbero essay on the latter and media genres; while signalling some current issues in cultural identity (increasing multilingualism and trans-territoriality) and the dissolution of genre boundaries and the expressive exaltation of the ephemeral (p. 148), it is somewhat dated, citing no work since 2000 and omitting ALBA and ALCA when discussing transnationalism and integration agreements (p. 160). Lúcia Sá then compares the films Cidade de Deus and Antônia in interrogating the favelas and making different uses of space, gender and everyday life. Morrison's chapter compellingly discusses São Paulo street art (Alexandre Orion's 2006 reverse graffiti project, Ossário), seeing marginality as both a space to occupy and a basis for action, as a deliberate mode of production (p. 192). Finally, Taylor discusses the ‘the popular’ in Latin American cybercultural practice, where mass products and folk or grassroots practices combine, clash or intertwine. The ‘Affect’ section includes three chapters. O'Bryen addresses the Magdalena River's centrality in Colombia, comparing the changing configurations of ‘the people’ in the 1858 costumbrista novel Manuela with the killing of Pepe, Pablo Escobar's hippopotamus, against the backdrop of the scandal of ‘false positives’, suggesting a kind of becoming with the multitude in Deleuzian terms. Andrea Noble presents an intriguing chapter on the politics of emotion through the tears of Pancho Villa. Contesting Knight's remark that common national sentiments followed the Revolution, she argues that ‘crying constituted a key element in the new politico-emotional communities that formed among the divergent social classes’ (p. 267). Finally, Edward King analyses the 1993–1996 Argentine comic series Cybersix, examining a carefully crafted comic in the articulation of memory and affective technologies, against the backdrop of the ‘disappeared’ of 1976–1983 and Menem's new technocratic democracy. Although some comment could have been made about Cybersix's relationship to other canonical Argentine comics dealing with memory within a similar context (i.e. Perramus by Breccia and Sasturain), the piece reads well, concluding that ‘the comic book is perhaps the privileged form through which to engage reflexively with the distributed nature of memory and cognition’ (p. 288). Overall, this is an excellent addition to existing literature on Latin American popular culture, highlighting the fact that, rather than attracting an interest that is contemporary with its disappearance (Sarlo, 1994), it presents the fundamental question of a restructuring of cognition – or, as Martín Barbero puts it, ‘[i]f we no longer read or write as we used to, it is because we can no longer see or represent in the same way’ (p. 151).

Topic: Latin American Literature Studies
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences