Popular Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean

From tango to plastic surgery, Donald Duck to reggaeton, this course places popular culture at the center of modern Latin American and Caribbean history. How, we will ask, did popular culture reflect and shape struggles over national belonging? How did foreign cultural products come to bear on international relations and transnational flows? In what contexts has culture served as a vehicle of resistance to dominant ideologies and systems of power? Far from a mere "diversion," popular culture instead offers a compelling lens onto the relationship between state and society in Latin America and beyond.