Latin American Mediascapes: From Mass Culture to Indigenous Media and Global Consumption

3 units

The increasing commodification and technological mediation of culture over the past century has transformed the constitution of identities and communities, as well as the very form of the popular and the political. How have these transformations modified our understanding of national, regional, and local cultures in Latin America? How do the ways in which indigenous and urban populations experience identity and community differ? What comes after the dissolution of categories such as lo alto, lo popular y lo indígena? Concentrating on Latin American cultures from the twentieth century to the present, this course takes an interdisciplinary approach in order to answer these questions, and explores them through three aspects of mediation: commodification, technology and consumption. These aspects are studied within four different debates: (1) Literary responses to mass culture: tensions between lettered practices and mass media, the value of democratization, and the politics of mass-oriented culture and literature are analyzed. Authors discussed may include: Mario Vargas Llosa, Ricardo Piglia, and Luis Rafael Sánchez; (2) Communication and nation: the role of technological orality (and its clash with print culture) in the configuration of national and campesino cultures in the Andes is explored; (3) The emergence of Indigenous media: an analysis of the reformulation of the politics of representation and the agency of indigenous and subaltern subjects in the countryside and the city in the midst of the boom of this kind of media throughout Latin America, particularly in the Amazon; (4) Consumer cultures: early twentieth-century consumption of popular print culture (sensationalist press) is compared to current discussions of consumption in contemporary urban Latin America in order to discuss democratization, citizenship, and global identities. Readings include works by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Arjun Appadurai, Friedrich Kittler, Jean Franco, George Yúdice, and Beatriz Sarlo. Students are encouraged to propose and discuss additional examples of national cases or authors. Prereq: Graduate Standing. In Spanish.