Böcker i Cambria Studies in Latin American Literatures and Cultures-serien

Although Juan Domingo Perón's central role in Argentine history and the need for an unbiased assessment of his impact on his nation's cinema are beyond dispute, the existing scholarship on the subject is limited. In recent decades Argentina has witnessed a revival of serious film study, some of which has focused on the nation's classical movies and, in one case, on Peronism. None of this work has been translated into English, however.This is the first English-language book that offers an extensive assessment of Argentine cinema during first Peronism. It is also the first study in any language that concentrates systematically on the evolution of social attitudes reflected in Argentine movies throughout those years and that assesses the period's impact on subsequent filmmaking activity. By analyzing popular Argentine movies from this time through the prism of myth-second-order communication systems that present historically developed customs and attitudes as natural-the book traces the filmic construction of gender, criminality, race, the family, sports, and the military. It identifies in movies the development and evolution of mindsets and attitudes that may be construed as "Peronist." By framing its consideration of films from the Perón years in the context of earlier and later ones, it demonstrates that this period accelerates-and sometimes registers backward-looking responses to-earlier progressive mythic shifts, and it traces the development in the 1950s of a critical mindset that comes to fruition in the "new cinema" of the 1960s. Picturing Argentina: Myths, Movies, and the Peronist Vision is an important book for Latin American studies, film studies, and history collections.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Argentina lived a process of accelerated modernization. To understand the beginnings of mass culture and mass cultural experiences (between 1880 and 1930), it becomes necessary to examine a variety of phenomena that combine modern forms of access to public space with the creation of new cultural contents. That was the period of the democratic political reforms, urban redesign, the rise of immigration rates, the economic growth, and the articulation of nationalist ideologies. Culture (elite, popular, and mass culture) played a major role in the context of deep social and political transformations. New phenomena profoundly affected the social life: popular spectacles, mass consumption, the variety shows, theatres, the circus, as well as the connections between these forms and the avant-garde of the 1920s. Coincidentally, the appearance and success of tango music and dancing, and the relationship between tango and masculine violence and the political violence of the early twentieth century are interconnected practices. Tango, a cultural export to Europe and the US, played a central function in redefining gender and class roles. Finally, the notions of good and poor taste as cultural and political experiences that define citizenship through fashion, the role of aesthetics in social life, and the dissemination of scientific and sociological knowledges introduce a complex scale of cultural practices Museum of Consumption: The Archives of Mass Culture in Argentina (1880 1930) is a study of the emergence of mass culture in modern Argentina. The book examines the tensions of this modern culture subject to the pressures of the market and politics. The book also traces the emergence of a cultural scene that constructed a frontier between elite and mass cultures during the modernization process. It was, however, a highly porous frontier: the reduced size of the cultural field meant that the same actors worked on both sides. If common sense would have it that the lower sectors imitate and copy elite culture, this book argues the opposite, demonstrating how plebeian productions impacted and radically transformed lettered culture. The book, therefore, takes a novel approach, viewing mass culture not as a series of case studies but rather as processes of cultural production and circulation. To this goal, the book focuses mainly on tango, circus, and fashion productions. This study belongs to the field of cultural studies. It lies at the intersection of numerous theoretical approaches like theory of the masses, studies of consumer culture, modernity and modernism, intellectual history, gender studies, and theories of spectacle. Its singular archive was constructed especially for this book and includes memoirs, chronicles, testimonies, essays, and fictions, all of which it places into dialog with canonical texts. Museum of Consumption: The Archives of Mass Culture in Argentina (1880 1930) is an important transdisciplinary book for Latin American cultural studies and history collections.