Issue 168

Memory and Popular Culture in Latin America

Issue 168, Vol. 36, Number 5

Issue Edtiors: Alicia Del Campo and Arturo Arias

Whereas the field of cultural studies, in the narrative memorialized by Stuart Hall, has always been considered as having originated in Birmingham, England, Latin American cultural studies have an origin independent of the legacy of the Birmingham School. They emerged primarily from within the social sciences in the 1960s, when important thinkers such as Darcy Ribeiro, Paulo Freire, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Carlos Monsiváis fused what had been the traditional cultural essay form with sociological research to account for the events then taking place in the continent. These systems of thought included dependency theory, liberation theology, the pedagogy of the oppressed, and the critique of internal colonialism, among various critical tendencies. These lines of thought were combined with the innovative production of literary and popular culture in the 1960s, including boom literature, street theater, cinema novo, and the nueva canción movement in popular music, to produce a new understanding of both symbolic production and social imaginaries on the continent, thus systematizing an original way of understanding cultural reality to explain the period as one of a struggle between imperialism and (Latin American) nation(s) and, within the nation itself, between capitalism and socialism. Read More...