Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (Critical Studies in Latin American Culture) - Softcover

Rowe, William; Schelling, Vivian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0860915417 ISBN 13: 9780860915416

Publisher: Verso Books, 1991

Synopsis

Samba and carnival, radio soaps and telenovelas, oral poetry, popular drama, Amerindian art. This illustrated overview of Latin America’s popular culture considers the broad spectrum of cultural forms in the various countries of the subcontinent.

Exploring the ways in which daily life and ritual have resisted and been influenced by Western mass culture, Memory and Modernity traces the main anthropological, sociological and political debates about the nature of popular culture. Rowe and Schelling use their analysis of the development of a culture industry in Latin America to engage with wider debates about modernity, drawing out the contrast between Latin America’s cultural wealth and its widespread material poverty.

In challenging the assumptions of much Western cultural criticism, this book will be essential reading for students of Latin American society, while offering the general reader a concise and accessible overview of an exciting and varied popular culture.

About this title

About the Author:

William Rowe is a Reader in Spanish American Studies at King's College, London, and Honorary Professor at the University of San Marcos. Peru.
Vivian Schelling is Senior Lecturer in Third World and Development Studies at the University of East London. She is author of A Presenca do Povo na Cultura Brasileira and co-author (with William Rowe) of Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America.

From Library Journal:

Rowe and Schelling trace the main anthropological and political debates about the nature and significance of popular culture in Latin America. Latin American culture as demonstrated by radio and television soap operas, the samba and carnival, popular drama, and oral poetry is an excellent way to convey how everyday life in Latin America has both assimilated and resisted Western mass culture. The authors point out, for example, that television soap operas in a semiliterate society have extraordinary power to shape culture but have themselves been formed by memory of the past. Novels by elite authors such as Jose Maria Arguedas and Manuel Puig have been transformed by the wealth of these expressions of non-elite culture. Although flawed by academic pretension and clouded by a slightly Marxist political viewpoint, Memory and Modernity is still worth reading. For academic collections.
- Nancy Padgett Lazar, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0860915417
• ISBN 13: 9780860915416
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264