In Musicians in Transit Matthew B. Karush examines the transnational careers of seven of the most influential Argentine musicians of the twentieth century: Afro-Argentine swing guitarist Oscar Alemán, jazz saxophonist Gato Barbieri, composer Lalo Schifrin, tango innovator Astor Piazzolla, balada singer Sandro, folksinger Mercedes Sosa, and rock musician Gustavo Santaolalla. As active participants in the globalized music business, these artists interacted with musicians and audiences in the United States, Europe, and Latin America and contended with genre distinctions, marketing conventions, and ethnic stereotypes. By responding creatively to these constraints, they made innovative music that provided Argentines with new ways of understanding their nation's place in the world.
Major change came to Argentina during the first decades of the twentieth century. Following the mass influx of European immigrants to the country during the beginning of the century, a truly national culture was produced through mass media, facilitating the assimilation of immigrants and their descendants. New forms of media emerged, such as radio and cinema, as did new forms of entertainment, such as tango songs, films, and radio theater. Yet despite the unifying effect of popular culture, the nation remained divided, and, if anything, more so in 1950 than in 1910. This book argues that the key to understanding this paradox lies in a reassessment of the mass culture of the 1920s and 1930s. With a focus on film and radio in and around Buenos Aires, the locus of production as well as much of the market consumption, Karush shows how integration and class fractures occurred simultaneously in a short span of the country's history. He brings together the usually separated subjects of radio and cinema to show how they can combine to gauge a larger cultural and political environment and shed light on class distinctions. The book contributes to an ongoing discussion of the relationship between power and mass culture. It will be of interest to scholars of cultural history and urban studies and those interested in Latin American history and culture
Después del golpe militar de 1955, algunos intelectuales antiperonistas intentaron crear una versión del nacionalismo argentino que fuera compatible con un cosmopolitismo modernizador. Dentro del campo de la música popular, abogaron por artistas locales que conciliaban las tradiciones argentinas con valores estéticos "universales" o con tendencias extranjeras "sofisticadas". El presente artículo intenta demostrar que este proyecto encontró un obstáculo en el rock, difundido en la Argentina por empresas multinacionales y percibido como una música extranjera, comercial y de baja calidad. La Nueva Ola, tal como se denominaba al fenómeno, asociaba al rock con varios géneros bailables caribeños, lo cual complicaba aún más el proyecto de conciliar la nacionalidad argentina con las versiones percibidas como más sofisticadas de la modernidad europea o norteamericana. ; Following the military coup of 1955, anti-Peronist intellectuals reimagined Argentine nationalism to make it compatible with a modernizing cosmopolitanism. Within the realm of popular music, they championed local artists who they believed were reconciling Argentine musical traditions with universal aesthetic values or with sophisticated, foreign trends. This article argues, however, that the advent of rock and roll, disseminated in Argentina by multinational corporations, made this ideological project more complicated by unleashing a flood of what was perceived as low-quality, commercial and foreign music. The Nueva Ola, as the phenomenon was known, associated rock and roll with a range of dance genres from the Caribbean, making it even more problematic for those who sought to reconcile Argentine national identity with the most sophisticated versions of European or North American modernity.
Over the last several decades, football, the world's most popular sport, has begun to attract well-deserved attention from academics in a variety of disciplines. In general, this scholarship has fallen into two unrelated fields of inquiry. While historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have asked questions about the culture of football, economists and experts in management and marketing have approached the sport with a very different agenda. Although these two groups of scholars undoubtedly have much to say to each other, the potential for intellectual exchange has not yet been realized. As a result, Football in the Americas would seem to hold great promise.
During the early 1990s, Argentina's Peronist Party accomplished a political magic trick: under the leadership of President Carlos Menem, Peronism turned away from its traditional commitment to social justice and an activist state, embraced the free market and neoliberal reform, and yet maintained the electoral support of the majority of the poor. For many Argentine intellectuals, this trick was easy enough to explain. According to the conventional wisdom, poor people remained loyal to Peronism, despite their rapidly declining standard of living, either because they remained under the hypnotic spell of Juan and Evita or because they were bought off by clientelist politicians offering handouts. Javier Auyero's ethnography of Peronist politics in an impoverished shantytown on the outskirts of Buenos Aires challenges these simplistic explanations. This timely and important book reconceptualizes political clientelism, a crucial phenomenon within scholarship on Latin America and beyond, while making visible and intelligible a population that has been relegated to marginality both by socioeconomic realities and by academic discourse.
