This course is concerned with the culture of everyday life, both rural and urban, including issues of identity, popular memory, resistance and negotiation expressed through ritual, crafts, the body, social movements, films, music, and literature. This course will focus on popular culture and mass-media during the 1980s in the Southern Cone and Cuba.
Latin America in the 1980s was a ferment of social transitions and artistic negotiations. In Chile and Argentina mass-media and popular culture became contested territory between the countries’ dictatorships and a disperse opposition who resisted totalitarianism through popular art-forms such as film, literature, rock music, comic strips and ritualized protests. In Cuba, meanwhile, the Castro regime’s questionable policies against homosexuals, the unexamined sexism of revolutionary culture, and the regime’s own lack of accountability were criticized by many of the same artists, filmmakers and musicians who had supported it during the 1960s and early 1970s. Artistically and socially, the 1980s also saw the continent shift towards economic privatisation, commercialism and postmodernism with its de-centering of subjectivity and sexuality, collapse of artistic hierarchy, and its fundamental distrust towards totalizing truths. In this course we will explore the popular artwork created in this de-stabilized milieu and how it sought to counter the dominant discourses of the regimes in which it emerged.
