In "Consumers and Citizens, " N(r)stor Garc a Canclini, the best-known and most innovative cultural studies scholar in Latin America, maps the critical effects of urban sprawl and global media and commodity markets on citizens-and shows at the same time that the complex results mean not only a shrinkage of certain traditional rights (particularly those of the welfare or client state) but also new openings for expanding citizenship.
Garc a Canclini focuses on the diverse ways in which democratic societies recognize markets of citizen opinions, however heterogeneous and dissonant, as in the...

Offers a study that asks how the art produced about the US-Mexico border - from picture postcards to films and performances - reflects political and economic transformations occurring worldwide. Starting with a discussion of photography and film about the Mexican Revolution, this book traces how this border has been represented in art.

There is more to identity than identifying with one's culture or standing solidly against it. Jose Esteban Munoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture--not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Munoz calls this process "disidentification," and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism.Disidentifications is also something of a performance in its own right, an attempt to fashion a...

Originally published in 1946 and never before available in English, Music in Cuba is not only the best and most extensive study of Cuban musical history, it is a work of literature. Drawing on such primary documents as church circulars and musical scores, Carpentier encompasses European-style elite Cuban music as well as the popular rural Spanish folk and urban Afro-Cuban music.

The earliest films made in Cuba--newsreel footage of the Cuban-Spanish-American War--date from the end of the nineteenth century, but Cuba cannot be said to have had an indigenous film industry before the revolution of 1959. The melodramas, musicals, and comedies made until then reflected Hollywood's--and the United States's--cultural domination of the island, but the revolution precipitated urgent debates about the role of cinema in a socialist country and the kinds of films best suited to the needs of the people and their rulers. Among the feature films, documentaries, and short subjects...

Focusing on the cultural practices of the lower classes and on the processes and productions of the murgas, "Carnival Theater" is a deeply thoughtful consideration of Uruguayan society's identity crisis and subsequent redefinition in the wake of the authoritarian-bureaucratic-technocratic regimes of the 1960s.

Through the dimensions of aesthetics, culture, and politics, Richard (cultural studies, U. Arcis, Santiago, Chile) analyzes certain zones of tension and conflict in Chile resulting from the democratic transition process. He finds the zones to be more or less residual, pointing to unstable formations of symbolic and cultural deposits and sedimentati