Post Popular Cultures And Digital Capitalism In Latin America

"In this book, renowned Latin American intellectuals, Pablo Alabarces and Néstor García Canclini, bring us up to date on the changes in the status and role of the popular classes in Latin American democracies over the past two decades. Building on decades long research and experience in the field of cultural studies, the authors ask how the digitalization and economization of society are changing the reality of political participation and social inequality in Latin America and beyond, leading to new forms of economic and cultural marginalization. García Canclini focuses on the rapid digitalization of our society and economies, ruminating over the future of political participation and democracy in the coming age of algorithms, transnationalization, and social precarity for growing swaths of the population. By contrast, Alabarces focuses on the disintegration and commodification of popular cultures throughout Latin America in the last two decades and discusses the consequences on democratic projects in the region. Both pieces approach the question of how democratic projects on a local, regional, national, and transnational level can deal with galloping social disintegration and accelerating political discontent as an increasing number people within the course of this digital revolution gain voice: all this against the authoritarian or technocratic alternatives that have been gaining ground again. The introduction by Sarah Corona contextualizes the contributions and their authors in the academic and political debate. She connects their focus on popular cultures to broader questions regarding the future of nation states and democracies facing multiple crises in the region and beyond. Post-Popular Cultures and Digital Capitalism in Latin America will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in political science, sociology, and cultural studies looking to freshen their views as well as develop an understanding of the Global South's perspective on current global issues"--

In this book, renowned Latin American intellectuals, Pablo Alabarces and Néstor García Canclini, bring us up to date on the changes in the status and role of the popular classes in Latin American democracies over the past two decades. Building on decades-long research and experience in the field of cultural studies, the authors ask how the digitalization and economization of society are changing the reality of political participation and social inequality in Latin America and beyond, leading to new forms of economic and cultural marginalization. García Canclini focuses on the rapid digitalization of our society and economies, ruminating over the future of political participation and democracy in the coming age of algorithms, transnationalization, and social precarity for growing swaths of the population. By contrast, Alabarces focuses on the disintegration and commodification of popular cultures throughout Latin America in the last two decades and discusses the consequences on democratic projects in the region. Both pieces approach the question of how democratic projects on a local, regional, national, and transnational level can deal with galloping social disintegration and accelerating political discontent as an increasing number of people within the course of this digital revolution gain voice: all this against the authoritarian or technocratic alternatives that have been gaining ground again. The introduction by Sarah Corona contextualizes the contributions and their authors in the academic and political debate. She connects their focus on popular cultures to broader questions regarding the future of nation-states and democracies facing multiple crises in the region and beyond. Post-Popular Cultures and Digital Capitalism in Latin America will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in political science, sociology, and cultural studies looking to freshen their views as well as develop an understanding of the Global South’s perspective on current global issues.

This collection of essays explores the interfaces between new information technologies and their impact on contemporary culture, and recent transformations in capitalist production. From a transnational frame, the essays investigate some of the key facets of contemporary global capitalism: the ascendance of finance capital, and the increasing importance of immaterial labor (understood here as a post-Fordist notion of work that privileges the art of communication, affect, and virtuosity). The contributors address these transformation by exploring their relation to new digital media (YouTube, MySpace, digital image and video technology, information networks, etc.) and various cultural forms including the Hispanic television talk show, indigenous video production, documentary film in Southern California, the Latin American stock market, German security surveillance, transnational videoconferencing, and Japanese tourists’ use of visual images on cell phones. The authors argue that the seemingly radical newness and alleged immateriality of contemporary speculative capitalism, turns out to be less dramatically new and more grounded in colonial/racial histories of both material and immaterial exploitation than one might at first imagine. Similarly, human interaction with digital media and virtuality, ostensibly a double marker for the contemporary and economically privileged subject, in fact reveals itself in many cases as transgressive of racial, economic and historical categories.

The first volume of The Cambridge History of Capitalism provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of capitalism from its earliest beginnings. Starting with its distant origins in ancient Babylon, successive chapters trace progression up to the 'Promised Land' of capitalism in America. Adopting a wide geographical coverage and comparative perspective, the international team of authors discuss the contributions of Greek, Roman, and Asian civilizations to the development of capitalism, as well as the Chinese, Indian and Arab empires. They determine what features of modern capitalism were present at each time and place, and why the various precursors of capitalism did not survive. Looking at the eventual success of medieval Europe and the examples of city-states in northern Italy and the Low Countries, the authors address how British mercantilism led to European imitations and American successes, and ultimately, how capitalism became global.

This volume provides an innovative and timely approach to a fast growing, yet still under-studied field in Latin American cultural production: digital online culture. It focuses on the transformations or continuations that cultural products and practices such as hypermedia fictions, net.art and online performance art, as well as blogs, films, databases and other genre-defying web-based projects, perform with respect to Latin American(ist) discourses, as well as their often contestatory positioning with respect to Western hegemonic discourses as they circulate online. The intellectual rationale for the volume is located at the crossroads of two, equally important, theoretical strands: theories of digital culture, in their majority the product of the anglophone academy; and contemporary debates on Latin American identity and culture.

This book brings together academic and activist work on community media, feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous perspectives to digital activism, including Free and Open Communication in Latin America. The essays in this collection speak to major changes over the past decade that are reshaping digital media uses and practices. The case studies presented here question many commonly held assumptions around global media ownership, sustainability, and access relevant to countries beyond Latin American contexts.

This volume explores one of the central issues that has been debated in internet studies in recent years: locality, and the extent to which cultural production online can be embedded in a specific place. The particular focus of the book is on the practices of net artists in Latin America, and how their work interrogates some of the central place-based concerns of Latin(o) American identity through their on- and offline cultural practice. Six particular works by artists of different countries in Latin America and within Latina/o communities in the US are studied in detail, with one each from Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, the US-Mexico border, and the US. Each chapter explores how each artist represents place in their works, and, in particular how traditional place-based affiliations, or notions of territorial identity, end up reproduced, re-affirmed, or even transformed online. At the same time, the book explores how these net.artists make use of new media technologies to express alternative viewpoints about the locations they represent, and use the internet as a space for the recuperation of cultural memory.

A Companion to Latin American Cinema offers a wide-ranging collection of newly commissioned essays and interviews that explore the ways in which Latin American cinema has established itself on the international film scene in the twenty-first century. Features contributions from international critics, historians, and scholars, along with interviews with acclaimed Latin American film directors Includes essays on the Latin American film industry, as well as the interactions between TV and documentary production with feature film culture Covers several up-and-coming regions of film activity such as nations in Central America Offers novel insights into Latin American cinema based on new methodologies, such as the quantitative approach, and essays contributed by practitioners as well as theorists

This book presents pioneering research that is designed to show, from a qualitative and ethnographic perspective, how new information and communication technologies, as applied to the school system and to local governance initiatives, merely reproduce traditional pedagogical approaches and the dominant forms by which power is exercised at the local level. The studies thus constitute points of departure for further thinking about the need to promote an Internet culture based on the social application of a OC right to communication and cultureOCO and an OC Internet right, OCO that will permit the establishment of true citizen participation and free access to knowledge, with due regard to personal and individual rights such as those of privacy and intimacy."

This publication investigates the impact of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) on Latin America. In analyzing the special characteristics of Latin America with regard to the integration of ICTs, the publication focuses on five main areas - access, regulatory framework, financing, education and the so-called soft factor.