Analysis Of Culture Of Class: Radio And Cinema In Latin America

Karush, MatthewB. Culture and Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920-1946.Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. 288 pp.

A marvel of Latin American history is how easily and quickly Juan Domingo Peron was able to grasp and secure political dominance in Argentina in 1946. Matthew Karush, professor of Latin American history at George Mason University, attempts to explain this phenomenon through the lens of mass media in Argentina between 1920 and 1946. His text, Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920-1946, explores how the influence of mass media, both domestically produced and imported, created an Argentina that was primed and ready for a quasi-populist government

Karush proposes that the mass media forces that were available for public consumption to Argentinians throughout the middle of the 20th century were so effective at reaching their audiences that they had a profound impact on the political future of the nation. Stressing the fluidity of class at this time, Karush examines the development of different socioeconomic classes in and around the Buenos Aires neighborhoods, or barrios most closely. These developments, according to the author, steamed from the mass media and culture that they were being exposed to. Argentinian mass media, according to Karush, tended to associate images and narratives of national identity with the poor while giving the rich a more menacing and negative image. This is actually a crucial element and gives Karush's thesis great support. While Peron was vying for power, and while he was in power, he always defined himself as being very patriotic and in turn would criticize any of his opposition and say they were unpatriotic. These politically charged attacks from Peron were grounded in the melodrama of the earlier decades. These images painted by the cinema helped set the stage for the rise of Peron because of the class consciousness that they were

Giving the most significant amount of his attention to cinema, melodrama in particular, as well as dance halls and the style of dance within them, Karush successfully opens the discussion for further scholarship in this direction of the field. Although Karush very successfully explored the styles of media that were being consumed at this time, as well as which variety of media was being consumed by which socioeconomic group, he failed to explore the way in which people were exploring and experiencing the media. Possibly because of the limitations of records or a lack of availability to access surviving peoples who lived through this time, but Karush never explores what people were experiencing in real-time as they were consuming the media. This information would have given much more depth to his argument and likely strengthened the human aspect of text if dialogue with Argentine citizens, past or present, had been added to the text. Additionally, Karush almost entirely ignores any areas that were not a part of Buneos Aires or its surrounding suburbs. On this note, he is almost entirely excused for the absence of information because of how central Buneos Aires is to Argentinian society