Media cultures in Latin America : an introduction

In this chapter, we outline how and why Latin American media and cultural studies came to be formed in such an identifiable way and present readers unfamiliar with the Latin American region with a preparatory understanding of this body of work as an interconnected ensemble of thinkers, approaches, and interdisciplinary debates. The formation of a Latin American intellectual world has been dialogic, constructed in conversations both within and outside the physical spaces of Latin America. The chapter describes several developments that, in combination, produced the media-culture nexus in Latin American research: these include critical communication and media research, Latin American cultural studies, practice paradigms, decolonial projects, Buen Vivir, Indigenous media, and the eco-territorialist turn. When taken as a whole, it is clear that one can conceive of a regionally specific set of interconnected conversations that can be defined as “Latin American media and cultural studies”; these conversations have taken place with knowledge of other intellectual developments in global media and cultural studies, but with their own national and regional agendas and tendencies.