Music and popular culture : subjects, spaces, and temporalities in twenty-first-century South America

Much of Latin America has been profoundly transformed in recent years by new dynamics, flows, and experiences of communication and culture. As a result, the region's decades-long consensus on the meaning and use of the concept of popular culture is ripe for reconsideration. Studying popular culture academically had its antecedents in folklore studies and in anthropological or museum collections of the Americas from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But around the 1980s, scholarly discussions of popular culture as a category of cultural production, and the popular classes as a category of social belonging, rapidly came to prominence through a series of dialogues among key thinkers across the Americas. Moving away from previous conceptions of folk culture (and sometimes actively rejecting them), these dialogues sought to understand how contemporary cultural practices and products were changing in the face of rapidly accelerating processes of mediatization and globalization.