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

By the end of the twentieth century, Latin American cultural scholars were in broad agreement as to how popular culture was defined and why it was significant. More recent developments, however, prompt us to re-examine accepted definitions of popular culture in Latin America. To illustrate some of the numerous displacements or disruptions that have marked popular culture in recent years, this chapter explores examples from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, with a focus on popular music. Understanding popular music in South America also requires considering how it intersects with high culture, the cultural industries, audiovisual media, and digital technologies, revealing how popular cultural practices are changing across the Latin American region and how, as a result, scholars of popular culture are adjusting their theoretical frameworks. Looking at the musical genres of cumbia, funk, and tango and also the festivities of Carnival, we consider shifts in how popular culture is produced and shared, in who might constitute the audiences of popular culture and what sorts of political, aesthetic, and class expressions it may contain. Latin American theories of popular culture continue to be of relevance, but they also require reorientation in a cultural landscape that features popular culture in new places and forms and with new characteristics.