Culture and Imperialism

Abstract

This issue of Latin American Perspectives focuses on culture in the age of the mass media. It is directly concerned with both mass culture as propagated by the consciousness industry in the current stage of capitalism and with the possibilities of resistance to such ideological manipulation in Latin American countries, be it on the level of a redirection of mass communications or on that of popular or elite cultural production. In this introduction we propose to provide some historical and theoretical background and to offer a brief summary of the relevant issues dealt with in this special issue. The time-frame of the research and analysis contained in the volume at hand is generally the past two decades. This is a period in which economic change has resulted in the integration of large sectors of the population into the world capitalist system. Older nationalist and populist ideologies have given way to newer ideologies of modernization and development. The crucial problem addressed is the relation of culture to ideology and the manner in which cultural activity reproduces a dominant ideology or, at the other extreme, contests and counters it. Culture in the era of advanced capitalism has often been divided into a series of discriminatory categories such as highbrow and lowbrow, midcult and masscult, elite and popular, high culture and folklore, avant-garde and kitsch, which obviously cannot be taken for granted by critics on the left. Furthermore the introduction of new media, especially television and radio, has brought yet another term mass culture into use, a term which marks a distinction between authentic art and mass-produced commodity culture such as pulp fiction, soap opera, fotonovelas, etc. Obviously the use of terms such as mass and popular culture is not simply a matter of personal preference but involves a number of ideological assumptions which are not easy to recognize since they are frequently embedded in the very structures of university disciplines. Thus, traditionally, literature departments concern themselves with the study of masterpieces divorced from any social and historical context and from the modes of production while, on the other hand, so-called folk and popular culture become incorporated into anthropological and sociological or