Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920-1946 by Matthew B. Karush

Abstract

Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920-1946 by Matthew B. Karush. Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2012. xii, 276 pp. $23.95 US (paper). A poor girl is seduced by a wealthy young man and then abandoned to a tragic fate. A generous and noble peasant moves to the city and confronts the glitter and cruelties of upper class urban life. These are the elements of melodrama, the genre that Matthew Karush argues reverberated in the social and political lives of Argentines in the 1920s and 30s. In radio and cinema, melodramatic plots prevailed and scripted the narratives, through which residents of Buenos Aires and its rural surroundings understood their place in social hierarchies and developed political affiliations. Divisive notions of class, he contends, both propagated and reinforced in the media, created the conditions for the popularity and success of Juan Peron and his particular form of populism. Radio dramas, films, songs, and novels pitted the lower classes, celebrated as deserving and morally superior, against the corrupt and selfish elite in ambiguous plots that could read as conservative or subversive, conformist or revolutionary, even as they retained a core Manichean plot of class conflict. For Karush this trope and the existence of what Raymond Williams might have called a structure of feeling solves a puzzle in Argentine historiography. The question of Peron's ability to secure overwhelming loyalty to his regime even as he irked some sectors has never been adequately explained. Karush imagines these melodramas as a sort of warm-up act, following which Peron and his charismatic wife Evita entered the stage and played on the incited feelings and imaginations of the public. The book's strengths lie in Karush's careful and compelling accounts of the way media worked in inter-war Buenos Aires. His reliance on plot as a point of entry for analysis allows for an examination of several forms of media and an account of their entanglement. Radio, recording, the press, and cinema did not exist in isolation from one another but were produced in overlapping and interactive contexts. Writers and producers worked in various venues, recorded music found its way into radio programs and movies, and stars crossed from one medium to another with great frequency. He also grounds his history of media in careful research on the sources of its funding and the nature of transnational connections, particularly with US media. Along the way, Karush offers his interpretation of the ways that Argentine film and music producers navigated the tensions of cultural production that both insisted on its own modernity and invoked authenticity as it staked out nationalist territory. …