{"title":"White Subjectivity and Black Nationalism in José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo’s Alack Sinner Comic “Vietblues” (1975)","authors":"Christopher Conway","doi":"10.7560/SLAPC3909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/SLAPC3909","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Argentine artist José Muñoz and writer Carlos Sampayo began publishing their Alack Sinner detective comic in the Italian magazine Alterlinus in 1974, after which its stories appeared in French, Spanish, Argentinian, and US publications. Beginning in 2015, the complete Alack Sinner was republished in several languages, winning over a new generation of readers and critics. In the fourth tale, “Vietblues” (1975), Muñoz and Sampayo liberated their storytelling from the limitations of pastiche and formula to challenge the genre conventions of the “private detective” crime narrative. The comic, set in New York City, foregrounds a white protagonist who refuses to partner with a group of Black nationalists intent on tearing down racist power structures. This article shows how the comic explores two definitions of history and political action: an idealistic, subjective, and individualistic one, and a more historical vision predicated on connections between oppressed groups. Muñoz and Sampayo argue for the possibility of interethnic solidarity while documenting their protagonist’s inability to successfully act on that promise. Key to the analysis are Muñoz and Sampayo’s treatment of race and the ways their white protagonist depoliticizes the African American experience by projecting it into himself as a dream state.","PeriodicalId":53864,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47503785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ex-voto: Folk, Outsider, Transnational—Debating Definitions","authors":"Lorella Di Gregorio","doi":"10.7560/SLAPC3904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/SLAPC3904","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Ex-votos are the representation of a struggle and also a spiritual practice. Historically, pictorial ex-votos depict an alleged miracle in an iconic manner. When the struggle is migration,...","PeriodicalId":53864,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41931923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gendered Figure Lighting, Artifice, and Realism in Rosaura a las diez","authors":"Matt Losada","doi":"10.7560/SLAPC3905","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/SLAPC3905","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines how, in Rosaura a las diez (Mario Soffici, 1958)—made as the Argentine studio system production model was in a crisis that would prove terminal—the productive tension between classical conventions of genre and gendered figure lighting is used to visually enact a shift in the representation of the title character from a female object of male gazes to a socially situated migrant who inhabits the social margins of a modern, complex Buenos Aires. The film’s plot employs multiple focalizers who retell the story, resulting in events being narrated several times, each of which expresses through its mise-en-scène the intense emotions and desires of each narrator-focalizer toward Rosaura, generating contradictions that are eventually resolved by a final sequence focalized by the title character. In this way, the film takes part in a wider, though partial, shift in Argentine cinema away from the classical conventions that privileged escapist spectacle, to instead propose an epistemological regrounding after the earlier conflicting subjectivities had undermined the usual credibility of the filmic image, and points toward the concerns with the social margins of the more independently produced cinema to come, known as the nuevo cine.","PeriodicalId":53864,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44375725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"La realidad que triunfa sobre la forma: La novela negra en Mario Mendoza, Lady Masacre","authors":"A. Jastrzębska","doi":"10.7560/SLAPC3908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/SLAPC3908","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Paradoxically, in Colombia, whose past and present time are marked by the continuous waves of violence, the crime or noir fiction is a marginal sub-genre. In fact, it has never appeared in its orthodox form in Colombian literature. The genre, which for some decades has served as a recurrent instrument to focus on the complicated and violent reality of modern societies, in contemporary Colombian fiction is subject to constant reinvention and perpetual hybridization. One of the authors recognized within this field of artistic production is Mario Mendoza (1964). The article studies his novel Lady Massacre (2013) with the aim of observing how Mendoza manages the traditional ingredients of the crime fiction (the crime, the detective, the investigation, the resolution of the enigma, and the social background) to reinvent the genre in the Colombian context.","PeriodicalId":53864,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46180191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Zombies as Temporal Critique: Sudor frío (2010) and Generations of Youth in Postdictatorship Argentina","authors":"Charles St-Georges","doi":"10.7560/SLAPC3901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/SLAPC3901","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Set in present-day Buenos Aires, the film Sudor frío (2010, dir. Adrián García Bogliano) features two former agents of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional who continue to imprison zombified abductees from the Dirty War of the 1970s and 1980s in their decrepit house of horrors, where they also capture and torture newer generations of Argentine youth who are disconnected from the historical violence of the dictatorship and are supposedly disenchanted with politics in general. Stunted in their normative development as young citizens toward traditional benchmarks like employment, home ownership, and procreation, their suspension in time can be read as zombiesque, allowing for the blurring of differences between generations. The distinct ways in which they have become frozen in time hold the potential to engender a kind of temporal critique that calls into question not only the national progress that has been made since the return to democracy, but also the prescriptive timeline that defines individual progress according to the logic of the neoliberal economy left intact since the last dictatorship.","PeriodicalId":53864,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44082017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Víctor Gaviria’s Mujer del animal and the Banality of Violence against Women","authors":"Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky","doi":"10.7560/SLAPC3906","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/SLAPC3906","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores violence against Colombian women in Víctor Gaviria’s 2016 film La mujer del animal. The plight of women comes into view in cases of domestic abuse, the apathy of an indifferent society, and in popular language that condones gendered aggression. The raw depiction of relentless oppression in La mujer del animal urges reflection on the normalization of mistreatment and societal collaboration. Rather than putting all blame on the tormentor himself, Gaviria’s film condemns the complicit community as the real evil responsible for forging intergenerational patterns of abusive behaviors. Moreover, the article argues that Gaviria’s mode of presentation—a realistic portrayal of violence deemed excessive by some commentators—is dismissed by them in the same way real-life gender violence continues to be ignored by institutions and communities alike.","PeriodicalId":53864,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43878560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Kurt Hollander’s Joyous Life and the Architecture of Sex","authors":"H. Campbell","doi":"10.7560/slapc3809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/slapc3809","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53864,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45566173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"De héroe a superhéroe: Encantos y desencantos del milagro económico chileno en El reemplazante","authors":"M. Jiménez","doi":"10.7560/slapc3806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/slapc3806","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53864,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44369181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"YouTube Kitsch and the Racial Politics of Taste in the Andes: The Case of Delfín Quishpe","authors":"Ignacio Aguiló","doi":"10.7560/slapc3801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/slapc3801","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article looks at “Torres gemelas,” a YouTube video by Ecuadorian indigenous musician Delfín Quishpe, which went viral in the late 2000s, reaching millions of views. I argue that this video, and associated phenomena, can be considered a paradigmatic example of how some contemporary indigenous creators are radically redefining their relationship with globalized and localized cultures in a context of unprecedented technological change and time-space compression. By refusing to cleave to expectations about Amerindian media production as political and collective or as an expression of ancestral and traditional indigeneity, these Andean creators are challenging established views regarding how they should participate in modernity and the digital world. At the same time, white audiences’ consumption of Delfín’s video (and similar media products) as kitsch (or “bad taste”) also points toward the deployment of racist discourse in the definition of indigenous cultural production—particularly when there is a deliberate discrepancy with mainstream society’s expectations about Amerindianness. Rather than arguing against the kitsch nature of “Torres gemelas” and comparable media productions, the article proposes to critically appropriate the term in order to address how these new cultural products are subject to symbolic violence, and yet at the same time have the potential to articulate anti-racist strategies.","PeriodicalId":53864,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71340148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"La Palmada en la Frente (1970): Political Cartoons, the Global Sixties, and Popular Culture in Chile","authors":"Matias Hermosilla","doi":"10.7560/slapc3802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7560/slapc3802","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the case of La Palmada en la Frente (1970), a one-issue political cartoon magazine, drawn and written by cartoonist Lugoze and produced in the context of a scare campaign against the possible election of the socialist Salvador Allende (1969–1970). This ephemeral document belonged to a larger group of publications that used humor and cartoons as ideological weapons. An extensive examination of this source allows a recast of the relationship between popular culture and politics in the Chilean experience of the global sixties. This essay argues that political cartoons work as a portal through which to understand behaviors, social problems, prejudices, fears, stereotypes, and myths that can enforce and challenge the study of Latin American popular culture and the sixties.","PeriodicalId":53864,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43827608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}