Memory and Modernity

Library Journal

Rowe and Schelling trace the main anthropological and political debates about the nature and significance of popular culture in Latin America. Latin American culture as demonstrated by radio and television soap operas, the samba and carnival, popular drama, and oral poetry is an excellent way to convey how everyday life in Latin America has both assimilated and resisted Western mass culture. The authors point out, for example, that television soap operas in a semiliterate society have extraordinary power to shape culture but have themselves been formed by memory of the past. Novels by elite authors such as Jose Maria Arguedas and Manuel Puig have been transformed by the wealth of these expressions of non-elite culture. Although flawed by academic pretension and clouded by a slightly Marxist political viewpoint, Memory and Modernity is still worth reading. For academic collections.-- Nancy Padgett Lazar, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit