Description:
This book on cultural studies lies at the intersection of theoretical approaches of consumer culture, modernity & modernism, intellectual history, gender studies, & theories of spectacle.
Brief description: Graciela Montaldo is a Professor of Latin American studies at Columbia University. She specializes in modern Latin American Culture with a focus on contemporary cultural practices. She is coeditor of The Argentina Reader: History, Culture and Politics. She has published Rubén Darío. Viajes de un cosmopolita extremo (2013), Zonas Ciegas. Populismos y experimentos culturales en Argentina (2010), and A propriedade da Cultura (2004), among other books.
Review Quotes:
"This is one of the most exciting books of cultural criticism I have read in recent years: it will interest scholars and students alike, redefining the archive through which politics and cultural practices are studied. Tracing the fascinating ways in which the emergence of the masses in late-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires resignified symbolic and political interactions, Graciela Montaldo throws new light on canonical works in juxtaposition with forms of popular spectacle embodied in the circus and emerging forms of the culture industry such as early cinema, variety shows, and magisterial lectures managed by impresarios as new cultural agents. Her study of tango will become the essential source for an up-to-date understanding of upper-class consumption and appropriation of a plebeian cultural practice in which class, gender, and urban violence are conjoined. In a dazzling display of erudition, archival research, and theoretical sophistication, Graciela Montaldo redefines our understanding of urban culture, consumption, and taste as she probes the constitution of mass subjects at the intersection of varied experiences and practices." -Diana Sorensen, James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
"Museum of Consumption is not only an innovative reading of cultural practices, urban characters, and symbolic and political exchanges in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires but also an invitation - at times, a very thought-provoking one - to think about the beginnings of mass culture as a much earlier urban phenomenon than previous scholarship suggests. Examining the circus, tango, theater, radio broadcasting, and early cinema; the compadrito, the niño bien, and the prostitute; bad taste and social contamination, Montaldo delves with a fine critical gaze into an array of social processes saturated by unstable and changing cultural values." -Diego Armus, Professor of History, Swarthmore College