Lucero

In Culture of Class, Matthew B. Karush, an associate professor of history at George Mason University, posits that American mass culture commodities shaped Argentina’s domestic cultural production in crucial ways in the 1920s and 1930s. Movies, recordings, and radio programs reveal how Argentine capitalists seeking to turn a profit tried to elevate their offerings to appeal to consumers seduced by North American modernity—mainly represented in Hollywood cinema and jazz. Karush states that in Argentina, influence of and comparison with US cultural production was a crucial factor in the construction of national mythmaking via film and radio. Exposing the population to a common national culture produced in Buenos Aires had, as a result, a paradoxical society characterized by ethnic integration, a decline of orthodox left-wing ideologies, but also a society that contained the seeds of the Perón populist explosion and the class-based polarization that followed. The book reassesses 1920s and 1930s mass culture in order to understand this paradox, considering forms of “mass cultural melodrama” that appealed at the same time to class pride and class envy, “encouraging viewers to look down on the rich even as they fantasized about being rich” (132). Karush stresses that the cultural production he examines constructed an image of Argentina that did not accurately reflect reality, and yet contributed to the construction of a “divided Argentina,” as his title suggests.