MODERNIZATION AND VISUAL ECONOMY: FILM, PHOTOJOURNALISM, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN BRAZIL AND ARGENTINA, 1955-1980

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dc.contributor.advisorWeinstein, Barbaraen_US
dc.contributor.authorHalperin, Paulaen_US
dc.contributor.departmentHistoryen_US
dc.contributor.publisherDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_US
dc.contributor.publisherUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.)en_US
dc.date.accessioned2010-10-07T06:15:18Z
dc.date.available2010-10-07T06:15:18Z
dc.date.issued2010en_US
dc.description.abstractThis dissertation explores the relationship among visual culture, nationalism, and modernization in Argentina and Brazil in a period of extreme political instability, marked by an alternation of weak civilian governments and dictatorships. I argue that motion pictures and photojournalism were constitutive elements of a modern public sphere that did not conform to the classic formulation advanced by Jürgen Habermas. Rather than treating the public sphere as progressively degraded by the mass media and cultural industries, I trace how, in postwar Argentina and Brazil, the increased production and circulation of mass media images contributed to active public debate and civic participation. With the progressive internationalization of entertainment markets that began in the 1950s in the modern cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires there was a dramatic growth in the number of film spectators and production, movie theaters and critics, popular magazines and academic journals that focused on film. Through close analysis of images distributed widely in international media circuits I reconstruct and analyze Brazilian and Argentine postwar visual economies from a transnational perspective to understand the constitution of the public sphere and how modernization, Latin American identity, nationhood, and socio-cultural change and conflict were represented and debated in those media. Cinema and the visual after World War II became a worldwide locus of production and circulation of discourses about history, national identity, and social mores, and a space of contention and discussion of modernization. Developments such as the Bandung Conference in 1955, the decolonization of Africa, the Cuban Revolution, together with the uneven impact of modernization, created a "Third Worldism" and "Latin Americanism" that transformed public debate and the cultural field. By researching "peripheral" nations, I add to our understanding of the process of the transnationalization of the cultural field and the emergence of a global mass culture in the 1960s and 1970s.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/10969
dc.subject.pqcontrolledHistory, Latin Americanen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledCinemaen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledLatin American Studiesen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledArgentinaen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledBrazilen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledCultural Historyen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledLatin American Filmen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledPublic Sphereen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledVisual Economyen_US
dc.titleMODERNIZATION AND VISUAL ECONOMY: FILM, PHOTOJOURNALISM, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN BRAZIL AND ARGENTINA, 1955-1980en_US
dc.typeDissertationen_US

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