Promotional Information

Following the mass arrival of European immigrants to Argentina in the early years of the twentieth century new forms of entertainment emerged including tango, films, radio and theater. While these forms of culture promoted ethnic integration they also produced a new kind of polarization that helped Juan Peron to build the mass movement that propelled him to power.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Class Formation in the Barrios 19
2. Competing in the Transnational Marketplace 43
3. Repackaging Popular Melodrama 85
4. Mass-Cultural Nation Building 133
5. Politicizing Populism 177
Epilogue: The Rise of the Middle Class, 1955–1976 215
Notes 225
Bibliography 251
Index 269

About the Author

Matthew B. Karush is Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. He is the author of Workers or Citizens: Democracy and Identity in Rosario, Argentina (1912–1930) and a co-editor of The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"This is an extremely important study. Matthew B. Karush succeeds in weaving together research on working class origins of populism, commoners' understandings of consumption, and the representations of social roles on the big screen and over the airwaves in a way that transforms the way we think about private lives and political conflict. Class identities, argues Karush, were central to Argentina's deep changes in the lead up to Peron's triumph. Tracking the fascinating evolution of film and radio gives us a whole new way to think about how culture, politics, and market life intersected to remap Argentine society. Karush has written a tremendous book." Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University "In Culture of Class, Matthew B. Karush provides a new cultural history of interwar Argentina and the origins of Peronism. His point of departure is the proliferation of new forms of popular mass media, which he argues simultaneously intensified class conflict and bolstered populist forms of respectability. Karush also shows how the popular mass media enabled the peripheral 'modernization' of Argentine national culture. He has written an outstanding book." Federico Finchelstein, author of Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945