Post-popular Cultures in Post-populist Times: The Return of Pop Culture in Latin American Social Sciences

Abstract

As we have argued in various works (Alabarces, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2013),the study of Latin American popular cultures was marginalized during theneo-liberal decade. This was a period in which the impoverishment, socialfragmentation, and exclusion that closed the twentieth-century on our continent,were further consolidated with the legitimization of allegedly democraticprocesses. A corollary of that movement was the expulsion of popularcultures from research agendas, dissolved instead into categories that claimedto be more appropriate and suitable for analysis during times of transformation:hybridization, ?descolección? and deterritorialization, each of whichgained popularity both in the publishing and academic markets. However,twenty years later, we are witnessing both a process of the re-opening of thoseagendas and the re-appearance of displaced categories and subjects. The newpolitical success of the national-popular narratives, for example, in spite of the criticism which they deserve, speaks more of continuities and, again, returns, rather than dissolutions and closures.The popular cultures which disappeared in the nineteen-nineties reappearin the new century because they never went away. Although invested withnew robes and including innovative practices and unstable and mobile texts,the popular cultures continue to function as signposts, revealing the degreeto which the possibility of a democratic culture is negotiated, discussed anddisputed?and, by extension, the possibility a fully and radically democraticsociety.