Transmission Processes in Popular Culture: Recontextualization and Resemiotization in Music

Abstract

Popular culture is an archive of cultural memory (Sobral, 2010). Youths’ active engagement with popular culture provides a space to observe intergenerational transmission processes in action. Cultural memory is constructed through the mnemonic activities of social groups such as the family, peers, and cultural-political communities. These sociocultural activities are embodied in artifacts of memory as art, songs, and literary texts. These sites of memory create an opportunity to fill the gaps that separate one generation from the next, constructing continuity through identity (Nora, 1989). Generational memory is constructed through participation in and engagement with sites of memory. In this chapter, we explore a representative cultural product related to the Uruguayan dictatorship and its recontextualizations. The processes of recontextualization (Bernstein, 2000) for cultural products and their resignification by youth are spaces of transmission.

This chapter is based on a previous article written in collaboration with Amparo Fernández and Nicolás Morales in 2014, La dictadura uruguaya en la cultura popular: recontextualizaciones de “A Redoblar” [The Uruguayan dictatorship in popular culture: recontextualizations of “A Redoblar”], in a special issue on recontextualizations of the recent past edited by Mariana Achugar and Teresa Oteíza. Discurso y Sociedad, 8 (1): 83–108.