“Lo popular”/Popular Culture: Performing the Borders of Power and Resistance

Abstract

The concept of “lo popular” (the popular) is perhaps one of the most challenging notions to define within Latin American Cultural Studies and Cultural Studies at large. This is because the idea of popular culture is evoked in a diverse and heterogeneous set of ideologies and understandings of the cultural. At times, “popular culture” has been defined in an oppositional manner, as everything that does not achieve the status of so-called lettered or high culture. In some understandings, “popular culture” is bound to standards of authenticity related with definitions of national, social, ethnic, or class identity. In some others, as Raymond Williams (1983, 237) reminds us in his Keywords, the very notion of the popular carries two older meanings that are typically understood as negative: an excessive pandering to the audience (due to its connection to popularity) or aesthetic inferiority (as it lacks the “distinction” conferred to elite forms of art and culture). Even though these last definitions have lost credibility thanks to the way in which the disciplines associated with cultural studies have transformed the idea of popular culture into a recognized and important object of study for scholars, it remains difficult to deploy the notion in critical discourse without invoking questions of social class or a value judgment (positive or negative) regarding its quality or intellectual merit.