This book is in the Cambria Latin American Literatures and Cultures Series headed by Román de la Campa, the Edwin B. and Lenore R. Williams Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania.

*Includes images.

In her groundbreaking book, Graciela Montaldo uses an innovative approach to understand the beginnings of mass culture and mass cultural experiences. Taking Argentina as a case study, she begins at the turn of the nineteenth century when Argentina underwent accelerated modernization and examines a variety of phenomena that combines modern forms of access to public space with the creation of new cultural content. This was the period of democratic political reforms, urban redesign, rise of immigration rates, economic growth, and articulation of nationalist ideologies. Culture—elite, popular, and mass—played a major role in deep social and political transformations. Profoundly affecting social life were new phenomena such as popular spectacles, mass consumption, variety shows, theatres, the circus as well as the connections between these forms and the avant-garde of the 1920s.

The study shows how, coincidentally, the appearance and success of tango music and dancing, and the relationship between tango and masculine violence, and the political violence of the early twentieth century are interconnected. Tango, a cultural export to Europe and the United States, played a central function in redefining gender and class roles. With thorough explications of the notions of “good taste” and “poor taste” as cultural and political experiences that define citizenship through fashion, the role of aesthetics in social life, and the dissemination of scientific and sociological knowledges, Montaldo reveals a complex scale of cultural practices.

Museum of Consumption holds important global lessons, for it not only examines the tensions of modern culture subject to the pressures of the market and politics but also traces the emergence of a cultural scene that constructed a frontier between elite and mass cultures during the modernization process. In the case of Argentina, Montaldo notes that this was a highly porous frontier: the reduced size of the cultural field meant that the same actors worked on both sides. One might assume that the lower rungs of society would imitate elite culture, but this book argues that the opposite was the case, showing how plebeian productions impacted and radically transformed lettered culture.

Museum of Consumption, therefore, takes a novel approach, viewing mass culture not as a series of case studies but rather as processes of cultural production and circulation, using tango, circus, and fashion productions to illustrate these. This study applies numerous theories, such as theory of the masses and theories of spectacle, and lies at the intersection of various studies, including of consumer culture, modernity and modernism, intellectual history, and gender studies. Its coverage includes memoirs, chronicles, testimonies, essays, and fictions, all of which it places in dialogue with canonical texts; the book also includes images.

Museum of Consumption: The Archives of Mass Culture in Argentina (1880–1930) is an important transdisciplinary book for Latin American cultural studies and history collections.