Camilo Diaz Pino

Amid a rapidly growing wave of anti-neoliberal protest emerging in late 2019, Chile's government scrambled to respond to the massive scale of this dissidence by attempting to find some external agent to pin the blame on. Initially seeking evidence of Venezuelan or Russian involvement, the state eventually pinned the blame on K-pop as an agent of "social rupture." This article examines this framing of K-pop by Chilean authorities and what this says about the position of Korean media's integration into a Latin American pop-culture landscape that is growing ever more globalized and non-Western. It likewise examines the contestatory embracing of K-pop by Chilean antineoliberal activists, their broader integration of globalized cultural objects, and how this reflects on wider current anti-neoliberal activist cultures operating in the Global South.

Amid a global cultural landscape defined both by the ambiguities of deterritorialization and the persistent impact of established geopolitical hierarchies, the idea of cultural reflux offers a potent tool to conceptualize and lend context to the study of nascent peripheral and semiperipheral media industries. Dialoguing with Thussu and Iwabuchi's work on media flow as well as Curtin's concept of media capitals, this article proposes to analyze " mockbusters " : derivative copies of established metropolitan media properties. I specifically look at the output of the Brazilian studio Video Brinquedo, infamous in the 2000s for its blatant, low-quality copies of established children's media properties. In examining the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) mockbuster as a case study of opportunistic media counterflow, the idea of cultural reflux complicates debates over where we should situate our analytical objectives with respect to mediatic peripherality, and how we can more concretely examine the relationship of media flow to transnational imperial frameworks. The advent of new pathways and platforms of digital and transnational media circulation has created a rupture in established hierarchies of mediatic production, access, and gatekeeping. While at once driven by and benefiting several entrenched commercial

This article discusses exoticism and self-exoticism in the representation of pre-revolutionary Cuban musicianship in two animated films: the 2010 Spanish/British co-production Chico and Rita and the 1985 Cuban film, Vampiros en la Habana. Within the similarly constructed animated archetypes on display, these films generate vastly different discursive outputs. Both texts are more interested in musicians as mythical figures than as comprehensive subjects, but where the mythology of Vampiros offers a dissenting, self-defined cultural identity, that of Chico and Rita employs a mythology of Otherness to reaffirm the cultural protagonism and hegemony of Euro- centric discourses. Although these films engage with similar archetypes, localities and representations of the exotic, the ways in which they do so evidence disparities in terms of intended audience, artistic intent, relationship to Cuba’s revolutionary project, and perspective towards Cuba’s cultural identity—all within the highly flexible, but highly codified and stigmatized, medium of animation.

This article proposes to discuss the portrayal of popular music in comics both as a factor of semiological constructions of sensory experience, as well as a as a narrative element tying transnational comic cultures to notions of social identity and labour. To this end, it focuses on the Japanese serialised manga BECK (Harold Sakuishi, 2000-2008) and the Canadian graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim (Bryan O’Malley, 2004-2010). These two works offer comparable perspectives on music and the social mythos of musicianship, as well as sharing similar young male protagonists and social contexts, despite their disparate settings in Tokyo and Toronto, respectively. Through a comparative reading of these texts, this analysis examines contemporary comic book techniques as well as the cross-cultural dynamics of Japanese and Anglo-American comic book cultures, specifically with regard to the portrayal of workers in fields of cultural production.
this study draws predominantly on the canon of semiotic analysis established by Scott McCloud to examine the techniques employed by these texts in communicating music as an emotive sensorial experience. In particular, I concentrate on their use of diagrammatic techniques and visual caricature as a means of communicating music —not through attempted sinaesthetic effects as may be expected, but rather through evocative intertextuality and the depiction of character’s emotive responses to sensorial experiences. In the second section, I tie the representation of music in these texts more widely to notions of musicianship as an area through which the mythology of artistic entrepreneurialism coexists with imperatives of collective identity. Here, I examine the cultural idiosyncrasies through which these comics reflect and construct upon these mythologies through filters of class, cultural and generational identity, creating narratives that at times perpetuate —and at others subvert— the grand entrepreneurial narratives ascribed to musicianship within contemporary neoliberal notions of creative labour.