Nick Morgan (SML): Telenovela noir in Latin America
SML Research Seminar Series
Location: Research Beehive 2.20, Old Library Building
Time/Date: 1st March 2012, 16:00 - 17:00
Now online: ReCap ReCapof the lecture
Telenovelas continue to be one of the most important products of the culture industry in Colombia, beating off the challenge of los realities in the early 2000s to remain at the top of the ratings. This was partly due to the emergence of a new kind of melodrama, the narconovela, which used the backdrop of Colombia’s cocaine trade to tell violent stories of poverty, crime and corruption in high places. Critics, especially in the country’s agenda setting media, attacked these series for presenting a distorted and degrading image of society, and the widespread fascination with their sensationalist story lines was interpreted as confirming a general decline in “public values”. While this minor moral panic had no impact on the popularity of the narconovela it did focus attention on the continuing fascination with the form, raising questions which recur whenever critical interest in telenovelas is rekindled. In methodological terms, how might this form of cultural production best be approached? How and why do these narratives connect so powerfully with popular desire? And what, if anything, does the emergence of a new subgenre tell us about shifts taking place in the political subjectivity of the telenovela audience?
My paper approaches these issues through the lens of Jesús Martín-Barbero’s pioneering work in the 80s and 90s. This was articulated in the light of an understanding of hegemony theory that emphasised the socio-cultural, political and aesthetic mediations which influence the telenovela form. Here I reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, including the suggestion that neo-Gramscian thought can only produce “populist” understandings of cultural production and therefore only appears to help explain the relationship between political domination and the cultural field (Jon Beasley-Murray). In an attempt to grasp the range of social meanings produced by these fictions I also consider the problems raised by the aesthetic conventions of the genre, especially the relationship between melodrama and realism, using film noir as a comparative example of how melodramatic narratives can contain significant forms of social criticism.Published: 13th January 2012