Exporting tears and fantasies of (under) development: popular television genres, globalization and nationalism in Mexico after World War II

Unrestricted The focus of this dissertation primarily consists of studying popular Mexican television programming that developed shortly after the introduction of television in that country, primarily telenovelas and sitcoms and the ways in which they mediate global politics. Of particular interest is how an engagement with these forms allows for a greater understanding of a host of cultural anxieties in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, an era intricately bound up with broad networks of globalization and a rhetoric of "development".; Issues of class, gender and race are important axes and nodal points along these vectors of change, and attention is placed here in order to discern the complex and uneven way in which processes of globalization register in the national consciousness of those nations that have been imagined to be in a perpetual state of development. There are important gender and generational dimensions to developmental logic that render Latin America as inferior to the US. This is why this project emphasizes a particular genre of telenovelas referred to as " Cinderella" stories that have been successful throughout Latin America and around the globe. The innocent, noble and "savage " girl that is at the center of these narratives articulates what is implicit in official narratives of economic growth and progress by foregrounding the feminization and infatilization of Latin America. Contemporary programming strategies that attempt to adapt the telenovela in the US are discussed as a way to demonstrate how such narratives of development continue to shape our understanding of global television format exchanges today.; Given the importance of the New Latin American cinema for "world" film studies in the US, this dissertation argues that these very same feelings facilitated the formulation and the embrace of a militant cinema as a way to fight imperialism. A transmedia and transgeneric approach is deployed as a way to explore the ways in which Latin American people are infantilized in Mexican television comedies of the same period and the militant masculinity of the New Latin American cinema that are imagined to respond to this oppressive, feminized, and infantilized state of underdevelopment.