Gran Bretaña

This thesis examines Néstor García Canclini ́s relationships with various non-academic institutions in Latin America (focusing on Mexico) during the 1990s and the 2000s. It emphasises the shortage of communication between scholars and non-academic policy-making institutions through its study of García Canclini ́s cultural policy activism. By investigating García Canclini’s activities with various Latin American non-academic institutions (and particularly those from Mexico), this thesis argues that he not only conceptualises and proposes cultural policy; he also conducts cultural policy. Through his discussion of cultural issues with bureaucrats, legislators, policy-makers, politicians, private managers and newspaper editors, this thesis evaluates his most important engagements to present how cultural policy can move from being an institutionally oriented instrument to an intellectually-oriented operation.

USA

The present dissertation is concerned with a set of art and literary practices from the Latin American avant - garde conversant with the technologies, the techniques of display, and the social and symbolic dynamics that vector into and out of advertising. Drawing on a set of paradigmatic avant - garde works from Mexico and Brazil, it posits sense perception and sensory experience as contested grounds within which viewing and reading postures can be steered towards critical consciousness even as they are subjected to coercion and control. These works, by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, Brazilian concrete poets Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari (collectively known as the Noigandres poets), and Mexican poet and writer Octavio Paz, function and signify under the two - pronged conviction that mass media (film, photography, newspapers, radio, television) and mass culture (mostly advertising and forms of advertising: billboards, logos, slogans, etc.) reconfigure conditions of reading and spectatorship in modern urban environments, and insist that it is the task of the writer and artist to intervene the dynamics under which this reconfiguration takes place.