Matthew B. Karush's Culture of Class adds an indispensable building block to expanding the studies of the 1920s and 1930s in Argentina. A period bracketed between the emergence of a combative labour movement at the turn of the twentieth century and the advent of Peronism in the 1940s, most scholars interested in the popular classes conceived of the 1920s and 1930s as times of vanishing class consciousness, a process echoed in the concurrent spread of a desire for upward social mobility and of a seemingly escapist mass culture. Karush tells a different story: he shows how mass culture helped to reconfigure (rather than to blur) class identities and to produce a powerful representation of a society deeply polarised in terms of class.

Karush explains the socio-political role of mass culture using two main theses. First, he argues that the ‘classism’ and ‘populism’ permeating mass-culture products were less the result of an ideological project than of the ways in which the domestic cultural producers competed in a transnational marketplace. Mass-culture producers appropriated genres and technical forms associated with a transnational modernity and tried to combine them with purportedly ‘authentic’ elements, producing what Karush labels ‘alternative modernity.’ Authenticity was, if anything, class-inflected: the moral and noble poor came to better represent the ‘authentic’ nation than the greedy rich. Second, Karush understands that those representations prefigured the language and provided the ‘raw materials’ to explain Peronism's attractiveness and contradictions.

Written with admirable prose, the book is divided into five chapters. The first chapter explores the social and cultural transformations represented in the new barrios in Buenos Aires – the geographical focus of the book. Mass-culture producers, Karush suggests, appealed to the socially heterogeneous inhabitants of the barrios and dealt with their concurrent desire for upward mobility and working-class pride. Although credible, the description of barrio culture does not suffice to delineate a map of the audiences, their social and demographic variations, and their cultural competence. In any case, the picture of the audiences pales in comparison to Karush's superb reconstruction of the trajectories of mass-culture producers, which is the main theme addressed in the second – and, in my opinion, best – chapter. Karush clearly points out that the technical, stylistic and marketing novelties being created at the time were linked increasingly with the United States, while he skilfully shows how a handful of local impresarios were propelling domestic mass culture. In shaping and satisfying local audiences, recording producer Max Glücksmann, radio impresario Jaime Yanquelevich and film-maker Atilio Mentasti, among others, helped configure an ‘alternative modernity’ tensioned between the allure of the modern and the appeal of tradition, or authenticity. For example, regardless of the attempts to sanitise tango of its ‘plebeian’ origins and associate it with modern musical forms such as jazz, composers, recorders and performers ultimately needed the connections with the popular in order to validate their own cultural production. Moving from producers to products, the third chapter explores the ‘populist melodrama’. Challenging its associations with cultural conservatism, the author draws on Peter Brook's classic study to argue that melodrama enabled workers to cope with the dislocations of modernity. Tango lyrics and movies created clear-cut, moralistic and fatalistic representations of the social world whereby the poor could either ‘fall’ into a world of treachery in their attempts to move upward or remain poor yet preserving the virtues of the entire nation. That ‘radical melodramatic populism’, in Karush's view, distinguished the Argentine version of melodrama. At this point, however, this reader wondered why the comparative scope only involved Hollywood and not other ‘melodramatic mass-cultures’ such as Mexico's.

In the last two chapters Karush develops an interpretation of the political dimensions of mass culture, which will surely encourage further debate. The fourth chapter stresses the apparent impossibility of mass culture representing a unified nation. For example, the author explores the advent of the vindication of the rural interior, a turn that came at the expense of deepening the city-versus-countryside divide. More problematically, though, Karush posits that the narrative identification with the poor proposed in myriad films precluded any possibility of representing class and ultimately national harmonisation. By comparing Manuel Romero's comedy La rubia del camino (1938) with its model, Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), for instance, Karush suggests that the Argentine version not only stressed class difference but also made the character of the rich woman undergo a rebirth in order to be able to reach a happy end: marriage with the poor worker. Doubtless, this is a plausible reading and one that Karush extends to his selective corpus of films (unfortunately, he does not explain the rationale of his selection). In fact, one might list at least five other major films of the late 1930s and early 1940s (including Romero's Elvira Fernández and Luis C. Amadori's La canción de los barrios) in which their narrative resolution – class harmony through interclass marriage – was based on the transformations of both sides rather than those of the rich alone. In any case, representations of class harmony were as common as representations of class difference and polarisation, to the point that they coincided in the same products. And Peronism was one ‘product’ of a melodramatic mass culture, as Karush dazzlingly shows in the fifth chapter. Among the many links between Peronism and mass culture, Karush points out the fact that ‘Perón's messages resonated with the expectations and assumptions of workers who were long-time consumers of domestic radio programs and movies’ (p. 179). Perón worked within a world view generated amidst mass culture and, as Karush shows, his version of ‘political populism’ helped solve some of the contradictions of the ‘melodramatic populism’: through their inclusion in the new movement, for example, workers might legitimately combine their desire for upward mobility with their class pride. Moreover, Perón's calls for national unity coexisted with the reinforcement of a class-based language to represent and address the nation.

Karush's book is a key contribution to the analysis of the deep connections between mass culture and politics in the contexts of Latin American ‘alternative modernity’ at large. To Argentine historiography, it adds a refreshing culturalist view of long-running discussions about the origins of Peronism and, more prominently, it helps expand decisively our knowledge of the heterogeneous popular classes through the lens of their cultural consumptions.