Broadcasting Modernity

Yeidy M. Rivero is Associate Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television, also published by Duke University Press.

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction. Broadcasting Modernity, Spectacles, and Television  11. Prelude to the Spectacles: Constituting a Modern Broadcasting System through the Law, 1923–1950  232. Spectacles of Progress: Technology, Expansion, and the Law  453. Spectacles of Decency: Morality as a Matter of the Industry and the State  754. Spectacles of Democracy and a Prelude to the Spectacles of Revolution  1025. Spectacles of Revolution: A Rebirth of Cubanness  1296. From Broadcasting Modernity to Constructing Modernity  163Epilogue  176Notes  181Bibliography  221Index  233

"Rivero has written an important book, rich with new information and original insight. It is a welcome addition to the expanding scholarship on Cuba media studies." - Louis A. Pérez Jr. (American Historical Review) "Yeidy M. Rivero’s work is an important contribution to the study of television, modernity, identity, and politics in the second half of the twentieth century in Latin America and the Caribbean.... [T]his is a book of impeccable quality whose content will generate great interest." - Fernando Purcell (Hispanic American Historical Review) "Yeidy M. Rivera's Broadcasting Modernity is a much-needed analysis of Latin American television during this time. The author's highly researched analysis provides a unique perspective on the development of Cuban television." - Nathan Widener (North Carolina Association of Historians) "Broadcasting Modernity is an important, well-written and researched book, highly recommended reading for Cuba and media scholars alike." - Christine Ehrick (Journal of Latin American Studies) "[Rivero's] well-grounded and theoretically sophisticated work raises crucial academic and political issues such as the corrosive effects of state censorship on cultural creativity; the competition between the commercial and educational functions of the mass media; and the ideological clashes among various sectors of the population as they seek to define and control the media." - Jorge Duany (Cuba Counterpoints) "A fascinating insight into the role of television in shaping Cuban identity and visions of modernity that offers a way to examine broader theoretical questions about how this medium functions in society during times of radical and social transformation." - Gavin O'Toole (Latin American Review of Books) "Rivero succeeds in developing a complex, fluid, and readable account of the emergence and evolution of television in Cuba in a time of huge political and social transformations without falling into generalization and political dogmatism. Broadcasting Modernity is about the interweaving of modernity and television, yet its reach goes beyond Cuba; it encourages the reader to reflect on how television is shaped by the outside world, but more significantly, how it served (and still does in certain parts of the world) to stage our everyday life." - Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (Canadian Journal of History) "Yeidy Rivero’s work is a bold and penetrating examination of the phenomenon of television and its transformative social and political role in Cuba. . . . Broadcasting Modernity fills a hole in not only the historiography of the role of television in Latin America and the world, but in the historical analysis of the Cuban Revolution itself." - Eric Walls (JHistory, H-Net Reviews)