Since the 1980s, Latin America has repeatedly been roiled by financial crises, from the Mexican debt shock of 1982 to the same country's peso crisis of 1994 and from the Argentine collapse of 2001 to Brazil's downward lurch in 2014. Yet while the political, economic, and social effects of these crises have been charted by scholars in a range of fields, their cultural impact has received less attention to date. Brian Whitener's Crisis Cultures argues that in the past three decades, finance has played a central role in forging a new cultural sensibility in Mexico and Brazil. Through readings of literature, nonfiction, films, and television programs, Whitener charts the rise (or return to prominence) of a series of cultural forms and discursive figures: the idea of “credit democracy” in Brazil or the trope of “delinquency” in Mexico, for example. Whitener argues that such cultural shifts, though often framed as products...

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