Radio history is an emerging and dynamic field of inquiry, addressing important gaps in media and cultural history as well as broadening our understanding of what Ana Ochoa Gautier calls “the aural public sphere.” While much of this scholarship to date has focused on broadcasting in the United States and Western Europe, we can now add Lauren Rea's Argentine Serialised Radio Drama in the Infamous Decade, 1930–1943 to the list of historical monographs on radio in Latin America. This book significantly deepens our understanding of the way radio intersected with its local environment and underscores radio's role in shaping “imagined communities” in the mid-twentieth century. Scholars of twentieth-century Argentine cultural history, and those interested in Latin American radio generally, will find much of value and interest here.
Argentine Serialised Radio Drama focuses on three important radio productions from the early 1930s through the early 1940s: Chispazos de tradición, Bajo...