Jean Franco’s work as a pathbreaking theorist, cultural critic, and scholar has helped to define Latin American studies over the last three decades. In the process, Franco has played a crucial role in developing cultural studies in both the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds. Critical Passions is the first volume to gather a wide-ranging selection of Franco’s influential essays. A key participant in the major debates in Latin American studies—beginning with the “boom” period of the 1960s and continuing through debates on ideology and discourse, Marxism, mass culture, and postmodernism—Franco is recognized for her feminist critique of Latin American writing. While her principal books are all readily available, Franco’s several dozen articles are dispersed in a variety of periodicals in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Although many of these essays are considered pioneering and classic, they have never before been collected in a single work. In this volume, Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman have organized the essays into four interrelated sections: feminism and the critique of authoritarianism, mass and popular culture, Latin American literature from the “boom” onward, and the cultural history of Mexico. As a group, these writings demonstrate Franco’s ability to reflect on and judge with equal seriousness all spheres of expression, whether subway graffiti, a fashion manual, or an avant-garde haiku. A bona fide fan of popular and mass media, Franco never allows her critiques to dissolve into the puritanical or reductive; instead, she finds ways to present and debate complex theoretical questions in direct and accessible language. This volume will draw an extensive readership in Latin American, cultural, and women’s studies.

"Irate listeners attacking anti-union advertisers, boycotts of soap operas, a bitter ex-federal official who took up the cause of consumers--Newman brings us all of this and more, revealing in her stunning new book how twentieth-century consumers--especially women--contested commercial radio in its glory years. With tremendous clarity and analytical sophistication, she shows that far from 'duped consumers, ' radio listeners were savvy, sassy, and effective activists who talked back plenty to commercial radio. Analyzing the dynamics of as a contested zone between listeners, advertisers, radio stations, and new consumer intellectuals, Newman deftly and persuasively reframes our understanding of the cultural politics of consumption."--Dana Frank, author of "Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism

"Cultural historians often claim that audiences were far from passive victims of mass media manipulation, but Kathy Newman is among the first to reveal how ordinary people actually responded. Focusing on the major mass medium of the 1930s and 1940s, the radio, Newman brilliantly tracks the dialectical process through which audience attention became a commodity that broadcasters set out to sell to sponsors and then how listeners, often women, turned their new-found importance to their own ends as assertive consumers. This is cultural history at its best, bringing together as it does the influence of intellectuals, the workings of cultural institutions, and the reactions of popular audiences."--Lizabeth Cohen, author of "A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

"Lively and accessible, Newman's fascinating account of the characters and concernsbehind anti-commercial activism illuminates an overlooked facet of radio history. Her cast of middle class reformers who used radio's own commercialized address to mobilize the consumer movement reminds us of advertising's complex and contested relationship to twentieth-century American culture, and points towards the same forces at work today, now on a global scale."--Michele Hilmes, co-editor of "Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio

"An important contribution. . . . More than any other work to date, Newman deconstructs 'the' radio audience and demonstrates how this often-referred-to singular entity was really a heterogeneous body with multiple forms, faces, and concerns. She shows how radio listeners used information they learned on air to launch social movements that had broad economic and political consequences in American society."--Steven J. Ross, author of "Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America