Abstract
The originality and theoretical breath of its approach sets this book apart from the myriad cultural studies that have as their point of departure an object preconceived as 'cultural' (high or low, artistic, social, performative, etc.), and reads in this object the social forces that it echoes, and/or the problems that it reveals vis-à-vis the era or the context in which it intervenes. Besides representing a fundamental reading of what 'culture' stands for nowadays, Yudice's theoretical stance is devised to provide a way out of the confusion that afflicts certain sectors of the humanities, torn between the paradoxical diagnoses of culture as both devalued and omnipresent. The sites of these negotiations are predominantly national, although the forces are global. [...]the interventions through which these actors gain power or agency required a self-reflective mapping of the forces at work. [...]one of Yúdice's main conceptual tools is an understanding of both governmentality and resistance in terms of performance, mainly following Judith Butler's elaboration. The case of funk music in Rio de Janeiro allows Yudice to show how a cultural emergent (with no explicit political agenda) challenges the elitism implicit in national popular culture, how this emergence announces the rise of new social actors, and how the public sphere is the stage of a re-articulation of forces under the pressure of this new visibility.