Rachel I. P. Lears

This dissertation focuses ethnographically upon the first generation of young Uruguayan musicians to come of age alongside digital media, exploring how the visual culture of popular music harnesses social meaning by indexing and constructing space, time, affect, and knowledge. Tracing how these artists negotiate political subjectivity, cultural memory, and collective identification, this project opens windows onto broader social conflicts surrounding the role of music in the “post-liberal” terrain of contemporary Latin American politics; the social practices through which cultural producers position themselves vis-à-vis the state and the market in a small country in the Global South in the twenty-first century; and the effects of digital multimedia upon epistemologies of musical knowledge.