Neo-anachronism? The coiled temporalities of South-South media flows

Abstract

This article mobilizes Jesus Martín Barbero’s magnum opus, Communication, Culture, and Hegemony, towards a better understanding of the contemporary global success of Turkish television drama, known as dizi, in Latin America, the land of the once-mighty telenovela. Hilighting Martín-Barbero’s centrality to my own intellectual project on the transnational connection and transcultural resonances between the Middle East and Latin America, I draw on preliminary fieldwork in Argentina and Mexico, where Turkish dizi have been hits, to revisit Martín-Barbero’s pivotal conceptualization of mediaciones and accounts for forces of global media competition, aesthetic mimicry, and the fundamental problematic of South-to-South relations that got a new lease on life with the success of dizi in Latin America. Ultimately, I probe Martín-Barbero’s “precious anachronism” to elaborate a notion of “coiled temporality” that emerges between different geocultural zones through the consumption of narrative television fiction.