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In the years since his death in 1993, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has become a globally recognized symbol of crime, wealth, power, and masculinity. In this long-overdue exploration of Escobar’s impact on popular culture, Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky shows how his legacy inspired the development of narcoculture—television, music, literature, and fashion representing the drug-trafficking lifestyle—in Colombia and around the world. Pobutsky looks at the ways the “Escobar brand” surfaces in bars, restaurants, and clothing lines; in Colombia’s tourist industry; and in telenovelas, documentaries, and narco memoirs about his life, which in turn have generated popular interest in other drug traffickers such as Griselda Blanco and Miami’s “cocaine cowboys.” Pobutsky illustrates how the Colombian state strives to erase his memory while Escobar’s notoriety only continues to increase in popular culture through the transnational media. She argues that the image of Escobar is inextricably linked to Colombia’s internal tensions in the areas of cocaine politics, gender relations, class divisions, and political corruption and that his “brand” perpetuates the country’s reputation as a center of organized crime, to the dismay of the Colombian people. This book is a fascinating study of how the world perceives Colombia and how Colombia’s citizens understand their nation’s past and present.

In this book, Eli Carter explores the ways in which the movement away from historically popular telenovelas toward new television and internet series is creating dramatic shifts in how Brazil imagines itself as a nation, especially within the context of an increasingly connected global mediascape. For more than half a century, South America’s largest over-the-air network, TV Globo, produced long-form melodramatic serials that cultivated the notion of the urban, upper-middle-class white Brazilian. Carter looks at how the expansion of internet access, the popularity of web series, the rise of independent production companies, and new legislation not only challenged TV Globo’s market domination but also began to change the face of Brazil’s growing audiovisual landscape. Combining sociohistorical, economic, and legal contextualization with close readings of audiovisual productions, Carter argues that a fragmented media has opened the door to new voices and narratives that represent a more diverse Brazilian identity.