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Cold War Toys examines playthings manufactured, promoted and commercialised in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay during the second half of the twentieth century. Establishing connections and conversations with toys produced in earlier periods, including nineteenth-century dollhouses and building blocks created in the 1920s by Joaquín Torres-García, it goes on to analyse, among other items, scale-model household appliances distributed by the Eva Perón Foundation, construction sets made in 1970s Chile during Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, and more recent figurines such as the Latin American versions of G.I. Joe and Latin Barbie dolls. The book approaches toys as dispositifs – cultural formations that condense the discourses, institutions, architectural forms, scientific statements and philosophical propositions of Latin America’s Cold War. Drawing on a rich compendium of objects, many inspired by European or US brands, it shows how South American toys incorporated local characters, designs, messages and materials through a process of creative adaptation, thereby acquiring new identities. These and other original artefacts are examined variously as commodities from a once-flourishing industry, as works of art, originators of cultural myths and as training tools for Cold War childhoods. ’Toys are also seen as undervalued expressions of children’s material culture, imbued with the collective memory of a turbulent and contested era.
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Keywords
- Argentina
- Building blocks.
- Chile
- Cold War
- Dictatorship
- miniatures
- Peronism
- Play
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCC Cultural studies::JBCC2 Material culture
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JH Sociology and anthropology::JHM Anthropology::JHMC Social and cultural anthropology
- thema EDItEUR::N History and Archaeology::NH History::NHK History of the Americas
- Toys
- Uruguay
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