Modernization, Nation-Building, and Television History

This innovative collection investigates the ways in which television programs around the world have highlighted modernization and encouraged nation-building. It is an attempt to catalogue and better understand the contours of this phenomenon, which took place as television developed and expanded in different parts of the world between the 1950s and the 1990s. From popular science and adult education shows to news magazines and television plays, few themes so thoroughly penetrated the small screen for so many years as modernization, with television producers and state authorities using television programs to bolster modernization efforts. Contributors analyze the hallmarks of these media efforts: nation-building, consumerism and consumer culture, the education and integration of citizens, and the glorification of the nation’s technological achievements.

Introduction Stewart Anderson and Melissa Chakars 1. The Opening Ceremonies of Television in Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Argentina Mirta Varela 2. Modernity as "Urbanity" in Early Public Service Broadcasting: The Case of Flanders Hilde Van den Bulck 3. Pro Wrestling and Crying Cowboys: American Influence on Early Japanese Television Jayson Makoto Chun 4. The Tightrope between East and West: East German Television Fiction from the 1960s and the Representation of a Socialist Modernity Stewart Anderson 5. Television Changing Habits: TV Programming in 1960s Soviet Latvia Sergei Kruk 6. Ethiopian Television Service as a Mosaic Modernity Project, 1964-1974 Amanuel Gebru 7. A Lachrymose Heroine for the Masses: The Origins of the Cinderella Plotline in Mexican Telenovelas, 1968-1973 Melixa Abad-Izquierdo 8. Flowers, Steppe Fires, and Communists: Images of Modernity and Identity on TV Shows from Soviet Buryatia in the Brezhnev Era Melissa Chakars 9. "Blue and White" Science and Technology: Nationality and Popular Science on Israeli Television, 1968-1988 Merav Katz-Kimchi 10. From "The Devil in the Black Box" to a Nation-Building Tool: Early TV in South Africa—A New Medium for a New Nation Kristin Skare Orgeret

Stewart Anderson is Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University. He has research interests in German history and collective memory. His recent publications include articles for the Journal of European Television History and Culture and Memory Studies, as well as a chapter on German television, ethics, and the evolution of Holocaust memory. Melissa Chakars is Assistant Professor of Russian and Soviet history at Saint Joseph’s University. Her publications include The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: The Buryat Transformation and several articles on empire, identity, and gender in the Soviet Union with a focus on Siberia.