The goal of this seminar is to provide a forum in which to discuss how TV shows (reality shows, true crime shows, documentary broadcasts, docufictions, and web series) bridge the gap between factual knowledge and myths, and how it facilitates the transfer of ordinary knowledge into the implausible, especially in Iberia and Latin America. Entertainment business and journalism intertwine to engage an audience oriented to the consumption of serialized narratives. Contemporary TV shows balance and negotiate the space delimited by the quotidian events and the supernatural occurrences forcing the plot and the characters, as well as the narrative and aesthetic to fit into specific tropes and storylines into a new hyperreal and self-conscious version of contemporary society. The Cuban-American lawyer Ana María Polo in Caso Cerrado or the versions of Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen (in Chile, Argentina, and Spain) are some examples of this explosion of a “constructed reality”.

This seminar invites contributions that reflect on the possibilities and limitations of the complex forms and the multiple dimensions of reality television’s influence on society, cultural shifts, and even political landscapes (fake news, p. e.). Possible paper topics include comparative and critical studies of specific TV shows, performativity, audience reception and patterns of consumption, the post-truth world, and any of these and any other television-related topics. 

Submit paper proposals here: https://www.acla.org/iberian-and-latin-american-tv-shows-masquerades