Cold War Toys: Building Blocks, Miniatures and Models in the Latin American Southern Cone (Modern Americas)

Cold War Toys examines a selection of toys manufactured, promoted and commercialized in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay during the second half of the twentieth century.The book approaches toys as ‘dispositifs' - cultural formations that condense the discourses, institutions, architectural forms, scientific statements and philosophical propositions of a contested and turbulent period.It presents a rich compendium of manufactured objects - many inspired by European or U.S. brands - that incorporate local characters, messages, designs and materials through a process of ‘creative adaptation', thereby acquiring an identity of their own.Although the book follows a broadly chronological order that aligns with the history of toys during the Cold War and its aftermath, its analysis also moves back and forth in time: from building blocks made in the 1920s by Joaquín Torres-García to those commercialized in 1970s Chile during Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government; from nineteenth-century doll