Music, Dance, Affect, and Emotions in Latin America

Music, Dance, Affect, and Emotions in Latin America is a collection of essays that analyze different manifestations of Argentine music and dance taking advantage of the exciting new theoretical developments advanced by the current affective turn. Contributors deal with the relationship between music, dance, affects, feelings, and emotions in different scenarios and show how the embodiment of music shape the experiential in ways that may impact upon but nevertheless many times evade conscious knowing. This book is one of the first academic attempts (regardless of region or country of scope) to try to solve some of the most important problems the affective turn has identified regarding how music and dance have been researched so far, such as the tendency, in representational accounts of music, to ignore the sensory and sonic registers to the detriment of the embodied and lived registers of experience and feeling that unfold in the process of making or listening to music.

This book's extended theoretical exploration illuminates the complex ways that music acts on bodies to evoke feelings and identities, while the case studies exemplify these processes across a variety of Latin American genres. This is a pioneering contribution to the study of affect in music., Music, Dance, Affect, and Emotions in Latin America innovates by placing emphasis on how music and dance mobilize affect— something made evident in the expression ‘groove to the music’— while at the same time detailing the complex set of factors (social conditions, identity constituents, etc.) that mediate musical representations and corporeal affects and emotions., For the humanities and humanistic social sciences, the affective turn forcefully compels a return to bodies in their multifarious relations—with themselves, other bodies, places, communities, with things of all kinds, and much more. This remarkable volume makes another, and most audacious, turn: South. Incisive essays show the rich complexities of how affect and emotions animate musicking (making, listening, dancing) in the specificity of Latin America locations. In a stunning demonstration of post-constructionism, we experience affect and emotions as living correlates of meaning and as a dynamic force for the evasive but inescapable subsistence of identities and subjectivities.

Pablo Vila is professor of sociology at Temple University.