Feeling Child

The Feeling Child: Affect and Politics in Latin American Literature and Film compiles a series of essays focusing on the figure of the child within the specific context of the “affective turn” in the study of contemporary sociocultural settings across Latin America. This edited volume looks specifically at the intersection between cultural constructions of childhood and the affective turn within the contemporary sociopolitical landscape of Latin America. The editors and contributors share a common aim in furthering comprehension of the particular intensity of the child’s affective presence—spectatorial, haptic, silent, and spectral, among others—in contemporary Latin American cultural expression. The contributions herein approach this theoretical challenge through an interdisciplinary lens which brings together two burgeoning strands of inquiry. The first is the notion of childhood as a significant, and inherently political, sociocultural space; the second is the recognition that affect is integral and fundamental to gaining a more complex understanding of the manner in which contemporary social worlds are made. In each case, this affective presence is teased out as a register of society, shedding light on the issues marking out the current sociopolitical landscape—in particular the traces of the recent past—in the regions represented. This book brings together established international scholars and young academics focusing on Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, and Peru.

The affective attributes of child protagonists, thoroughly explored in The Feeling Child, reveal the disruptive potential of the child figure. Focusing on a selection of Latin American film and fiction, the essays probe how the child embodies a search for justice and understanding through feeling. The otherness of the child, whether observed in play or as a precocious and often stubborn witness to the chaos of adult society, can serve as a vehicle for examining traumatic memories of violence, repression, and inequality across the generations., This provocative volume examines the affective turn in literary and visual representations of Spanish American children and adolescents. With a thorough conceptualization of affect, The Feeling Child provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the varied Spanish American childhoods shaped by major political events, class, ethnicity, and gender. By tracing the child in literary works and films of the twentieth and twenty first century, the different chapters offer stimulating analyses.

Philippa Page is assistant professor of Spanish and film at Newcastle University.Inela Selimović is assistant professor of Spanish at Wellesley College.Camilla Sutherland is assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Groningen.