The debts of intellectual generosity, collegiality, companionship, encouragement, and criticism that I have incurred in the course of this project are too numerous to count. So many iterations of this thought puzzle that has finally come together in these pages have passed through so many kind and capable hands that it is a vertiginous proposition to name them all. I am unendingly grateful to one and all and will endeavor to the best of my abilities, to the end of my academic days, to pay those debts forward whenever and wherever possible.
The small kernel of an idea about the epistemological dimension of affect that was born by listening to NPR and going to the movies found many generous sources of interlocution, support, and encouragement through the years from gestation to realization. There is no one I should thank before Carlos J. Alonso, mentor extraordinaire. I am grateful to Carlos for awakening my love of criticism to the fullest, for embodying intellectual gravitas, and for encouraging me to be both disciplined and courageous in my scholarly life, all of which inspired me to undertake the project of writing this book and, more important, to stay the course.
I am also grateful for invaluable early feedback from Michael Solomon, Reinaldo Laddaga, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, and Heather Love, Heather’s own work reassuring me, several years before the affect boom had consecrated a disciplinary niche, that there was indeed a “there there” to my budding project. Erica Miller Yozell, Elisabeth Austin, Meghan McInnis Domínguez, Emilio Irigoyen, Rachel Burke, Tania Gentic, Elena Lahr-Vivaz, and eagle-eye Jennifer van Frank were go-to readers during first drafts when I was still piecing the project together. Phill Penix-Tadsen, Sam Steinberg, and Craig Epplin have given me earnest critiques at various points along the way, with no punches held.
At Emory I have been lucky to have capable and adventurous Spanish majors willing to try out my thought experiments on affect in the classroom. My intrepid undergraduates in “Social Currency of Love in Twenty-First-Century Media” tickled my funny bone with a speed-dating game in Spanish; in “Coming to Our Senses in the Global Americas” they formulated comparatist analyses of hemispheric pairings of smiles, frowns, and tears; in “Green with Love: Sustainability Discourse in Latin American-U.S. Media,” they considered the relationship between love and ecostories in film and advertising, such as the polar bear’s embrace of a startledNissan LEAF owner that I discuss in
chapter 4. My graduate students, for their part, thoughtfully engaged with “Dollars and Sense: Neoliberal Capitalism and Emotional Social Meaning” and “Love in the Media: Toward a Social Meaning of Affect in the Twenty-First-Century Global Americas.” I cotaught the latter seminar in a magical semester alongside Michele Schreiber of Emory’s Film and Media Studies, with whom I once chatted the entire day away about films and the representation of emotion.
In writing the manuscript, I leaned heavily on the faculty writing group to which Michele and I belonged together with the indomitable Monique Allewaert and the wise Andrea White. Their friendship was every bit as important as their interdisciplinary critical insight for bringing my chapters into being. This group was convened by Amy Benson Brown, at that time the founding director of Emory’s Author Development Program, whose superlative crash course in academic publishing gave me the tools to search for a press and the faith that my project might find one when the time came. During a visit to Duke, Michael Hardt read my draft introduction at this stage and offered generous and insightful feedback. Brian Massumi also gave me a detailed and helpful critique.
I thank Laurie Patton and Allison Adams, for their vote of confidence in awarding me the pilot grant from the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence for a pre-editorial manuscript review conference, and Donna Troka, for her stewardship in seeing it through to fruition. For my conference, Priscilla Wald agreed to make the trip from Durham sight unseen, which presaged her boundless energy, generosity, and acumen; Carlos J. Alonso found time during his busy graduate deanship to attend; and, from Emory, Lynne Huffer, Matthew Bernstein, Jeff Lesser, Larry Barsalou, and my stalwart colleague and chair Karen Stolley offered their time and countless pearls of inveterate wisdom. I recall that some thirty students and faculty attended the public portion of the review conference, including Peggy Barlett, Bob McCauley, and Laura Otis, colleagues who have all been kind and venerable sources of guidance and know-how, both interdisciplinary and institutional. My graduate advisee Anne Garland Mahler, who broke the mold of stellar on every front, graciously took notes for me at the conference; I believe she has inquired more often about my book than I ever had to about her spectacular thesis.
Within my department, I must offer special thanks to Hernán Feldman, who was always a meticulous and skeptical reader, giving especially sage advice on how to strengthen my historical hypothesis about the relationship between religion, free-market capitalism, and affect, my characterization of the place of affect in the Enlightenment, and my references to Argentine culture, politics, and history. Robert Goddard has engaged me in many a hallway volley of ideas about the Economist, Adam Smith, and neocolonialism. Don Tuten and Hazel Gold also have my thanks for their support.
Yanna Yannakakis gave me brilliant guidance in streamlining the articulation of my project as a grant proposal; I am thankful for a semester’s leave to work on the book granted by Emory’s University Research Committee and for gratifying recognition by the American Council of Learned Societies as an alternate. David Nugent and Chris Krupa joined me in a collegial interdisciplinary reading group that grew out of discussions at Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program faculty meetings.
Thanks to Bob McCauley and Laura Namy for inviting me to dialogue with Jocelyne Bachevalier in a humanities-sciences conversation on emotion hosted by Emory’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture; thanks, more broadly, to the CMBC for serving as my lunchtime haunt for cutting-edge thought on affect across the disciplines throughout my writing process. I thank Karla Oeler of Emory’s Film and Media Studies for taking interest in my work on affect and for subsequently inviting me to present what eventually became my book
chapter 4 in her departmental graduate seminar series.
Within the profession more broadly, I am grateful to Jill Kuhnheim, Jonathan Culler, Bruno Bosteels, Doris Sommer, Hilda Chacón, Susan Martin-Márquez, and Ignacio Sánchez Prado for affording me the opportunity to present some aspect of the book on conference panels of the divisions on Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature and Literary Criticism at the Modern Language Association Convention. Additional thanks to Nacho, and to Mabel Moraña, for inviting me to the Washington University in St. Louis conference on “Reading Emotions in Latin America” and for including me in their published volume of conference proceedings, El lenguaje de las emociones: Afecto y cultura en América Latina. Their conference and anthology put affect on the Hispanist map. Josh Lund recommended me for the Wash U conference; he has my thanks for this and also for inviting me to coauthor “False Parity and the Politics of Amnesia,” a memory studies response piece that begins the work of considering the relationship between affect and “democratic” free-market violence. I also thank Eugenio Di Stefano, Emilio Sauri, and Todd Cronan for inviting me to contribute a Hispanist take on epistemological affect to the “Latin American Issue” of nonsite.
If this book has an intellectual patron saint, it is Nancy Armstrong. Nancy is a force of nature within the scholarly world, with the gravitational pull of a planet and a fearsome talent for discernment. Had she not seen a glimmer in the last few paragraphs of a talk I gave, I would likely have tarried in conceptual gestation far longer than I did. Nancy published the talk in the Novel anniversary conference proceedings and then encouraged me to submit my book introduction to differences, where it became “Headless Capitalism: Affect as Free-Market Episteme.” I must offer thanks to Ellen Rooney, and especially to managing editor Denise Davis, who indulged my final rounds of revisions with generous and unflappable equanimity. I will never know just what compelled Nancy to cross multiple disciplinary lines of field, time period, region, language, and medium to take me under her wing, but her mentoring has made all the difference. She has my endless admiration and humble gratitude.
Lynne Huffer changed my life by making the introduction to her editor at Columbia University Press. Wendy Lochner is the stuff of academic lore: enthusiastic, engaged, lightning-quick, razor sharp, knowledgeable, savvy, sage. She sized up the project instantly, sifted through my pre-editorial conference advice with ease and authority, and guided me toward a sound plan of action while I was still pinching myself. Wendy, her assistant Christine Dunbar, and manuscript editor Susan Pensak (who is also, amazingly, a translator of Latin American literature) have been a first author’s dream come true. I also thank the two anonymous Columbia UP readers who generously provided detailed and astute critiques of the manuscript that I strove to honor in final revisions. I am grateful to Cynthia and Robert Swanson for a meticulous and conceptually complete index, and to Emory College and the Emory Laney Graduate School for a book subvention to fund it. And I am honored by the spare elegance Julia Kushnirsky’s cover design, which feels like just the right way to enclose this long labor of love.
In all truth, this project began with the development of a certain way of looking at the world that long preceded my professional scholarly life. I have lived my days as the fatherless child of lesbian parents during the conservative 1980s, granddaughter to the first college graduates in families of rural Kentucky farmers and Dutch Pennsylvania factory workers, one of few white faces in a predominantly African American and Latino inner-city neighborhood, a scholarship student at elite New England private schools, and an Anglo scholar in the Hispanic field. The sustained education of being an outsider on the inside has given me a kaleidoscopic view of class, gender, sexuality, race, and language from my earliest years. I understood normativity as an arbitrary and contingent construct decades before I knew how to articulate it as such; I understood that humans mount narratives of self-legitimation as a mechanism of self-empowerment and that the axes of those stories trace lines of inclusion and exclusion on a spectrum from the sympathetic to the violent.
If, in this book, I have taken my gaze on that strange patchwork quilt of stories and stretched it to the scale of epochs and world systems, it is because the fiercely independent minds of my grandparents, my mother, and my aunts allowed me to grow up thinking that it was only natural to aim so high; this book is foundationally underwritten by their imprint on my character. But mine would be a starless sky without the love and support of Chris Blais and our combined firmament: Lucia, Stella, Ziya, Celeste, and Autumn Moon. They are my heart and soul, my light in the dark, my reason for being, my inspiration for writing.