Abstract
This article proposes an affective turn in scholarship on colonial Latin American literature, focusing on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’sNaufragiosas a case study. Through an engagement with embodied, intersubjective, and circulatory affects in Cabeza de Vaca’s text, it sketches out a critical framework that investigates what I call the exteriority of feeling in the colonial Americas. My reading focuses on three main areas: the theory of the humoral body as the cultural referent that shapes the externalization of embodied affect in Cabeza de Vaca’s text, the description of forms of affective transmission precariously established between European and indigenous communities, and the emergence of affective minefields and emotional untranslatables in colonial contexts. In this way, this article works toward a broad investigation of the meanings, functions, and circulation of affect and emotion in the colonial Americas.
Highlights
This article argues for an affective turn in scholarship on colonial Latin American literature, focusing, as a case study, on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación que dio Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca de lo acaescido en las Indias, known to contemporary readers as Naufragios
Critical commentaries on the Naufragios have long pointed out the feelings of fear, anguish, and bodily pain expressed in this text, yet they have tended to approach these experiences as private, transcendental, and ahistorical categories, failing to inquire into their historical contingency, cultural relativity, and intersubjective circulation
Beyond prompting new interpretations of central aspects of Cabeza de Vaca’s text, this approach serves as a springboard for two interrelated claims regarding the productivity of the interface between contemporary affect studies across disciplines and colonial Latin American studies
Summary
This article proposes an affective turn in scholarship on colonial Latin American literature, focusing on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios as a case study. In Cabeza de Vaca’s text, emotives unfold, instead, into instances where the brunt of what is transmitted is a gestural and bodily effect rather than the outcome of discursive interaction, and where the contents of these gestures are at least partially unintelligible to the receiver Bypassing verbal expression, these passages in the Naufragios register emotives that mold and alter feeling states through opaque nonverbal signs: uncovering the body, blowing on the patient’s skin, and making the sign of the cross appear in this light as a particular kind of ambivalent emotive that is traded between subjects within cross-cultural interactions in the context of Spanish colonialism in the New World. Processes of affective transmission in colonial contexts, in contrast, reveal the existence of conflictive and striated circuits: affective minefields where affective formations are always at risk of imploding into one another
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