Reviewed by: The Senses of Democracy: Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America by Francine R. Masiello Jerónimo Arellano Masiello, Francine R. The Senses of Democracy: Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America. U Texas P, 2018. 325 pp. There was a time, not long ago, when central categories of historical experience such as emotion and sense perceptions were conceived of as atemporal entities, hardwired into the brain and closed off to the influx of culture. One of the most generative movements in contemporary critical thought across the humanities and social sciences has been the reconceptualization of these forms of experience, restaging their relationship to the fluctuations of social and cultural history. Brand new fields have emerged in the process: we now have lines of scholarship with rubrics such as the history of emotions and the history of the senses. But this shift in focus has also yielded, more broadly and beyond the bounds of these new disciplines, a portable toolkit and a new sensibility attuned to the turbulent intersections between the visceral interiors of the body, the wiring of the nervous system, and the rise and fall of artistic and cultural forms. It is tempting to see Francine Masiello's latest book, The Senses of Democracy: Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America, as a prime example of this new sensibility (one that, it should be noted, has by now been well-established in multiple fields but is still somewhat a rarity in Latin Americanist criticism—thus the allure and future traction of Masiello's book). Charting what she calls "the evolution of sense work" in Latin America across roughly two centuries (2), Masiello approaches the human sensorium as a site molded by political and cultural forces, but also as a force field that is enlisted by artists and cultural agents to nurture forms of indiscipline, rebelliousness, and disobedience recruited against political and market forces. The Senses of Democracy is also, in many ways, a love letter to the vibrant feedback loops that, passing through the senses, connect subject and world—"love" is understood here not as a form of sensuous self-indulgence but, rather, as a mode of dogged attention to the details of felt experience. Five chapters—each of them ripe with sensorially-charged scenes—anchor the narrative of The Senses of Democracy. Although Masiello's book moves from the past into the present, it does not entertain linear chronologies. Instead, it is a book made up of swaths and flashes of "sense work"—"the ways in which the senses take form in culture" (3). In the first chapter, "Sensing the Early Republic," Masiello pieces together key moments in nineteenth-century Latin America in which "social, political, and literary life were tied to a regime of perception" (20). Masiello recasts canonical works as well as key debates in Latin American culture, such as the dichotomy between "civilization and barbarism," by paying attention to how they recruit sensory responses in order to intervene in the public culture of Latin America in the nineteenth century. Building upon these entanglements between the politics of culture and the plasticity of regimes of perception, the following chapter explores how women writers in Latin America develop methods of sense work that question the gendered authoritarianism of State power, challenging the exclusion of women from political life. Chapter three moves to the twentieth century, offering an account of the ways in which avant-garde artists in Latin America such as Roberto Arlt wrestled [End Page 307] with the shock of modern technologies that radically transformed the relationship between the sentient body and the lived world. Chapter four investigates two concrete, local scenes of sense work unfolding in subsequent decades: first, the activities of the Contorno group, a collective of dissident Argentine writers and intellectuals who developed a robust critique of the effects of mass violence on the sentient body during the government of Perón, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception; second, the intersections between the work of writer Juan José Saer, poet Raúl Zurita, and visual artist Guillermo Núñez, found in a shared concern with the physicality of the tortured body and the body in pain in...
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Apr 26, 2023
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