ABSTRACT
The impact of the affective turn in Latin America should be scrutinized under the umbrella of two key issues: the experience of trauma and the exploration of new strategies for emancipation. The complex link between these two axes engenders most of the peculiarities of the use of this framework in the region. This essay examines that link in order to illuminate key recent debates. The history of women, LGBTQIA+ and feminist activism, new Latin American cinema, literature, digital cultures, visual arts, memory studies, anthropology, history, and performance studies are fields that focus on different matters, but share their nuanced pondering of issues such as the mechanisms of representation, subjectivity, the status of narratives, the role of images, and the link between past and present. This piece is devoted, not only to giving an account of these milestones, but also to analyzing the specific ways in which affect theories are reinterpreted by cultural and critical analysis and involved in activism in Latin America. Such perspectives are, rather than mere interpretations of theories developed in the global North, a unique perspective on affect.
