The Latin American Posthegemonic: Affect, Illiteracy, and the Question of Reading

• In Event: Literary Posthegemony: The Politics of the Affect

Abstract

In this paper I examine the disciplinary and theoretical impact wrought by two recent interventions in Latin American cultural studies that can be termed, respectively, the “posthegemonic” and “affective” turns. The first foregrounds the conceptual feebleness of the hegemonic/popular dichotomy as a means for interrogating power, while the latter postulates the existence of a plane of relationality in excess of, or completely beyond, conventional notions of discourse, ideology, and representation. Together, posthegemony and affect signal for the study of Latin America a potentially radical disciplinary shift in the treatment and analysis of literature that emphasizes “percepts,” “impingements,” and “intensities” over traditional and seemingly now exhausted categories such as representation, identity, and consciousness. Drawing from the work of such critics as Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze, and Julia Kristeva, this paper advances a critical reflection intent on determining the precise nature of the relation between affect, discourse, and what I have elsewhere termed “illiteracy” (2014). As a means to test these claims, I offer a reading of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez (2004), a novel which critically brings to bear, and simultaneously frustrates, the stakes of posthegemonic modes of reading.

Author

• Abraham Acosta, University of Arizona