The Feeling Child: Affect and Politics in Latin American Literature and Film compiles a series of essays focusing on the figure of the child within the specific context of the "affective turn" in the study of contemporary sociocultural settings across Latin America. This edited volume looks specifically at the intersection between cultural constructions of childhood and the affective turn within the contemporary sociopolitical landscape of Latin America. The editors and contributors share a common aim in furthering comprehension of the particular intensity of the child's affective presence-spectatorial, haptic, silent, and spectral, among others-in contemporary Latin American cultural expression. The contributions herein approach this theoretical challenge through an interdisciplinary lens which brings together two burgeoning strands of inquiry. The first is the notion of childhood as a significant, and inherently political, sociocultural space; the second is the recognition that affect is integral and fundamental to gaining a more complex understanding of the manner in which contemporary social worlds are made. In each case, this affective presence is teased out as a register of society, shedding light on the issues marking out the current sociopolitical landscape-in particular the traces of the recent past-in the regions represented. This book brings together established international scholars and young academics focusing on Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, and Peru.

Luisa Futoransky is a poet of lived experience above all, though not hers alone; other voices inhabit the work, whether of friends, lovers, fellow travellers (people she met or figures from history and literature). Like her fiction, the poetry employs a direct language rooted in anecdote and reflection, while sometimes delighting in playful experimentalism. Hers are mosaic narratives, made of pieces, fragments. Something else to notice in Nettles is her flair for the theatrical, especially acute when she writes in shorter forms. Surely her studies of opera helped to hone her instinct for the dramatic gesture. But to think that we start in Rome with this book only to end up in Ohio. That is some sense of humour.