Judith Sierra-Rivera. Affective Intellectuals and the Space of Catastrophe in the Americas. The Ohio State University Press, 2018. 217 pp.

Abstract

Affective Intellectuals and the Space of Catastrophe in the Americas studies the cultural politics of emotion in Latin America, an area that merits much more attention, especially when it comes to the role of the intellectual voice in a neoliberal space. Across the chapters, Judith Sierra-Rivera studies the emotional discourses of Carlos Monsiváis, Francisco Goldman, Pedro Lemebel, Josean Ramos, and Sandra Álvarez Ramírez, which she puts in conversation with an array of other intellectual and critical discourses. The book's inquiry pivots around the material, ideological, and emotional connections between the "real and the lettered city" (5) in which the author respectively studied in each chapter operates. By choosing a different context (roughly, Mexico, Central America and the US, Chile, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, all in the twentieth century) for each chapter, the study gains in amplitude, for it shows the variety of crises in which discourse emerges and the dissimilar audiences to whom these discourses can reach out.The objects of this study include a radio program, a blog, and numerous books and essays, together with songs, anecdotes, and interviews. The book's emphasis on the space of catastrophe echoes in the everyday buzz of our 2020 reality: it is impossible not to see its currency with the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter 2020 protests, and the migrants' crisis at the border. Its new currency arises from the recently overexposed modes of production forced upon a new dispossessed collectivity. This collectivity is not monolithic, and the book clearly proves that. Throughout its chapters, different forms of collective enunciation are presented, together with an analysis of the public sphere in which intellectual subjects insert their voices. Following Sara Ahmed's work, Sierra-Rivera directs attention to "intellectual discourses [in which] unhappy bodies stitch together and seek to form another kind of 'we'" (16).The book consists of five chapters and a brief epilogue. Chapter one focuses on Monsiváis's writings in the space that goes from the tragedy of Tlatelolco in 1968 to the one brought about by the 1985 earthquake. Directing the study's gaze on Monsiváis's attention to urban bodies, Sierra-Rivera shows how two apparently very different events share the structures of feeling of a space of