Cinema and Inter-American Relations; Tracking Transnational Affect by Adrián Pérez Melgosa (review)

Adrián Pérez Melgosa’s Cinema and Inter-American Relations focuses on the role of affect (or of what Pérez Melgosa also calls intense emotion) in film, at the same time that it refocuses the debate surrounding the relations of films from Latin America to films from Hollywood (or what he calls Inter-American relations). In this book, Pérez Melgosa follows critics such as Eric Shouse and Ann E. Kaplan, who have recently taken the concept of affect (as it was developed in the field of Continental Philosophy by Brian Massumi in the ’80s) into the related fields of film and media studies. But he breaks new ground by adding the concept developed by Teresa Brennan in the ’90s of “transference of affect,” and by applying it to the problem of Inter-American relations in film. In his book, he also follows the work of Ana López and Margarita de Orellana. But similarly this book breaks new ground by turning away from their description of Inter-American film circulation as a kind of autism, or as a circular or solipsistic look from Hollywood. Instead, Pérez Melgosa introduces the concept of the transfer of affect across Inter-American films as a figure for the mutual reciprocity that governs these relations. For him, the transfer of affect is the key to understanding the role of film in the construction of subjects that are always in relation to an other. More importantly still, Pérez Melgosa shows how agency is still be possible in an age when visual culture reduces our choices of being to one of two options: either that of the stereotyping subject or that of the stereotypical object.

Cinema marks a turn in the direction of Pérez-Melgosa’s work that reflects his readings of recent feminist and post-feminist philosophers concerned with the body in general, and with the female and queer body in particular, including perhaps most importantly the work of Kelly Oliver and Judith Butler. Indeed, Pérez Melgosa’s interest in affect is in the context of this hopeful turn towards the meaning of the body (or towards the corporeal dimension of meaning, if you will), in our increasingly spectacular, de-meaning, and always ideological visual culture.

Cinema displays a commanding mastery of a variety of disciplines including Transatlantic Studies, Film Studies, Media Studies, Continental Philosophy, Post-Colonial Studies, Globalization Studies, and most importantly, perhaps, Literary Studies. The thrust of the book as a whole can perhaps be characterized as what Gayatri Spivak described as the work of ideological critique, or a critique of the very logic of cultural production that is always ideological, or that always reflects the ideology of a social class, of a patriarchy, and that is, also, always racialized in colonial contexts. This ideological critique owes much to the insight of Benedict Anderson, who made a compelling case some time ago for the idea that the nation was a portable construct: or a community imagined by a set of like-minded individuals. Pérez Melgosa’s ideological critique of film is also inflected by the work of literary scholars that are in dialogue and in a debate with this work, among which Doris Sommer’s 1990 work of Foundational Fictions stands out. In her book, Sommer gave a convincing account of the causal relations between the trope of allegory in general, and the allegory of romantic heteronormative Latin American liaisons in particular, and the construct of imagined communities or nations for Latin America. With his combined references to the work of Gayatri Spivak, Benedict Anderson, and Doris Sommer, Pérez Melgosa brings Film Studies into a broader disciplinary debate carried on in the area of Post-Colonial studies, and adds to this debate the critique of a repeating trope in film produced in the Americas: to wit, the allegory of America as a cabaret.

Cinema reveals Pérez Melgosa’s impressive command of his object of...