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  • Affectual Erasure: Representations of Indigenous Peoples in Argentine Cinema by Cynthia Margarita Tompkins
  • Julia Brown
Tompkins, Cynthia Margarita. Affectual Erasure: Representations of Indigenous Peoples in Argentine Cinema. SUNY P, 2018. 357 pp.

This comprehensive survey of fifteen fiction and documentary films dating from as early as 1917, with Alcides Greca's El último malón, to as recently as 2010 with Sebastián Lingiardi's Las pistas-Lanhoyij-Nmitaxanaxac, makes a significant contribution to emergent and timely discussions in Latin American film studies. While scholar Laura Podalsky precedes Tompkins in applying affect theory to the study of Latin American cinema in her monograph The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (2011), Tompkins's affect and emotion-based study of Indigenous representation in Latin American film is the only one of its kind. Moreover, only in the last ten years has scholarship on the representation of Indigenous peoples in Argentine cinema begun to concretize. Tompkins's book is the first English-language monograph on the subject and will serve as critical point of reference for future scholarship in the area.

The affectual and emotional turn brought to bear in addressing Indigenous representation in films has significant ethical implications. Affect theory, deployed in a mediatic context—and particularly in the study of film—provides the potential for a decolonial methodological framework insofar as it draws on social-constructivist approaches to understanding experience. These approaches cut through layers of colonial and hegemonic perspectives embedded in more universalizing film studies approaches that tend to quantify, overgeneralize, and thereby homogenize dissimilar Indigenous subjects and communities portrayed on screen, [End Page 322] an act which amounts to speaking for or on behalf of, rather than allowing the Indigenous subject(s) on screen to speak (verbally or not).

Affect theory arguably provides a work-through of this problem although, as Tompkins notes, it does not wholly recuse itself from universalism but rather attempts to "integrate these extremes" (xxxi). Tompkins's text presents a thorough foundational survey of affect theory by discussing an extensive range of theorizations proposed by scholars such as William Reddy, Brian Massumi, Jonathan Flatley, and Steven Shaviro. Taken together, these theories provide Tompkins with a wealth of possibilities that address nuance in the affective and emotional portrayals of First Peoples on the screen: in dialogue, via mise en scéne and through aesthetics. Affect theory's application is also significant in understanding how films "interpellate the audience" (xl), a relationship taken for granted or observed only partially through other analytical lenses.

Notwithstanding the potential limitations of aesthetic and ethnographic analyses, Tompkins's sections ethnographic representation and Indigenous representation, provided in almost every chapter, do not nullify the social-constructivist approach taken in her analyses of emotion and affect, but rather, serve as companions to it, deepening emphases on contingency and experiential subjectivity as opposed to experiential universality. The result of including an ethnographic element in her text, therefore, is not to present a simplified version of the realities lived by First Peoples. Instead, Tompkins redoubles the emphasis on the complexities and aporia of experiences, histories, cultures, languages, land, and migration relationships, as well as challenges and successes in preserving community and identity in the face of colonization and genocide within Mocoví, Quichua, Ranquel, Mapuche, Tehuelche, Guaikuru, Kolla, Mbyá, Pilagá, Aché, Toba, Qom, and Wichí communities.

The carefully derived methodological approach of Affectual Erasure is matched by its organizational approach. By dividing the films into five chronologically-determined parts, Tompkins may situate the films within their particular social, political, economic, and artistic moments in Argentina and abroad. Further, an acute awareness of the shaping forces of ideology, discourse, and processes of state formation informs this organizational choice: the themes of nationalism, the civilization-barbarism duality, and the matter of State violence appear and reappear frequently throughout the text. The first part of the text, titled "Early Cinema, 1896-1932" examines two films (El ultimo malón and La quena de la muerte) within the context of positivist and nationalist discourse, while the second part, concerned with classical cinema—filmed between 1933 and 1956—coincides with Juan Perón's populist presidency and identifies films from this time (Frontera Sur...

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