Music, Dance, Affect, and Emotions in Latin America

This book’s extended theoretical exploration illuminates the complex ways that music acts on bodies to evoke feelings and identities, while the case studies exemplify these processes across a variety of Latin American genres. This is a pioneering contribution to the study of affect in music. – Nancy Morris, Temple UniversityMusic, Dance, Affect, and Emotions in Latin America innovates by placing emphasis on how music and dance mobilize affect— something made evident in the expression ‘groove to the music’— while at the same time detailing the complex set of factors (social conditions, identity constituents, etc.) that mediate musical representations and corporeal affects and emotions. – George Yúdice, University of MiamiFor the humanities and humanistic social sciences, the affective turn forcefully compels a return to bodies in their multifarious relations—with themselves, other bodies, places, communities, with things of all kinds, and much more. This remarkable volume makes another, and most audacious, turn: South. Incisive essays show the rich complexities of how affect and emotions animate musicking (making, listening, dancing) in the specificity of Latin America locations. In a stunning demonstration of post-constructionism, we experience affect and emotions as living correlates of meaning and as a dynamic force for the evasive but inescapable subsistence of identities and subjectivities. – Jairo A. Moreno, University of Pennsylvania

Pablo Vila is professor of sociology at Temple University.