For the last 50 years, following a trend in the humanities and social sciences, various discourses in Latin American Studies have been subject to a number of turns—the linguistic turn, the spatial turn, the decolonial turn, the visual, sonic, or affective turns, among many others. Similarly, in a jolting move, the leftist turn of the marea rosada has veered right, and the critical response has been grounded in a turn toward environmental, digital, feminist, indigenous, and Black internationalist thought, each of which has reoriented the discipline to shed light on new avenues of critical inquiry.

Focusing on nineteenth-century scholarship, this panel explores how this twisting and turning across so many disciplines has generated a series of collaborative and multidisciplinary practices in the study of the region. Are Latin Americanists dialoguing, overlapping, debating, or simply outsmarting each other with literal and metaphorical uses of key concepts from different disciplines (e.g. tracing cartographies of sound, mapping scopic regimes of modernity, framing the history of emotions, and so forth)? By putting diverse interdisciplinary approaches into conversation with one another, this panel seeks to explore how Siglo XIX literary and cultural studies have pivoted toward collaborative meaning making and to what effect. At end, our panelists aim to interrogate how these myriad turns represent—or obscure—minoritarian identities, offering insight into the ways that past cultural production might converge and diverge with the complex histories and erasures that have defined the hemispheric Americas since the onset of colonization.

Taking heed of MLA’s suggestion, we will feature three formal presentations, commentary by a discussant, and a presider who will ensure fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion with attendees.

Mercedes Lopez Rodriguez will go beyond visuality as a dominant framework to analyze the representation of indigenous bodies. She departs from recent studies that incorporate a multisensorial approach to the creation of identities in contexts linked to a wide variety of processes of cultural change. Building upon these studies, her presentation links two complementing approaches: on the one hand, it analyzes the construction of race through the sensorial experiences associated with hearing, taste, smell, and touch. On the other, it studies the emotions linked to these sensorial experiences and their crucial role in naturalizing discourses of exclusion and discrimination. Particularly, she will focus on emotions such as disgust and fear of contact with indigenous food and bodies as described by white travelers in the 19th-century Colombian Andes.

Continuing with a focus on Colombia, María del Pilar Melgarejo will analyze the works of Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833-1903) to explore how emotions mediate the relationship between the individual and the social. Melgarejo looks at how Acosta’s vibrant intellectual life defied the patriarchal structures of nineteenth-century intellectual networks. The panelist examines how Acosta refused to remain silent by becoming the interpreter of her social milieu and promoting historical and cultural knowledge as means to open up spaces for women beyond the limited social roles imposed upon them. Melgarejo, then, explores how the recent affective turn in literary and cultural studies offers an innovative optic to analyze the production of feminine subjectivity in the nineteenth century and its relation to affect as a way of breaking from the structures of power in place.

Finally, Carlos Abreu Mendoza will start by revising Doris Sommer’s influential reading of nation-building as a response to the challenges presented by the excess of the national space. Abreu Mendoza notes that, even while Sommer defined this struggle against the landscape as an expression of the “American sublime,” her coinage of this term has not produced a similar interest among Latin Americanists, even as it applies to defining ideas about nationhood in the continent. The panelist addresses this paradox between sources and reception by considering how sublimity is ubiquitous in the cultural production of nineteenth-century Latin America yet rarely found in Latin Americanist scholarship. Abreu Mendoza goes on to examine how the audible techniques cultivated by Latin American nation builders found a way into their foundational fictions. Departing from ocularcentric historiographical practices that emphasize geography, cartography, and mapping, his paper interrogates the role of listening and sound in the articulation of the American sublime, thus advancing the alternative category of the audible sublime, an unexplored sensory regime where emotions such as wonder, shock, and fear are produced as aural responses to nation-building in Latin America.

Finally, Dierdra Reber, a scholar with a comparatist background and remarkable publications on the intersection of affect, cultural theory, and discourses of power, will offer a response to the three presentations.