This session explores how Caribbean cultural production makes use of affect to address consumption, labor, and tourism. Building upon Sarah Ahmed’s (2004) framework of affective economies and her argument that emotions play a crucial role in shaping collective identities, our panel aims to show the ways Caribbean peoples, historically subjected to colonial domination and commodification, enact political responses by harnessing the emotions that bind the collective together. The objective of this panel is to dialogue on the role of “ugly feelings” (Ngai 2005) and other negative emotions, such as abjection, refusal, or even pleasure, in Caribbean cultural contexts, serving as a means to subvert capitalism’s hold on the collective affective domain.

Each paper is allocated 12 minutes, followed by a brief respondent intervention (5-8 minutes), ensuring a minimum of 15 minutes dedicated to open discussion. We believe that these four papers create a well-balanced structure and offer valuable insights into the panel’s overarching topic. Through four different case studies, they build on works that links the affective with the political in current Caribbean Studies (Yomaira Figueroa-Vázquez, Tao Leigh Goffe, José Muñoz, Mimi Sheller, among others) to further explore how the region’s cultural production intervenes emotionally as a political response to the visitor economic model of tourism, and other forms of consumption. With the goal of pushing traditional boundaries between Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean scholarship, we bring together four papers that depart from their disciplinary particularities and establish connections with the greater Caribbean to explore the larger affective dimensions of economic lives in the present.

First, Lauren Horst analyzes the affective economies of development in Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969). Inspired by a real-life team of social scientists who visited Barbados and set on a fictional Caribbean island in the mid-1960s, the novel describes a community caught between the developmentalist desires of the island’s native elite and the developmentalist plans of a team of American researchers visiting the island. Through affect, communicated in the characters’ eyes and voices, Horst argues that the novel re-politicizes the seemingly objective voice of technocratic development and shows how literary fiction exposes omissions and distortions in official development documents, thereby highlighting alternative economies rooted in local histories.

Also focusing on a novel, Agnes Sastre-Rivera analyzes Here Comes the Sun (2016). Written by Nicole Dennis Benn, the novel builds a contemporary picture of Jamaican society, juxtaposing a luxurious resort against women-owned houses. Sastre-Rivera contends that both settings illustrate the trafficking of women’s bodies, while also demonstrating how they transcend the limitations of those spaces. To so do, the presenter takes a closer look at the main character, a closeted queer woman, from her role as a front desk clerk that serves as a façade to her “real work” as a sex worker, and analyzes how Benn uses metaphors to suggest that their body and the island of Jamaica are one: both are being consumed and subjected to the tourist’s gaze throughout the novel.

In a similar vein, the tourist gaze is interrogated in Justo Planas’ paper, which focuses on film. Planas explores the depiction of pleasure, labor, and tourism in contemporary movies from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Planas analyzes Celestino y el Vampiro (2003) and La Fiera y la Bestia (2019) and demonstrates how parody serves as a powerful affective dispositif to counter oppressive narratives of sex and gender in the Caribbean, especially those involving the eroticization and commodification of the vulnerable collective body. Ultimately, Planas links foreign pleasure to vampirism, deconstructing erotic commodification in the Caribbean both on and off the big screen.

Finally, Ali Kulez shifts attention to a different industry while also examining dissident aesthetics that trigger affective responses in the Hispanophone Caribbean. Kulez explores the affective presence and absence of food in two publications of the press Ediciones Vigía (Cuba) that revolve around the themes of hunger, scarcity, and cannibalism. This press is renowned for using discarded materials to craft collectible book-objects. Kulez centers the importance of abjection, as an affect, in Vigia’s artistic project. Ultimately, he interprets it as a desiring machine, one that transforms the “material residues” of Caribbean life to contrasting ends: a process that can both “beautify” and ignore harsh realities or create a dissident affective economies centered around abjection.

Linguistic balkanization of the Caribbean is of the main ways empire has exercised power over the region, so these four cross-national and -linguistic, explorations of cultural and affective life under late capitalism reveal commonalities and provide opportunities for solidarity and common liberation.