Tears, Laughter, and Love: Affect and Popular Culture in Latin America
SPANSH 224
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
“What is love (baby don’t hurt me)?” pop culture keeps asking; in Latin America, one answer has long come in the form of tears, melodrama, and serialized romance. In the 1960s, the romance‑comic series Lágrimas, risas y amor promised its readers an education in how to suffer, laugh, and love. This course takes that archive of “tears, laughter, and love” as a point of departure to explore how Latin American popular culture has taught its publics to feel from the nineteenth century to the present. Primary materials will include sentimental poetry (Amado Nervo’s love poems), canonical and middlebrow fiction (María, Las batallas en el desierto, El beso de la mujer araña, En breve cárcel, Cuentos para leer sin rímel), women’s magazines from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (La Mujer, Claudia, Para ti), and a range of audiovisual melodramas such as Enamorada, El crimen del Padre Amaro, El secreto de sus ojos, Una mujer fantástica, and telenovelas like Pasión de gavilanes, Rubí, and La reina del flow.
Using “sentimental education” as a guiding thread, we will examine how affect participates in the making of gendered and classed hierarchies, ideals of love and family, and notions of respectability and taste in Latin America. Guiding questions include: How do material forms—cheap print, comics, magazines, film, and telenovelas—shape affective experience? What can affect theory and Latin American cultural criticism teach us about so‑called cursi or lowbrow genres? These case studies will be read alongside key texts in affect theory (e.g. Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai) and Latin American cultural theory (e.g. Carlos Monsiváis, Jesús Martín‑Barbero, Graciela Montaldo, Doris Sommer).
Course Notes
Conducted in Spanish (readings in Spanish and English). Designed as an introduction to the study of affect, materiality, and popular culture, the course is open to students from across the humanities and social sciences.
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
