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Pérez Melgosa, Adrián. Cinema and Inter-American Relations; Tracking Transnational Affect. New York: Roudedge 2012. 260 pp.
Adrián Pérez Melgosa's Cinema and Inter-American Relations focuses on the role of affect (or of what Pérez Melgosa also calls intense emotion) in film, at the same time that it refocuses the debate surrounding the relations of films from Latin America to films from Hollywood (or what he calls Inter-American relations). In this book, Pérez Melgosa follows critics such as Eric Shouse and Ann E. Kaplan, who have recently taken the concept of affect (as it was developed in the field of Continental Philosophy by Brian Massumi in the '80s) into the related fields of film and media studies. But he breaks new ground by adding the concept developed by Teresa Brennan in the '90s of "transference of affect," and by applying it to the problem of Inter-American relations in film. In his book, he also follows the work of Ana López and Margarita de Orellana. But similarly this book breaks new ground by turning away from their description of Inter-American film circulation as a kind of autism, or as a circular or solipsistic look from Hollywood. Instead, Pérez Melgosa introduces the concept of the transfer of affect across Inter-American films as a figure for the mutual reciprocity that governs these relations. For him, the transfer of affect is the key to understanding the role of film in the construction of subjects that are always in relation to an other. More importantly still, Pérez Melgosa shows how agency is still he possible in an age when visual culture reduces our choices of being to one of two options: either that of the stereotyping subject or that of the stereotypical object.
Cinema marks a turn in the direction of Pérez-Melgosa's work that reflects his readings of recent feminist and post-feminist philosophers concerned with the body in general, and with the female and queer body in particular,...