Reading the Affects in the Colonial Americas: The Exteriority of Feeling in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios

Abstract

This article proposes an affective turn in scholarship on colonial Latin American literature, focusing on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios as a case study. Through an engagement with embodied, intersubjective, and circulatory affects in Cabeza de Vaca’s text, it sketches out a critical framework that investigates what I call the exteriority of feeling in the colonial Americas. My reading focuses on three main areas: the theory of the humoral body as the cultural referent that shapes the externalization of embodied affect in Cabeza de Vaca’s text, the description of forms of affective transmission precariously established between European and indigenous communities, and the emergence of affective minefields and emotional untranslatables in colonial contexts. In this way, this article works toward a broad investigation of the meanings, functions, and circulation of affect and emotion in the colonial Americas.