Jean Franco, who passed away in December 2022 at the age of 98, was a founding figure of Latin American cultural studies –particularly but not exclusively in English-speaking academia– and one of the Journal’s most important interlocutors since its own inception in 1992. In fact, the Journal’s second issue of that same year, focused in its entirety on the concept of border, featured an essay-length review by Jean (included in this collection), in which she discusses the implications, methodologically and conceptually speaking, of Néstor García Canclini’s landmark book Culturas híbridas, published in Mexico only two years earlier, for the project of cultural studies as it was taking shape in the Anglosphere at the time. In what even now remains an impressively prescient and provocative reading, her analysis of Canclini zeroes in on his “tour” of Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology and the way the latter’s construction of a “national heritage” effectively patrols the border –hence the essay’s title– between authenticity and kitsch, ancestrality and comodity, which Canclini’s notion of hybridity would challenge and complicate, Jean argued, in ways both similar and complementary to those in which scholars such as Susan Stewart and Mieke Bal were then rethinking objectness, space and scale in the museum, or those in which Donna Haraway was starting to rethink race, gender, and species barriers. It was this exceptional capacity for thinking outside the box (in particular, the one engineered by academic disciplines and their various forms of border patrolling) that set Jean Franco’s work apart for over half a century – first, by almost single-handedly re-inventing the peninsular-centered field of “Hispanic Studies” through her ground breaking trilogy The Modern Culture of Latin America (1967), An Introduction to Latin American Literature (1969), and Spanish American Literature Since Independence (1973). Following appointments at the Universities of London and Essex (where she held the first chair for Latin American literature in the UK), upon moving to Stanford in 1972 and eventually to Columbia University in 1982, and upon completing an authoritative monograph on the poetry of César Vallejo (1976), Jean became once again a leading voice in the field’s cultural turn, one that her own much broader interest and involvement with anti-imperialism, the women’s movement and the struggle against the wave of rightwing dictatorships rolling through the region (which she had experienced firsthand in the 1954, CIA-engineered coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala) had long anticipated. Her work on the emplotments of gender in literary representations, popular culture, and architecture (Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, 1989), and on the Latin American Cold War and the reconfigurations of the cultural field it ushered in (The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City, 2002; Cruel Modernity, 2013) were, once again, field-defining in both method and scope. This collection features an overview of Jean’s contribution to the project of Latin American cultural studies since the 1990s, the many legacies of which remain at the heart of critical endeavors today.

• https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/cjla20/collections/Jean-Franco-in-memoriam

The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies proudly announces the dossier “Affective Arrangements and Violence in Latin America,” edited by Silvana Mandolessi, Reindert Dhondt, and Martín Zícari, which has just been published in Vol, 31, Issue 3. The five articles compiled in this dossier explore how social practices and aesthetic objects in Latin America mobilise affective dispositions and politics. The articles investigate a multiplicity of bodies, which are both individual and social, human and non-human, natural and cultural, textual and visual, shaping as well as deconstructing the surface of the Latin American territory. Affects mobilise – and are mobilised – in multiple ways and through multiple media, but all the articles share the common intent to examine the mobilisation of affects as relational, social, and situated dynamics, interrogating the particular situatedness of Latin America.

Here are some further readings on questions of affect, media, and the politics and cultures of violence published in the Journal in recent years:

• Cynthia Francica, “A Dystopian Utopia: Queerness, Affect and the Political in Roberto Jacoby’s Darkroom (2002)” Vol. 28, 2 (2019): 291-320.

• Cecilia Macón, “Time-Riding: Albertina Carri and the Ironic Affective Presence of the Past” Vol. 27, 3 (2018): 399-414.

• Brad Epps, “The Unbearable Lightness of Bones: Memory, Emotion, and Pedagogy in Patricio Guzmán’s Chile, la memoria obstinada and Nostalgia de la luz” Vol. 26, 4 (2017): 483-502.

• Kaitlyn M. Murphy, “Memory Mapping: Affect, Place, and Testimony in El Lugar Más Pequeño (2011)” Vol. 25, 4 (2016): 571-595.

• Irene Depetris Chauvin, “Geographies of Love(lessness), Space and Affectivity in Viajo Porque Preciso, Volto Porque te Amo (Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes, 2009) and Turistas (Alicia Scherson, 2009)” Vol. 25, 3 (2016): 467-483.

• Martín Fotta, Sílvia Posocco and Frank Dylan Smith, “Violence and Affective States in Contemporary Latin America” Vol. 25, 2 (2016): 167-177.

• Andrew Lantz, “The Performativity of Violence: Abducting Agency in Mexico’s Drug War” Vol. 25, 2 (2016): 252-269.

• Frank Dylan Smith, “Feeling the Boundaries of Normality – ‘tristeza’ and the Restitution of Community in the Aftermath of Violence” Vol. 25, 2 (2016): 237-251.

• Andrea Noble, “Introduction: Visual Culture and Violence in Contemporary Mexico” Vol. 24, 4 (2015): 417-433.

• Sarah Wright, “Noli me tangere: Memory, embodiment and affect in Silvio Caiozzi’s Fernando ha vuelto (2005)” Vol. 21, 1 (2012): 37-48.

• Luis Duno Gottberg, “Mob Outrages: Reflections on the Media Construction of the Masses in Venezuela (April 200-January 2003)” Vol. 13, 1 (2004): 115-135.