Appearing in print some twenty years ago, Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (2003) was the point of departure for research into non-normative Latin American cinema in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the intervening years, scholars have responded with a turn to affect in the analysis of cinema. This paper argues that over the next 25 years we need to critically interrogate this turn in ways that parallel recent innovative works on affect and LGBTQ cinema that remain in dialogue with Foster's foundational work on gender and sexuality in Latin America: Eugenie Brinkema's The Forms of the Affects (2014); Affect, Gender and Sexuality in Latin America (2021), edited by Cecilia Macón, Mariela Solana, and Nayla Luz Vacarezza; and Geoffrey Maguire’s Bodies of Water: Queer Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (2024).

Hegel famously wrote that “Minerva’s owl flies only at dusk.” As everyone knows, Hegel meant by this that only in retrospect can one begin to truly understand an event or topic. As we will see, the idea of knowledge as crepuscular is relevant to an understanding of The Failure of Latin America: Postcolonialism in Bad Times (2019). John Beverley’s authorship gives The Failure of Latin America added relevance: he has played a major role in (U.S.) academic criticism about Latin America during the last forty or so years. The Failure of Latin America is thus presented as a kind of intellectual testament that sums up Beverley’s political and theoretical evolution, together with that of the region as a civilizational location for social hopes from the revolutionary 1960s to our post-utopian present.

Since 2010 there has been a surge in Latin American(ist) ecocritical studies and the environmental humanities. While building on the legacies of deconstruction and postcolonial thought, these newer lines of research take a step back from—though not abandoning by any means—the deconstructive trends of the last several decades to interrogate, instead, socioecological dynamics and the social construction of hope. This paper proposes Carolyn Fornoff’s Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (2024) as a model for how the Latin American humanities can pursue scholarship attuned to the socioecological pressures of the coming decades.

Recent critical and theoretical concerns reflect the vitality and dynamism of Latin American criticism and theory in the twenty-first century. As seen over the past two decades, our field has become less monolithic, veering, instead, toward a rich amalgam of subfields that will be further consolidated in the near future. Emblematic of this amalgam model of the field is The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literary and Cultural Forms (2022), edited by Guillermina De Ferrari and Mariano Siskind.

Between February 17, 2025 and March 10, 2025, we will publish weekly installments in the "State of the Field" Debates series. Scholars in the field are invited to submit 1,000 - 2,000 word responses to one or more of the position papers. Responses may be considered for inclusion in the journal following editorial review. Please send a query to editors@formajournal.org.