Abstract
This article revisits the anthology McOndo (1996), edited by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, and suggests that this collection might be reappraised by considering the affective charges of the moods and atmospheres that circulate throughout these stories. Proposing an exploration of ‘affective creativity’ in relation to the historical contingency of emotional experience, I argue that McOndo manifests the emergence of an aesthetics of non-transcendent emotions – an aesthetics that probes, engages with and resignifies trivial forms of feeling. I suggest that such an aesthetics responds to the proliferation of new modes of production and consumption that extend their reach into the affective life of individual subjects, and to the disenchantment with forms of artistic and revolutionary militancy linked to the projects of radical social reform of the 1960s in Latin America, which often banked on the ability of feelings to drive subjects towards transformative action