Introduction: An Archive of Inter-American Affects 1. Cabaret America: Flying Down to Rio and the Construction of Latin American Identity as Performance 2. Dance Diplomacy: Film Musical Comedies as Models of Inter-American Integration 3. Hemispheric Romances at the Cinematic Contact Zone 4. The Ends of Magic: Post-Magical Realisms and the Affect of Discovery 5. Capturing a Moving Identity: The Affective Work of Latino Transnational Subjects Conclusion

Adrián Pérez Melgosa is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA.

Cinema and Inter-American Relations studies the key role that commercial narrative films have played in the articulation of the political and cultural relationship between the United States and Latin America since the onset of the Good Neighbor policy (1933). Pérez Melgosa analyzes the evolution of inter-American narratives in films from across the continent, highlights the social effects of the technologies used to produce these works, and explores the connections of cinema to successive shifts in hemispheric policy. As a result, Cinema and Inter-American Relations reveals the existence of a continued cinematic conversation between Anglo and Latin America about a cluster of shared allegories representing the continent and its cultures.
Pérez Melgosa contends that cinema has become a virtual contact zone of the Americas, mediating in a variety of hemispheric political debates about the articulation of Anglo, Latin American, and Latino identities. Cinema and Inter-American Relations brings sustained attention to ongoing calls for a transnational focus on the disciplines of film studies, American studies, and Latin American studies and engages with current theories of the transmission of affect to delineate a new cartography of how to understand the Americas in relation to cinema.