Introduction: The new right and Latin America – Affects, Discourse, Media, Performance

Abstract

The articles collected in this double issue were selected among the responses to an open call for papers circulated at the beginning of 2025, encouraging contributors to think from the vantage point of cultural studies about the novel affective energies, subjectivities, and symbolic forms the Latin American new right has ushered in, arguing that these cannot be left to sociology and political science alone. Understanding their novelty (as well as the way they merely update long-standing patterns) also requires addressing them in their complexity as cultural phenomena, including aspects such as new religiosities, the impact of social media technologies, gendered fashion and corporeal forms of expression and their libidinal and political valences, or the performative deployment of musical styles and attire once associated with rebelliousness and with youth and underground culture. What kinds of “emergent formations”, we need to ask, do these structures of feeling reveal, and are the crises to which they respond merely “conjunctural” or rather “organic” in kind, as Stuart Hall would once have put it?