Tears, Laughter, and Love: Affect and Popular Culture in Latin America

Harvard FAS

“What is love (baby don’t hurt me)?” pop culture keeps asking; in Latin America, one answer has long come in the form of tears, melodrama, and serialized romance. In the 1960s, the romance‑comic series Lágrimas, risas y amor promised its readers an education in how to suffer, laugh, and love. This course takes that archive of “tears, laughter, and love” as a point of departure to explore how Latin American popular culture has taught its publics to feel from the nineteenth century to the…