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Reber's argument is fierce. With near breathless but nonetheless sure-footed speed, she cuts a course through an impressive range of hemispheric popular culture to show how capitalism has, from the beginning, generated its own self-serving counter-discourse. -- Nancy Armstrong, Gilbert, Lewis and Edward Lehrman Professor of English, Duke University Coming to Our Senses is a sophisticated work of scholarship concerned with advocating the enormous potential of the category of 'affect' in order to understand contemporary global culture. It is a definite must-have book for scholars in an array of disciplines. -- Ignacio M. S nchez Prado, Washington University in Saint Louis Coming to Our Senses offers an ambitious, exciting, and persuasive argument in which the turn to emotions and the centrality of the human (rights of man) came out of the political transformation from colonialism to democratic capitalism: from a model of experience in which the head governs the body to one in which a headless body regulates itself through its capacity to know the world through feelings. This work illustrates both how important it is to attend to this powerful turn to the emotions in the contemporary moment and how crucial humanities-based inquiries are to understanding the ways in which cultural forms underpin political landscapes. This daring, thought-provoking, challenging book will no doubt be controversial, as innovative projects inevitably are, but it will be widely discussed and debated across fields and disciplines, and it will be broadly influential. -- Priscilla Wald, Duke University Coming to our Senses is an impressive book about nothing more and nothing less than a seismic change of episteme in Western civilization, from Descartes's I think, therefore I am to I feel, therefore I am. It will have an huge impact in the whole humanities (English, cognitive studies, Latin American studies, etc), forcing us to rethink long-held assumptions about the way culture works and making us revise the paradigms within which we live. Reber articulates the clear connection that exists between the capitalist system, the neoliberal model and its critique--the sustainability crowd--, our cognitive mapping of the territory, and the cultural works we regularly consume. In order to better understand these works, we need to know the ground where they are produced. Reber skillfully tackles the paradigm itself where these books are consumed. -- Edmundo Paz-Sold n, Cornell University The rise in scholarly attention to affect, this epistemic shift, this stirring at our feet , is symptomatic: a kind of magnetic attraction to a historical transition whose vehemence we sense but do not yet fully know. In Coming to our Senses, Dierdra Reber sets out to know it. Adam Smith needed to write about moral sentiments before he could produce the founding text of modern capitalism, and when he moved on to his exposition of the logic of liberal political economy, he gave us (and Reber) the great metaphor for historical capitalism at its most radically affective: the invisible hand , the self-regulating body of free-market economy. Two centuries later, Evo Morales's distinction between vivir mejor and vivir bien effectively points the way back from the unsustainable wealth of nations to a humbler and healthier moral sentiment of one-world togetherness. It is the tracing and making sense of this kind of trajectory, from Smith to Morales, that gives Reber's book its shape and that marks its profound intervention. Coming to our Senses is an exhilarating work, one whose erudition, verve and span of cultural references and evidence make for fantastic reading. It is also a book whose ambition and scope means that it will be marked by productive controversy and debate. Reber is a rare example of a scholar who has the depth of knowledge and the creativity of perspective to apprehend cultural processes on a scale that handles interregional comparison with care and insight. In this and many other senses, Coming to our Senses is a model of cutting-edge humanistic scholarship. -- Joshua Lund, University of Notre Dame

Reber's argument is fierce. With near breathless but nonetheless sure-footed speed, she cuts a course through an impressive range of hemispheric popular culture to show how capitalism has, from the beginning, generated its own self-serving counter-discourse. -- Nancy Armstrong, Gilbert, Lewis and Edward Lehrman Professor of English, Duke University Coming to Our Senses is a sophisticated work of scholarship concerned with advocating the enormous potential of the category of 'affect' in order to understand contemporary global culture. It is a definite must-have book for scholars in an array of disciplines. -- Ignacio M. S nchez Prado, Washington University in Saint Louis

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Dierdra Reber is assistant professor of Spanish at Emory University. Her essays on the cultural politics of Latin American film and fiction and the epistemology of global culture have appeared in Revista Iberoamericana, Modern Language Notes, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, differences, and nonsite.

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