The affective politics of friendship in Puerto Rican war stories

This article examines how friendship becomes affective politics that mediate war experiences in a series of Puerto Rican war stories. I propose that there is an affective voice that tells an experience of war and calls for a community that will perhaps share experiences and feelings. This voice forms different kinds of alliances that work together to articulate an even greater community beyond the locus of the story. Therefore, this intention and its affective politics resist a logic of war based solely on national love. By focusing on these affective dynamics and their potential political effects, this article moves away from the 1898 critical paradigm, which has tended to read cultural representations of war almost solely within the context of their connection with the US invasion of the island. Also, by developing a comparative analysis between materials produced on the island and in the diaspora, I am inscribing this article within the scholarly production on Latino soldiers and veterans, where there is often the need to define the we that is reclaiming both a voice and a medium to tell our story of war. This article assesses the political particularities of the speaking I and/or we in each analyzed story, while also looking into their (in)stability in relation to an undefined receptive and affective community.