Carolyn Fornoff | Cornell University (original) (raw)

Papers by Carolyn Fornoff

Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics, 2023

Extractivism is a concept developed by Latin American thinkers to describe the region’s historica... more Extractivism is a concept developed by Latin American thinkers to describe the region’s historical insertion into the world economy based on the large-scale removal and export of raw materials. Extractivism drove empire and it funded its expansion; it also was the impetus for mass enslavement, territorial destruction, and the extinction of peoples, nonhuman species, and of ways of living differently in relation to the earth. Any understanding of capitalist modernity must reckon with how that modernity was produced through extractivism. This chapter provides a panoramic gloss of extractivism as a concept, history, and subject of Latin American cultural production. Throughout, I pay particular attention to how literature and other forms of cultural production have helped shape and contest the terms of the extractivist world-ecology.

The Film Archipelago: Islands in Latin American Cinema, 2022

Surrounded by water and detached from the mainland, islands have long been conceived as spatially... more Surrounded by water and detached from the mainland, islands have long been conceived as spatially and conceptually set apart from the rest of society. This distance has made the island the perfect staging ground for envisioning utopia. In the twenty-first century, one neoliberal manifestation of the quest for a paradisiacal ‘blank slate’ is lifestyle migration, the consumption-led search for an inexpensive leisure destination to live out one’s later years. This chapter examines how Anayansi Prado’s documentary Paraíso for Sale (2011) visualizes the racialized and spatialized conflicts set in motion by the influx of semi-permanent, older white residents to Bocas del Toro, an archipelago in Panama prized for its aesthetic beauty, climate, and affordability. I argue that Prado’s cinematographic choice not to dwell on the archipelago’s beauty upends the archetypal tourist gaze that reinforces the erasure and dispossession of local peoples and instead foregrounds a politicized, terrene-oriented sense of place.

Forma Journal, 2023

Extractivist reflexivity is typically expressed in one of two ways: as a critical reflection on t... more Extractivist reflexivity is typically expressed in one of two ways: as a critical reflection on the materials that constitute the work and its conditions of production, or as a reflexive consideration about the system that gives rise to the work and in which it circulates and is consumed. It is a form of critique that calls attention to itself—to its materiality, financing, institutional structuring, or participation otherwise in the circuits of commodities and capital it seeks to illuminate or diagnose. Fritzia Irízar, Débora Delmar, and Minerva Cuevas reckon with art’s implication in extractivist systems, both in terms of bolstering its desires and emerging from within its financial ecosystem. Rather than position art as solely counter or opposed to extractivism, these artists lay bare the collusions, implications, and frictions that embroil fine art and extractivism.

Ecocinema Theory and Practice 2, 2023

Following recent shifts in ecomedia studies, this chapter puts forth a panoramic reading of the m... more Following recent shifts in ecomedia studies, this chapter puts forth a panoramic reading of the material realities of Mexican cinema. It touches on the history of film funding and distribution in Mexico, the relationship of state-sponsored cultural production to oil extraction in a country that relies on a nationalized oil industry for 40% of its operating revenue, the rural–urban divide in access to film exhibition spaces, the class divide of the same, the increase in personal electronics and e-waste, and potential alternatives to traditional film distribution through the case of Cine Móvil ToTo. Along the way, it interrogates how cinema and oil might be disentangled, and how this unraveling necessitates the imagining and building of new forms of infrastructure for the post-oil era.

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema, 2021

After years of visiting zoos in Mexico City, Caracas, and New York-strolling and sketching animal... more After years of visiting zoos in Mexico City, Caracas, and New York-strolling and sketching animals, gathering ideas for poems-in 1938, the Mexican writer José Juan Tablada declared that zoos were, in fact, hellish. Contrary to expectation, he wrote in a crónica published in Excélsior, little could be learned from seeing animals in captivity because the "diabolical torment of claustrophobia" rendered them unnaturally sluggish. 1 If his readers actually wanted to learn about animals, Tablada suggested, they should watch the films by Martin and Osa Johnson, which "reveal the secrets of the jungle." 2 Naturalist explorers and documentary filmmakers from Kansas, the Johnsons pioneered the nature film genre with films like Congorilla (1932) and Baboona (1935). The first to film Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya by air, they inaugurated the now-iconic aerial shots of herds traversing the African plains. Their adventure-documentaries simulated the face-to-face encounter with wild animals and interpreted the behavior shown on-screen. 3 Taken with these moving images, Tablada concluded that cinema was a better pedagogical tool than the zoo. Unlike the zoo, "a color and sound film," he wrote, "captures the marvelous colors of hides and plumages, the savage and mysterious polyphony of the virgin jungle." 4 Tablada proposed that film was the optimal medium, ethically and aesthetically, for experiencing nonhuman wildlife-better than seeing it in the flesh. Cinema was less interventionist; the camera observed without disrupting. The cinematic experience of the nonhuman, he wrote, had become all the more " accurate" SP_FOR_INT_001-022.indd 1 SP_FOR_INT_001-022.indd 1 4/9/21 5:43 PM 4/9/21 5:43 PM SP_FOR_INT_001-022.indd 2 SP_FOR_INT_001-022.indd 2 4/9/21 5:43 PM 4/9/21 5:43 PM

Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 2020

The first to publish poetry written in Mè’phàà, the bilingual collections Xtámbaa / Earthen Skin ... more The first to publish poetry written in Mè’phàà, the bilingual collections Xtámbaa / Earthen Skin (2016) and Tsína rí nayaxa’ / The Scar that Looks at You (2018) by Hubert Matiúwàa respond to the knot of problems faced by the inhabitants of La Montaña in the Mexican state of Guerrero, and narrate how the Mè’phàà community processes this pain and mobilizes in response. The fight of the Mè’phàà people, Matiúwàa contends, is ontological. By systematizing Mè’phàà cultural practices as philosophy in his essays and poetic work, Matiúwàa traces how these epistemological tools can be deployed to combat regional problems and imagine other worlds, ethics, and futures for La Montaña, and in this way, secure its survival.

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2018

This article examines how Cuban-Mexican writer Julieta Campos reevaluates passivity as a transfor... more This article examines how Cuban-Mexican writer Julieta Campos reevaluates passivity as a transformative force in feminism. Unlike contemporaneous authors such as Rosario Castellanos who define feminism as productive activity, I argue that in her book of short stories, Celina o los gatos (1968), Campos takes an inverse trajectory, deploying nonhuman material passivity in order to unravel the logic of the self-actualized liberal subject. Rather than articulate feminism as empowerment-directed toward reform and positivity-Campos imagines withdrawal, silence, and motionlessness as non-normative ways to resist prescribed purpose.

Paradoxa, 2018

Imagining climate change is a thorny act of speculation: a conjecture about how future conditions... more Imagining climate change is a thorny act of speculation: a conjecture about how future conditions will look radically different from the past and present. Because climate refers to the sum of weather patterns over time, it denotes continuity and the status quo. Whereas weather indicates temporal specificity-or as the Oxford dictionary puts it, "the state of the atmosphere at a particular place and time"-climate is its composite, a zooming out to consider the whole. To think about climate is to make a difficult mental temporal leap: to look past first-hand experience or singular events, and instead consider trends. Therefore conceptualizing climate change isn't just about visualizing the catastrophic, but a new normal that we have yet to experience. Imagining a different climate is akin to the practice of science fiction; envisioning a different world, governed by different rules.

Mexican Literature in Theory, 2018

Land was a central concern of the Mexican revolution, and consequently, landscapes figured promin... more Land was a central concern of the Mexican revolution, and consequently, landscapes figured prominently in its literature. The iconic image of the revolutionary leader framed against the arid countryside is, John Mraz argues, a representation that emphasizes the hero’s protagonism against the backdrop of “the future country he will create” (198). This interpretation of nature as a passive resource to be seized and molded to man’s will has dominated cultural artifacts and scholarship alike. This chapter examines a radically different model of the relationship between environment and revolutionary, proffered by a lesser-studied author of the genre, Rafael F. Muñoz, in Se llevaron el cañon a Bachimba (1941). The novel tracks the story of Alvarito, a young man who joins Orozco’s ultimately failed rebellion against Madero’s nascent government. However, rather than focus on storyline, reading this work with an ecological eye means forgoing the confines of plot in favor of attending to the landscape: not as a mute backdrop, but as an agent. The natural world is structurally central to Se llevaron el cañon; the plot is repeatedly interrupted by narrative interludes that explore Chihuahua’s ecology with detailed specificity. One such disruption is the striking treatment of the mesquite brush as an autopoietic system that resists utilitarianism. Nature operates in the text both at, and above, the scale of the human who composes it: history is depicted as effaced by larger ecological forces, the temporality of nature juxtaposed against the transience of revolutionary events. As a result, Muñoz figures revolution as entangled with other nonhuman forms of being, a matrix of relationality in which different forms of life are always becoming, and becoming-with each other.

Istmo, 2017

This article explores how Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s directorial debut, Lo que soñó Sebastián [What Sebas... more This article explores how Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s directorial debut, Lo que soñó Sebastián [What Sebastian Dreamt] (2004), crafts a cinematic imaginary of Guatemala’s Petén jungle. Rather than simply depict the Petén as a passive stage or mise-en-scène for the unfolding human drama, the film endows the jungle with agency, underscoring the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman life. It does so on a narrative level by probing the complicated ethics of environmentalism and the inevitability of complicity. It also does so through experimental cinematic techniques. The ludic distortion of natural sound and unexpected point-of-view shots work together to trouble the viewer’s expectation of how we might see or feel this place.

While most scholarship examining Ezra Pound’s influence on Ernesto Cardenal’s poetics has focused... more While most scholarship examining Ezra Pound’s influence on Ernesto Cardenal’s poetics has focused on style and form, little attention has been given to the vast ideological differences that separate the two. Why would Cardenal, a committed Marxist and Liberation Theologist, claim as his biggest influence a poet whose fascist, anti-Semitic politics figure so prominently in his work? If perhaps the most obvious response is that Cardenal was more interested in Pound’s aesthetics than his ideology, this conclusion obviates the question of how Cardenal accounts for Pound’s politics. By taking a look at Cardenal’s discussion of Pound’s politics and probing possible ideological congruencies in their works, this article proposes that Cardenal was not only inspired by Pound’s reinvention of the epic and use of the archive, but also stirred by his figuration of the poet as a political actor, and persuaded by his condemnation of the U.S. government and usury. This affinity between these two great poets, I argue, discloses the slippage between two oppositional discourses—the Fascist and the Marxist—in their critiques of production in the mid-twentieth century.

The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature, 2015

The astounding commercial success of the literary boom femenino since the 1980s combined with a h... more The astounding commercial success of the literary boom femenino since the 1980s combined with a highly active female readership has dramatically reshaped the Latin American literary landscape that traditionally relegated women to the sidelines. However, even though bestselling women have gained visibility in the publishing industry, the association of the bestseller with “light,” trashy lit has produced a ghettoization of all publications by women to the reductive parameters of “women’s literature,” perpetuated by the critical oversight of innovative texts written by women. This article examines how the accelerating transformation of literature into an industry has produced a commodification of feminism, difference, and the eroticized female body into promotable concepts, and how contemporary experimental women writers have called attention to this process of market-driven co-optation, and responded by reworking these sites. Writing against marketable figurations of feminist girl power and the Allendian “levity of being,” the turn to abjection, cynicism, and anesthetized disenchantment by many women authors complicates the facile consumption of fiction as entertainment.

Uno de los textos menos comentados de Ficciones, “La secta del Fénix” ha sido tratado por lo gene... more Uno de los textos menos comentados de Ficciones, “La secta del Fénix” ha sido tratado por lo general por la crítica como un simple acertijo, ejemplar del chiste literario borgiano. Los críticos que han abarcado este texto coinciden en afirmar que el “secreto” de la Secta es el coito, como Borges mismo aludió en una entrevista con Ronald Christ en 1968. Este articulo recorre el legado crítico del texto, el performance del secreto por Borges en su entrevista con Christ, y cuestiona la tendencia crítica de recurrir a una lectura extratextual de “La secta del Fénix” para resolver el acertijo con la respuesta propuesta por el mismo autor. Al poner de lado la evidencia metatextual, a partir del concepto derridiano del “secreto” se despliegan otras posibilidades de lectura del acertijo, que reformulan el texto de un simple chiste con una respuesta única a un texto ricamente ambiguo, parte del corpus literario de Borges que problematiza cuestiones de identidad y lenguaje.
http://www.borges.pitt.edu/journal/variaciones-borges-39

Film Reviews by Carolyn Fornoff

environmental humanities and the politics of nature in culture, feminist and queer theories, and ... more environmental humanities and the politics of nature in culture, feminist and queer theories, and subjectivity and affect in contemporary culture. She has previously written for Mediatico on the Guatemalan film Ixcanul. Fornoff has a website here and you can follow her on Twitter at @c4noff. Documenting Extraction in La hija de la laguna (Ernesto Cabellos, 2015)

The fact that Ixcanul, one of the first Guatemalan features to ever receive broad international a... more The fact that Ixcanul, one of the first Guatemalan features to ever receive broad international acclaim, focuses on the precarity of a young indigenous woman and features boldly lush cinematography of the Guatemalan highlands, may prompt potential viewers to respond with wary anticipation. International audiences have long been known to eagerly consume Latin American films that offer exoticizing, tragic narratives about the struggles of impoverished, unfamiliar cultural groups. Fortunately, Ixcanul falls into none of the usual essentializing traps.

Books by Carolyn Fornoff

Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities, 2020

University of Minnesota Press , 2020

Humanists, scientists, and artists collaborate to address the disjunctive temporalities of ecolog... more Humanists, scientists, and artists collaborate to address the disjunctive temporalities of ecological crisis

This book contends that to represent and respond to crises wrought by climate change requires reframing time itself, making more visible the relationship between past, present, and future, and between a human life span and the planet’s. Timescales puts oceanographers, geophysicists, geologists, and anthropologists into conversation with literary scholars, art historians, and archaeologists to forge new intellectual spaces.