Mark Anderson | The University of Georgia (original) (raw)

Books by Mark Anderson

Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the last few decades as the f... more Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the last few decades as the full scope of anthropogenic climate change manifests itself and large-scale natural resource extraction has expanded into formerly remote areas that seemed beyond the reach of industrialization. Scientists and popular culture alike have turned to the term “Anthropocene” to capture the global scale of environmental and even geological transformations that humans have carried out over the last two centuries. The chapters in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature examine the dynamics and interplay between local cultures and the expansion of global capitalism in Latin America, emphasizing the role of art in bearing witness to and generating awareness of environmental and social crises, but also its possibilities for formulating solutions. They take particular care to draw out the ways in which local environmental crises in Latin American nations are witnessed and imagined as part of a global system, focusing on the problems of time, scale, and complexity as key terms in conceiving the dimensions of crisis. At the same time, they question the notion of the Anthropocene as a species-wide “human” historical project, making visible the coloniality of natural resource extraction in Latin America and its dire effects for local people, cultures, and environments.

Taking an ecocritical approach to Latin American cultural production including literature, film, performance, and digital artwork, the chapters in this volume develop a notion of ecological crisis that captures not only its documentary sense in the representation of environmental destruction, but also the crisis in the modern worldview provoked by the acknowledgment of the global scope of the disaster. In this sense, crisis is also the promise of a turning point, of the possibilities for change. Latin American artistic representations of ecological crisis thus create the conditions for projects that decolonize environments, developing new, sustainable ways of conceiving of and relating to our world, or returning to old ones.

In the aftermath of disaster, literary and other cultural representations of the event can play a... more In the aftermath of disaster, literary and other cultural representations of the event can play a role in the renegotiation of political power. In Disaster Writing, Mark D. Anderson analyzes four natural disasters in Latin America that acquired national significance and symbolism through literary mediation: the 1930 cyclone in the Dominican Republic, volcanic eruptions in Central America, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, and recurring drought in northeastern Brazil.

Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the disaster narratives, Anderson explores concepts such as the social construction of risk, landscape as political and cultural geography, vulnerability as the convergence of natural hazard and social marginalization, and the cultural mediation of trauma and loss. He shows how the political and historical contexts suggest a systematic link between natural disaster and cultural politics.

Journal Special Issues by Mark Anderson

A special number of open-access, online journal Ecozon@ dedicated to transatlantic Iberian, Latin... more A special number of open-access, online journal Ecozon@ dedicated to transatlantic Iberian, Latin American, and Lusophone African ecocriticisms. Click on the link above or visit Ecozon@'s site to access.

Papers by Mark Anderson

Escrituras de lo posglobal en América Latina, ed. Muller y Knobloch, 2024

Este ensayo coloca en una tensión productiva las obras Políticas de la amistad de Jacques Derrida... more Este ensayo coloca en una tensión productiva las obras Políticas de la amistad de Jacques Derrida y La caída del cielo de Davi Kopenawa Yanomami con el fin de repensar la política desde la participación y la representación más que humanas.

Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics, 2023

One of the key methodological challenges in the environmental humanities has been problematizing ... more One of the key methodological challenges in the environmental humanities has been problematizing the representation of nonhuman entities. In a field in which the aesthetics of an artwork has always been viewed as the cross-pollination of the historical development of artistic styles and techniques, social context, and individual or collective creativity, it is quite difficult to imagine how representations of plants, animals, and environments can be imagined as anything other than mimesis as it is traditionally conceived, that is, as the subjective or idealistic projection of human values and interests over nonhuman objects. This chapter explores the implications of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's theorization of Indigenous multinaturalism for the mimetic representation of nonhumans in literature.

The Falling Sky recounts incursions since the 1960s of napë pë (hostile outsiders, white people) ... more The Falling Sky recounts incursions since the 1960s of napë pë (hostile outsiders, white people) into Yanomami territory in the Brazilian Amazonia, looking first to extract souls then land, tin, gold, and oil. Devastating epidemics followed each of these waves of extractive activity, leading the Yanomami to inscribe the napë pë’s bodies, trade goods, and even their words within a framework of contagious “epidemic fumes’’ associated with Yoasí, the giver of death. From a Eurocentric scientific ontology, the conceptualization of contagion through epidemic fumes brings to mind outmoded notions of how infectious diseases are transmitted; Kopenawa would thus seemingly have little to contribute to a broader understanding of the relations between extractivism, environmental destruction, public health, and cultural loss. However, Kopenawa and Albert dedicate the majority of the book to shamanistic practices and Yanomami relational ontologies, with the explicit goal of engaging in what recent anthropological thought calls ‘’ontological diplomacy.” More than conserving in writing beliefs threatened by encroaching capitalism, Kopenawa wants to teach the napë pë to listen to the songs of the creator deity, Omama, and to communicate with the xapiri, animal spirits of human ancestors. Following Viveiros de Castro’s exhortation to recognize indigenous thought as such, I propose a materialist reading of Kopenawa’s project in dialogue with Derrida’s theorizations of the gift and the trace. Reading Kopenawa alongside Derrida in a relation of productive equivocation draws out his theorization of the relations between discursivity, contagion, and capitalistic necropolitics.

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema, ed. Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes, 2021

This chapter examines representations of viscosity, porosity, and toxicity in two documentary fil... more This chapter examines representations of viscosity, porosity, and toxicity in two documentary films dealing with oil extraction and pollution in the Ecuadoran Amazon: Crude: The Real Price of Oil (dir. Joe Berlinger, Entendre Films, 2009) and The Blood of Kouan (dir. Yorgos Avgeropolous, Small Planet, 2009). I argue that viscosity functions within these films as a trope that disrupts static notions of the body, which rely on subject/object dualism, particularly in the relationships between human bodies, nonhuman bodies, and environments as a whole. This modern ideal of the self-contained, static subject and of the categorical apprehension of materials as passive objects of human instrumentality is further confounded by the experience of toxicity, which reveals the subject’s porosity to material flows of different types, and of the circulation within its body of “foreign” matter, some of which acts upon it in a perverse or toxic manner. Finally, I argue that the viscous materiality of the filmic medium creates effects by which the viewer is implicated in the bodily experience of toxicity, leading to a form of ethical engagement that arises from the materiality of encounter more than ideological predisposition.

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2019

In representations of violence leading to death, political agency is nearly always attributed sol... more In representations of violence leading to death, political agency is nearly always attributed solely to the killer, who is seen as extracting sovereign power through the enactment of objectifying violence. In contrast, the victim's body is portrayed as an object entirely voided of any political agency of its own, silenced absolutely and definitively in the political event that is the killing itself Agency may only be associated with the dead body when it is projected over it after the fact through processes of mythification and/or monumentalization, leading to overdetermined representations that opaque any possibilities for the ongoing political agency of the deceased. Recent representations of dying bodies in Mexico problematize this conceptualization of politicized killing as a total stripping of agency from the victims. They contest the notion of violent death as an event, portraying it rather as a transactional process that is never fully contained or complete, generating affective debts that persist in the living and obligate them to respond. This essay analyzes how dying bodies may resist reification as fetishized political objects, either by occupying a liminal position between life and death or through generating a demos of their own through affective engagement.

Cli-Fi: A Companion, ed. Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns Putra, 2019

A brief discussion of Loyola Brandão's cli-fi novel Não Verás Pais Nenhum in the context of the A... more A brief discussion of Loyola Brandão's cli-fi novel Não Verás Pais Nenhum in the context of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene debate, with some suggestions for teaching the novel in the college classroom.

Este ensayo analiza las estrategias que emplea el autor mexicano Enrique Serna para rematerializa... more Este ensayo analiza las estrategias que emplea el autor mexicano Enrique Serna para rematerializar la palabra como una fuerza afectiva en varias de sus obras. Se publicó en La sonrisa afilada: Enrique Serna ante la crítica (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2017), antología editada por Martín Camps.

An overview of Daniel Sada's writing and an analysis of the common attribution of a "baroque" aes... more An overview of Daniel Sada's writing and an analysis of the common attribution of a "baroque" aesthetics to his work as it relates to the recurring themes of violence, nomadism, and Northern Mexican popular culture. Published in Contemporary Latin American Fiction: Critical Insights, ed. Ignacio López Calvo (Ipswich, MA: Salem, 2017).

Transatlantic ecocriticism engages cultural production from nations around the Atlantic Basin to ... more Transatlantic ecocriticism engages cultural production from nations around the Atlantic Basin to study the ways in which environments and cultures are affected and transformed by the multidirectional circulation of animal and plant species, capital, commodities, development and land management practices, forms of activism and resistance, and people across the Atlantic Ocean. Until very recently, transatlantic ecocriticism has been synonymous with North-North (that is, North American and Northern European) approaches to the representation of environment and ecological discourse. The incorporation of perspectives emerging from other transatlantic circuits has the potential to enhance significantly ecocritical debate, particularly with regards to the geopolitics of socioenvironmental degradation and coordinated environmental activism. Although there are substantial numbers of activists, artists, and scholars from the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, and Lusophone Africa involved in intercontinental collaboration and dialogue on issues related to ecocriticism, little critical attention has so far been devoted to this phenomenon. This collection of essays looks to draw attention to the transatlantic socioecological movements that have arisen in response to the drastic environmental and social transformations, displacements, and transplantings that the colonial and postcolonial history of the Southern Atlantic has entailed. Since the late 1980s, a variety of theoretical correctives to neocolonial, hegemonic Euro-American strains of environmentalism have appeared, prominently among them Ramachandra Guha's seminal essay " Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique. " In this essay, Guha deconstructs the inappropriate claim of universality and the unrecognized cultural bias ingrained in one of the most radical strains of Euro-American environmentalism, deep ecology. Guha exposes deep ecologists' lack of concern with social equality and the preservation of livelihoods in peripheral regions in the world economic system. In their 1997 book Varieties of Environmentalism, Guha and Joan Martínez-Alier developed the concept of " the environmentalism of the poor " to highlight further the unequal social distribution (asymmetries between benefits and risks, responsibility and vulnerability, etc.) of the ecological depletion caused by economic growth and capital accumulation.

This chapter analyzes the roles that literature played in the mediation of public perceptions and... more This chapter analyzes the roles that literature played in the mediation of public perceptions and state policies for dealing with the long history of drought in Northeastern Brazil, particularly before the 1960s when few technical/academic studies of the phenomenon existed.

This chapter studies the political uses of crónicas and testimonial literature representing the 1... more This chapter studies the political uses of crónicas and testimonial literature representing the 1985 earthquake that severely affected Mexico City.

This chapter studies volcanic iconography and the trope of volcanic eruption in a variety of Cent... more This chapter studies volcanic iconography and the trope of volcanic eruption in a variety of Central American cultural representations from the flag of the República de Centroamérica to poetry by Rubén Darío, José Coronel Urtecho, Claribel Alegría, and Roque Dalton.

This chapter deals with how Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo used the destruction wrou... more This chapter deals with how Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo used the destruction wrought by Cyclone San Zenón not only to consolidate his power but also to remake the Dominican Republic according to his specifications.

Published in Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature, and the Arts, ed. Jos... more Published in Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature, and the Arts, ed. José Manuel Marrero Henríquez (Alcalá: University of Alcalá; Instituto Franklin, 2016).

Posthumanist philosophy has relied to a large degree on the gaze—specifically, the animal’s gaze—to destabilize the human/nature binomial and problematize the straightforward abstraction of the subject in symbolic opposition to the object. Recent ecocriticism presents a more holistic approach to this problem, emphasizing the immediacy of the full bodily experience of the environment as what both invokes and exceeds symbolic mediation. I follow this work in locating the generation of material subjectivities in full sensorial immersion within the environment, but in this essay I concentrate primarily on the sense of touch, especially as it relates to friction—the touching of bodies and the transfer of kinetic energy between them, which may be as slight as a breeze flowing over one’s skin, as formidable as total immersion in water, as insidious as toxicity or infection, and as violently transversal as abrasion, bruising, or laceration. The focus on frictions of different intensities in Amazonian writing leads to a conceptualization of being—and, therefore, agency—as something not limited to humans, but rather as an ecological condition proper to bodies of any kind that interact with material flows through bodily contact.

I argue that literary and filmic representations of Mexico City's underground and water cycles di... more I argue that literary and filmic representations of Mexico City's underground and water cycles disrupt the "flattening" effects of the neoliberal global view and modern planning.

Recent criticism of the Spanish American novela total likens the genre’s “totalizing” approach to... more Recent criticism of the Spanish American novela total likens the genre’s “totalizing” approach to social representation to that of state-administered nationalism, in which differences are either systematically erased or institutionalized through demographic segmentation in order to construct homogeneous, “democratic” consensus among political agents. In this view, the total novel misappropriates others’ voices for the cultural elite’s own political and commercial ends. In contrast, the testimonio is held up as a more democratic genre that distributes representational authority among a variety of agents. This essay reevaluates the relationship between the novela total and testimonial modes of discourse, arguing that Mexican author Fernando del Paso’s total novels draw on the litigious power of testimonial as well
as modernist aesthetics of rupture to disrupt the narrative of democratic consensus constructed by Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional and to postulate a civil society that congeals as a horizontal, aggregative ethical community in opposition to state politics.

Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the last few decades as the f... more Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the last few decades as the full scope of anthropogenic climate change manifests itself and large-scale natural resource extraction has expanded into formerly remote areas that seemed beyond the reach of industrialization. Scientists and popular culture alike have turned to the term “Anthropocene” to capture the global scale of environmental and even geological transformations that humans have carried out over the last two centuries. The chapters in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature examine the dynamics and interplay between local cultures and the expansion of global capitalism in Latin America, emphasizing the role of art in bearing witness to and generating awareness of environmental and social crises, but also its possibilities for formulating solutions. They take particular care to draw out the ways in which local environmental crises in Latin American nations are witnessed and imagined as part of a global system, focusing on the problems of time, scale, and complexity as key terms in conceiving the dimensions of crisis. At the same time, they question the notion of the Anthropocene as a species-wide “human” historical project, making visible the coloniality of natural resource extraction in Latin America and its dire effects for local people, cultures, and environments.

Taking an ecocritical approach to Latin American cultural production including literature, film, performance, and digital artwork, the chapters in this volume develop a notion of ecological crisis that captures not only its documentary sense in the representation of environmental destruction, but also the crisis in the modern worldview provoked by the acknowledgment of the global scope of the disaster. In this sense, crisis is also the promise of a turning point, of the possibilities for change. Latin American artistic representations of ecological crisis thus create the conditions for projects that decolonize environments, developing new, sustainable ways of conceiving of and relating to our world, or returning to old ones.

In the aftermath of disaster, literary and other cultural representations of the event can play a... more In the aftermath of disaster, literary and other cultural representations of the event can play a role in the renegotiation of political power. In Disaster Writing, Mark D. Anderson analyzes four natural disasters in Latin America that acquired national significance and symbolism through literary mediation: the 1930 cyclone in the Dominican Republic, volcanic eruptions in Central America, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, and recurring drought in northeastern Brazil.

Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the disaster narratives, Anderson explores concepts such as the social construction of risk, landscape as political and cultural geography, vulnerability as the convergence of natural hazard and social marginalization, and the cultural mediation of trauma and loss. He shows how the political and historical contexts suggest a systematic link between natural disaster and cultural politics.

A special number of open-access, online journal Ecozon@ dedicated to transatlantic Iberian, Latin... more A special number of open-access, online journal Ecozon@ dedicated to transatlantic Iberian, Latin American, and Lusophone African ecocriticisms. Click on the link above or visit Ecozon@'s site to access.

Escrituras de lo posglobal en América Latina, ed. Muller y Knobloch, 2024

Este ensayo coloca en una tensión productiva las obras Políticas de la amistad de Jacques Derrida... more Este ensayo coloca en una tensión productiva las obras Políticas de la amistad de Jacques Derrida y La caída del cielo de Davi Kopenawa Yanomami con el fin de repensar la política desde la participación y la representación más que humanas.

Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics, 2023

One of the key methodological challenges in the environmental humanities has been problematizing ... more One of the key methodological challenges in the environmental humanities has been problematizing the representation of nonhuman entities. In a field in which the aesthetics of an artwork has always been viewed as the cross-pollination of the historical development of artistic styles and techniques, social context, and individual or collective creativity, it is quite difficult to imagine how representations of plants, animals, and environments can be imagined as anything other than mimesis as it is traditionally conceived, that is, as the subjective or idealistic projection of human values and interests over nonhuman objects. This chapter explores the implications of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's theorization of Indigenous multinaturalism for the mimetic representation of nonhumans in literature.

The Falling Sky recounts incursions since the 1960s of napë pë (hostile outsiders, white people) ... more The Falling Sky recounts incursions since the 1960s of napë pë (hostile outsiders, white people) into Yanomami territory in the Brazilian Amazonia, looking first to extract souls then land, tin, gold, and oil. Devastating epidemics followed each of these waves of extractive activity, leading the Yanomami to inscribe the napë pë’s bodies, trade goods, and even their words within a framework of contagious “epidemic fumes’’ associated with Yoasí, the giver of death. From a Eurocentric scientific ontology, the conceptualization of contagion through epidemic fumes brings to mind outmoded notions of how infectious diseases are transmitted; Kopenawa would thus seemingly have little to contribute to a broader understanding of the relations between extractivism, environmental destruction, public health, and cultural loss. However, Kopenawa and Albert dedicate the majority of the book to shamanistic practices and Yanomami relational ontologies, with the explicit goal of engaging in what recent anthropological thought calls ‘’ontological diplomacy.” More than conserving in writing beliefs threatened by encroaching capitalism, Kopenawa wants to teach the napë pë to listen to the songs of the creator deity, Omama, and to communicate with the xapiri, animal spirits of human ancestors. Following Viveiros de Castro’s exhortation to recognize indigenous thought as such, I propose a materialist reading of Kopenawa’s project in dialogue with Derrida’s theorizations of the gift and the trace. Reading Kopenawa alongside Derrida in a relation of productive equivocation draws out his theorization of the relations between discursivity, contagion, and capitalistic necropolitics.

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema, ed. Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes, 2021

This chapter examines representations of viscosity, porosity, and toxicity in two documentary fil... more This chapter examines representations of viscosity, porosity, and toxicity in two documentary films dealing with oil extraction and pollution in the Ecuadoran Amazon: Crude: The Real Price of Oil (dir. Joe Berlinger, Entendre Films, 2009) and The Blood of Kouan (dir. Yorgos Avgeropolous, Small Planet, 2009). I argue that viscosity functions within these films as a trope that disrupts static notions of the body, which rely on subject/object dualism, particularly in the relationships between human bodies, nonhuman bodies, and environments as a whole. This modern ideal of the self-contained, static subject and of the categorical apprehension of materials as passive objects of human instrumentality is further confounded by the experience of toxicity, which reveals the subject’s porosity to material flows of different types, and of the circulation within its body of “foreign” matter, some of which acts upon it in a perverse or toxic manner. Finally, I argue that the viscous materiality of the filmic medium creates effects by which the viewer is implicated in the bodily experience of toxicity, leading to a form of ethical engagement that arises from the materiality of encounter more than ideological predisposition.

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2019

In representations of violence leading to death, political agency is nearly always attributed sol... more In representations of violence leading to death, political agency is nearly always attributed solely to the killer, who is seen as extracting sovereign power through the enactment of objectifying violence. In contrast, the victim's body is portrayed as an object entirely voided of any political agency of its own, silenced absolutely and definitively in the political event that is the killing itself Agency may only be associated with the dead body when it is projected over it after the fact through processes of mythification and/or monumentalization, leading to overdetermined representations that opaque any possibilities for the ongoing political agency of the deceased. Recent representations of dying bodies in Mexico problematize this conceptualization of politicized killing as a total stripping of agency from the victims. They contest the notion of violent death as an event, portraying it rather as a transactional process that is never fully contained or complete, generating affective debts that persist in the living and obligate them to respond. This essay analyzes how dying bodies may resist reification as fetishized political objects, either by occupying a liminal position between life and death or through generating a demos of their own through affective engagement.

Cli-Fi: A Companion, ed. Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns Putra, 2019

A brief discussion of Loyola Brandão's cli-fi novel Não Verás Pais Nenhum in the context of the A... more A brief discussion of Loyola Brandão's cli-fi novel Não Verás Pais Nenhum in the context of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene debate, with some suggestions for teaching the novel in the college classroom.

Este ensayo analiza las estrategias que emplea el autor mexicano Enrique Serna para rematerializa... more Este ensayo analiza las estrategias que emplea el autor mexicano Enrique Serna para rematerializar la palabra como una fuerza afectiva en varias de sus obras. Se publicó en La sonrisa afilada: Enrique Serna ante la crítica (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2017), antología editada por Martín Camps.

An overview of Daniel Sada's writing and an analysis of the common attribution of a "baroque" aes... more An overview of Daniel Sada's writing and an analysis of the common attribution of a "baroque" aesthetics to his work as it relates to the recurring themes of violence, nomadism, and Northern Mexican popular culture. Published in Contemporary Latin American Fiction: Critical Insights, ed. Ignacio López Calvo (Ipswich, MA: Salem, 2017).

Transatlantic ecocriticism engages cultural production from nations around the Atlantic Basin to ... more Transatlantic ecocriticism engages cultural production from nations around the Atlantic Basin to study the ways in which environments and cultures are affected and transformed by the multidirectional circulation of animal and plant species, capital, commodities, development and land management practices, forms of activism and resistance, and people across the Atlantic Ocean. Until very recently, transatlantic ecocriticism has been synonymous with North-North (that is, North American and Northern European) approaches to the representation of environment and ecological discourse. The incorporation of perspectives emerging from other transatlantic circuits has the potential to enhance significantly ecocritical debate, particularly with regards to the geopolitics of socioenvironmental degradation and coordinated environmental activism. Although there are substantial numbers of activists, artists, and scholars from the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, and Lusophone Africa involved in intercontinental collaboration and dialogue on issues related to ecocriticism, little critical attention has so far been devoted to this phenomenon. This collection of essays looks to draw attention to the transatlantic socioecological movements that have arisen in response to the drastic environmental and social transformations, displacements, and transplantings that the colonial and postcolonial history of the Southern Atlantic has entailed. Since the late 1980s, a variety of theoretical correctives to neocolonial, hegemonic Euro-American strains of environmentalism have appeared, prominently among them Ramachandra Guha's seminal essay " Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique. " In this essay, Guha deconstructs the inappropriate claim of universality and the unrecognized cultural bias ingrained in one of the most radical strains of Euro-American environmentalism, deep ecology. Guha exposes deep ecologists' lack of concern with social equality and the preservation of livelihoods in peripheral regions in the world economic system. In their 1997 book Varieties of Environmentalism, Guha and Joan Martínez-Alier developed the concept of " the environmentalism of the poor " to highlight further the unequal social distribution (asymmetries between benefits and risks, responsibility and vulnerability, etc.) of the ecological depletion caused by economic growth and capital accumulation.

This chapter analyzes the roles that literature played in the mediation of public perceptions and... more This chapter analyzes the roles that literature played in the mediation of public perceptions and state policies for dealing with the long history of drought in Northeastern Brazil, particularly before the 1960s when few technical/academic studies of the phenomenon existed.

This chapter studies the political uses of crónicas and testimonial literature representing the 1... more This chapter studies the political uses of crónicas and testimonial literature representing the 1985 earthquake that severely affected Mexico City.

This chapter studies volcanic iconography and the trope of volcanic eruption in a variety of Cent... more This chapter studies volcanic iconography and the trope of volcanic eruption in a variety of Central American cultural representations from the flag of the República de Centroamérica to poetry by Rubén Darío, José Coronel Urtecho, Claribel Alegría, and Roque Dalton.

This chapter deals with how Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo used the destruction wrou... more This chapter deals with how Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo used the destruction wrought by Cyclone San Zenón not only to consolidate his power but also to remake the Dominican Republic according to his specifications.

Published in Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature, and the Arts, ed. Jos... more Published in Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature, and the Arts, ed. José Manuel Marrero Henríquez (Alcalá: University of Alcalá; Instituto Franklin, 2016).

Posthumanist philosophy has relied to a large degree on the gaze—specifically, the animal’s gaze—to destabilize the human/nature binomial and problematize the straightforward abstraction of the subject in symbolic opposition to the object. Recent ecocriticism presents a more holistic approach to this problem, emphasizing the immediacy of the full bodily experience of the environment as what both invokes and exceeds symbolic mediation. I follow this work in locating the generation of material subjectivities in full sensorial immersion within the environment, but in this essay I concentrate primarily on the sense of touch, especially as it relates to friction—the touching of bodies and the transfer of kinetic energy between them, which may be as slight as a breeze flowing over one’s skin, as formidable as total immersion in water, as insidious as toxicity or infection, and as violently transversal as abrasion, bruising, or laceration. The focus on frictions of different intensities in Amazonian writing leads to a conceptualization of being—and, therefore, agency—as something not limited to humans, but rather as an ecological condition proper to bodies of any kind that interact with material flows through bodily contact.

I argue that literary and filmic representations of Mexico City's underground and water cycles di... more I argue that literary and filmic representations of Mexico City's underground and water cycles disrupt the "flattening" effects of the neoliberal global view and modern planning.

Recent criticism of the Spanish American novela total likens the genre’s “totalizing” approach to... more Recent criticism of the Spanish American novela total likens the genre’s “totalizing” approach to social representation to that of state-administered nationalism, in which differences are either systematically erased or institutionalized through demographic segmentation in order to construct homogeneous, “democratic” consensus among political agents. In this view, the total novel misappropriates others’ voices for the cultural elite’s own political and commercial ends. In contrast, the testimonio is held up as a more democratic genre that distributes representational authority among a variety of agents. This essay reevaluates the relationship between the novela total and testimonial modes of discourse, arguing that Mexican author Fernando del Paso’s total novels draw on the litigious power of testimonial as well
as modernist aesthetics of rupture to disrupt the narrative of democratic consensus constructed by Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional and to postulate a civil society that congeals as a horizontal, aggregative ethical community in opposition to state politics.

I argue that Yanez's Al filo del agua presents a perspective of the Mexican revolution as a rebel... more I argue that Yanez's Al filo del agua presents a perspective of the Mexican revolution as a rebellion against the autocratic order responsible for repressing both inner human nature and external non-human nature. My arguments are informed by Horkheimer and Adorno's concept of the "revolt of nature."

This paper deals with the mechanics of perception in the encounter with Amazonian environments an... more This paper deals with the mechanics of perception in the encounter with Amazonian environments and how perception disrupts the aesthetics of representation in writing by Euclides da Cunha, Alberto Rangel, and José Eustasio Rivera.

This paper provides an overview of Vargas Llosa’s theory of the total novel, followed by a discus... more This paper provides an overview of Vargas Llosa’s theory of the total novel, followed by a discussion of its position within the broader debates that arose in the post-World War II period in response to the revelations of the extent of human rights abuses under totalitarian regimes as well as concerns about the possibilities for democratic governance in the era of mass culture. As my examination of Vargas Llosa’s thought on the total novel reveals, despite its apparently purely aesthetic propositions, the total novel as a literary form was designed specifically to disrupt consensual ideological constructs that claimed to “close the book” on reality by accessing absolute truth. In this regard, the theory of the total novel comprised an incipient postmodernism that shared ground with early deconstructionism (due, at least in part, to the common influence of Blanchot and his reading of Mallarmé), recognizing the ultimate symbolic and ideological nature of all representation; but it was also decisively modern in its hierarchical privileging of representational forms that are closer to what Vargas Llosa, influenced by Karl Popper, calls “objective” or “real reality.” The total novel’s unmasking of the symbolism sustaining ideological interpretations of reality was designed to carry humanity closer to the horizons of unmediated, chaotic reality, even if those horizons could never be delineated clearly due humans’ inability to extricate themselves from culture.
On the other hand, this process of desymbolization—of detachment from historical and political identities--has also been linked to the rise of neoliberal multiculturalism and globalized market segmentation, that is, the construction of consumer identities distributed within ever more refined demographic categories. In this view, the total novel would play an important part within the Boom’s commercial project of (re)inventing Latin America as a regional marketplace, as the site of production of distinctive cultural products, and as a new demographic (the Latino) during the rapid expansion of globalization in the neoliberal capitalist model from the 1960s on. As I will show in my conclusions, however, there are ongoing tensions between these two distinct if entwined projects, since the total novel’s explicit supplementarity to reality draws into question the pragmatism claimed by the neoliberal consensus within which the Boom functions as a commercial paradigm. In this reading, the total novel persists as a destabilizing form rooted in modernist aesthetics of rupture within the larger integrationist project of the Boom and post-Boom. The internal tensions between the novel as critique and as commodity led to the abandonment of the total novel in the 1980s by the majority of its practitioners; but it has returned in recent years to contest the hegemony of the neoliberal consensus that portrays itself as the only possible reading of reality, thus taking on totalitarian overtones of its own.