Swallowed: Political Ecology and Environmentalism in the Spanish American "Novela de la (original) (raw)
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Introduction_ The Latin American Ecocultural Reader
The Latin American Ecocultural Reader, 2020
The Latin American Ecocultural Reader is a comprehensive anthology of literary and cultural texts about the natural world. The selections, drawn from throughout the Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil, span from the early colonial period to the present. Editors Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes present work by canonical figures, including José Martí, Bartolomé de las Casas, Rubén Darío, and Alfonsina Storni, in the context of our current state of environmental crisis, prompting new interpretations of their celebrated writings. They also present contemporary work that illuminates the marginalized environmental cultures of women, indigenous, and Afro-Latin American populations. Each selection is introduced with a short essay on the author and the salience of their work; the selections are arranged into eight parts, each of which begins with an introductory essay that speaks to the political, economic, and environmental history of the time and provides interpretative cues for the selections that follow. The editors also include a general introduction with a concise overview of the field of ecocriticism as it has developed since the 1990s. They argue that various strands of environmental thought—recognizable today as extractivism, eco-feminism, Amerindian ontologies, and so forth—can be traced back through the centuries to the earliest colonial period, when Europeans first described the Americas as an edenic “New World” and appropriated the bodies of enslaved Indians and Africans to exploit its natural bounty.
Hispanic Ecocriticism, 2019
Hispanic Ecocriticism finds a rich soil in the main topics of environmental concern in the literature of Latin America and Spain, not only as a source for renewing critical analysis and hermeneutics, but also for the benefit of global environmental awareness. In a renewed exchange of transatlantic relationships, Hispanic Ecocriticism intermingles Latin American ecocritical issues of interest — the oil industry; contamination of forests and rivers; urban ecologies; African, Andean, and Amazonian biocultural ecosystems — with those of interest in Spain — animal rights and the ecological footprints of human activity in contemporary narratives of eco-science fiction, in dystopias, and in literature inspired by natural or rural landscapes that conceal ways of life and cultures in peril of extinction.
An Ecocritical Approach to Mexican and Colombian Brief Fiction, 2000-2015
This dissertation analyzes Mexican and Colombian brief fiction published after 2000, focusing on four authors from the Generation Zero Zero, Mexican authors Alberto Chimal and Heriberto Yépez and Colombian authors María Paz Ruiz Gil and Gabriela A. Arciniegas. The Generation Zero Zero consists of Latin American authors born in the 1970s who have published their major works after 2000. Agustín Cadena, Lorena Campa Rojas, Dolores Corrales Soriano, and Lauro Zavala separate the Generation Zero Zero from the writers of the Crack and claim that the group is heterogeneous in their lived experience in a time of crisis, their dismantling of utopic ideas, and their literary creations within the fantastic, science fiction and horror genres. This dissertation analyzes four authors of this generation to identify underlying ecocritical trends, an environmental unconscious, and the representation of human and non-human characters within this group of authors. Through an ecocritical approach to their writing and an exploration of their use of brief literary forms, I analyze Chimal, Yépez, Ruiz Gil, and Arciniegas’ representation of the environment and the non-human to reveal both anthropocentric and ecocentric perspectives within their publications, demonstrating a possible divide in the Generation Zero Zero in regard to environmental discourse.
2009
Day and Correa-Díaz 348 the New World, and its lack of institutional support, anyone observing the youth, vigor, and productivity of environmental historians there today would certainly sense that the situation is rapidly changing" (73). 2 Miller has joined successfully those regional, young, vigorous, and productive historians from the American Academy with a solid and well-researched book. More to the point, Miller's book helps to overcome the limited "recentism" that informs the scholarly production on Latin American Environmental History. According to Andrew Sluyter, despite the healthy number and diversity of articles, "those same contributions do exhibit one notable bias: recentism. They disproportionately focus on the twentieth century, followed closely by an affinity for the nineteenth century." 3 Certainly this is not the case when we read the book reviewed here. Miller's work has achieved the not minor task of extending and deepening our understanding of pre-Columbian America and early modern (colonial) times in the Americas, and thus contributing to a more comprehensive history of Latin America, which definitely restores its rightful place to nature. However, if we are to attend to Hughes's claim that "[world environmental history] is also one of the earliest kinds of environmental history to appear" (78), it is necessary to understand that all local, regional, and national EHs belong as particular pieces of inquiry of a global historiographical (and multidisciplinary) approach to world history, one which records and studies the interplay between humanity and the environment throughout history, since the latter "has had a formative role in every period of history, from ancient times onward" (3). The essential question in the field is the one formulated by Cline Ponting: "How has the environment of the world shaped human history and how have people 2 What is Environmental History? (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006.) Hughes provides a detailed list of bibliographical references of environmental histories in Spanish. The reader can also find useful information about Latin American environmental theorists/thinkers, particularly in the field of ethics, in
Mythical dimension of human-environmental relations in modern latin- american prose fiction
Various modes of interaction between humans and the natural world are among the most important topics in modern Latin-American literature. The narrative discourse of the region debates the Old World myths and ideals projected onto the Latin-American reality. It also incorporates indigenous mythical concepts which contribute towards the creation of a new and original literary vision of the natural world. Growing interest in ecocriticism and its importance in postcolonial studies highlight the validity of new approaches to non-Western cultures and literatures and the necessity of reinterpretation of cultural practice within environmentally conscious theoretical framework. Far from being exhaustive, the present study suggests some new and ecologically sensitive interpretative patterns which centre on the relationship between myth, nature and narrative.
Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Latin American Culture (Syllabus)
In this course, we explore how Latin American cultural production, both past and present, exposes and confronts the profound challenges and consequences of the Anthropocene-a geological epoch defined by human impact on the planet. Through an ecocritical lens, we will examine the environmental and social consequences of this era, focusing on the intersections of cultural studies, literary studies, and environmental humanities. By engaging with works that conceptualize the Anthropocene and related terms like the Capitalocene and the Plantationocene, we will uncover the connections between our ongoing environmental crisis and the legacies of colonialism, racialization, and extractivism. Our interdisciplinary approach includes diverse texts and artistic pieces that illuminate these complex interactions while also proposing possible responses to the problems they pose. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with current scholarship in environmental humanities and have a deeper understanding of Latin American culture, literature, and environmental art. The course will be taught in English, with further readings suggested for those proficient in Spanish or Portuguese.
2015
Political ecology is the field where power strategies are deployed to deconstruct the unsustainable modern rationality and to mobilize social actions in the globalised world for the construction of a sustainable future founded on the potentialities of nature and cultural creativity; in emancipatory thinking and political ethics to renew the meaning and sustainability of life. Political ecology roots theoretical deconstruction in the political arena; beyond recognizing cultural diversity, traditional knowledge and indigenous peoples' rights, radical environmentalism contests the hegemonic unification power of the market as the ineluctable fate of humanity. Political ecology in Latin America is operating a similar procedure as the one achieved by Marx with Hegelian idealism, turning the philosophy of post-modernity (Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida) on the grounds of a political ontology: territorializing thinking on being, difference and otherness in an environmental rationality, rooted in an ontology of cultural diversity, a politics of difference and an ethics of otherness. Decolonizing knowledge and legitimizing other knowledges-savoirs-wisdoms liberate alternative ways of understanding reality, nature, human life and social relations opening up different paths to reconstruct human life in the planet.