Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics 9783110775907, 9783110775877

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Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics

Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics Edited by Jens Andermann, Gabriel Giorgi, and Victoria Saramago

ISBN 978-3-11-077587-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-077590-7 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-077596-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023937302 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: The Absolute Restoration of All Things (2022) © Miguel Fernández de Castro and Natalia Mendoza Rockwell Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents List of Illustrations

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Jens Andermann, Gabriel Giorgi, and Victoria Saramago Introduction 1

Itineraries Laura Barbas-Rhoden Ecocriticism 27 Carolyn Fornoff Extractivism

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Mark Anderson Multinaturalism/Nonhuman Representation

Keywords Ximena Briceño Animal 91 Dana Khromov Climate 109 Carolina Sá Carvalho Contagion 123 Javier Uriarte Desert 141 Valeria de los Ríos Extinction 157 Cynthia Francica Feminisms 173

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Contents

Catalina Arango-Correa Forest 189 Jorge Quintana Navarrete Geology 203 Jamille Pinheiro Dias Indigeneity 215 Adriana Michele Campos Johnson Infrastructure 229 Michel Nieva Labor 245 Ricardo Duarte Filho Land/Body 257 Gabriel Rudas Burgos Landscape 271 Héctor Hoyos Matter 285 Orlando Bentancor Mining 299 Sebastián Figueroa Monoculture 313 Victoria Saramago Oil 329 Lesley Wylie Plant 343 Ignacio Aguiló Race 355

Contents

Matías Ayala Munita Resilience 369 Gabriel Giorgi Strata 381 Gisela Heffes Toxicity 395 Jens Andermann Trance 409 Lisa Blackmore Water 421

Coda Planetarity as Radical Heterogeneity: A Conversation with Mary Louise Pratt 441 List of Contributors Index

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List of Illustrations Carolyn Fornoff Figure 1 Figure 2

Miguel Fernández de Castro and Natalia Mendoza, The Absolute Restoration of All Things, 2022. Image courtesy of the artists 45 Marcela Magno, “Bolivia, Salar de Uyuni, 20°32’54.95”S 67°22’36.33”O, 30 Abr 2019,” from the series Land II Litio (2022). Image courtesy of the artist 57

Carolina Sá Carvalho Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6

Vivian Caccuri, Mosquito net for Mosquito Shrine. III Kochi-Muziris Biennial, Kerala, India, 2018 124 Vivian Caccuri, Detail of Mosquito Shrine II, 2020 124 Frames from It’s Murder She Says. Animated film, Warner Bros, 1945 125 Vivian Caccuri, Mosquito Shrine. III Kochi-Muziris Biennial, Kerala, India, 2018 126 Frame from Campanha Nacional do Combate à Dengue. Ministério da Saúde, 2015 135 Frame from Haedes & Aegypta e a abordagem da Oxitec, 2013. Online video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHYADWpNidc (30 March 2023) 136

Cynthia Francica Figure 1 Figure 2

Still from Patricia Domínguez (in collaboration with Mujeres del Agua), La Balada de las Sirenas Secas. Video, 2020. 183 Still from Seba Calfuqueo, Kowkülen/Ser líquido. Video, 2020 185

Jamille Pinheiro Dias Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3

Denilson Baniwa, Não há cartografia no mundo dos pajés (There is no cartography in the world of shamans), 2020. Courtesy of the artist 220 Denilson Baniwa dressed as a Jaguar-Shaman in a cornfield. Mato Grosso, Brazil, 4 June 2021. Photograph by Jamille Pinheiro Dias 222 Yacunã Tuxá, Não somos Iracema (We are not Iracema). Digital illustration, 2019. Courtesy of the artist 224

Michel Nieva Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6

Colectivo Lamarencoche, La familia obrera (The working-class family), 2000 245 Pao Lunch, Pornopetróleo, 2016, installation sample 249 Pao Lunch, Pornopetróleo, 2016, installation sample 249 Pao Lunch, Pornopetróleo, 2016, installation sample 250 Pao Lunch, Pornopetróleo, 2016, installation sample 250 Pao Lunch, “El pozo” (The hole/The well), 2016. 30 × 40 cm. One of the nine paintings made with oil, blood and saliva from Pao Lunch’s installation 251

Ricardo Duarte Filho Figure 1 Figure 2

Lopo Homem and Antonio de Holanda, “Terra Brasilis” (1519), from the Miller Atlas. Bibliothèque Nationale de France 258 Fome de Resistência – Fundamento Kayapó Menkragnoti. Collective artwork, 2019–2020 264

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-203

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Figure 3

List of Illustrations

Painting of Fome de Resistência – Fundamento Kayapó Menkragnoti, 2019–2020 266

Gabriel Rudas Burgos Figure 1 Figure 2

Figure 3

Francisco Antonio Cano, Horizontes. Oil on canvas. Museum of Antioquia, 1913 272 “Le Chimborazo vu depuis le Plateau de Tapia. Dessiné par Thibaut, d’après une esquisse de M.r de Humboldt. Gravé par Bouquet. De l’Imprimerie de Langlois” [color]. Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique. Paris: F. Schoell, 1810 [–1813]. Plate 25 275 Pachacuti Yamqui, Juan de Santa Cruz. Drawing of the Corichancha temple. “Relacion de antigüedades deste reyno del Pirú” (1613). Tres relaciones de antigüedades peruanas. Ed. Marcos Jimenez de la Espada, printing and casting by M. Tello, 1879. 257 278

Héctor Hoyos Figure 1 Figure 2

Figure 3

Casa Nacional de la Moneda, Potosí. Photo by Dan Lundberg (Creative Commons) 286 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, “Plus Ultra, el ynga: ‘I am the support for your columns’, c. 1590.” In Martín de Murúa, Historia del origen y genealogía real de los reyes Incas del Perú, Galvin manuscript. Courtesy of Seán Galvin, Image Getty Research Institute 287 Caspar David Friedrich, “Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” (The wanderer above the sea of fog), 1817. Hamburger Kunsthalle 289

Sebastián Figueroa Figure 1

Example of clear-cutting in Biobío, Chile. Photo by Resumen.cl

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Victoria Saramago Figure 1

Helena Ignez in A família do barulho (The Family of Disorder), 1970

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Gabriel Giorgi Figure 1

Page from Museo de la bruma, Galo Ghigliotto, 2017

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Gisela Heffes Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4

Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Conjunto vacío, 2015, 147 404 Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Conjunto vacío, 2015, 238 and 239 Verónica Gerber Bicecci, La compañía, 2019, 14 405 Verónica Gerber Bicecci, La compañía, 2019, 16 406

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Lisa Blackmore Figure 1 Figure 2

Map of Tenochtitlan, printed 1524 in Nuremberg, Germany, attributed to Friedrich Peypus (1485–1534) 424 Itaipu dam on the Paraná river, between Brazil and Paraguay, 2013. Source: Deni Williams, WikiCommons (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0) 425

List of Illustrations

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5 Figure 6

Image of polluted riverbed following the tailings dam collapse in Bento Rodrigues, Minas Gerais. 19 November 2015. Source: Romerito Pontes, WikiCommons (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0) 425 Yeni y Nan, photograph of the performance Integraciones en el agua II, 1982. Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas. Photo courtesy the artists and Henrique Faría, New York 428 Leonel Vásquez, Río La Verdad, 2022. Photo courtesy the artist 432 Photo of the Muisca crop cultivation system being recreated by Colectivo Camellones y Zanjas in the Reserva Thomas Van der Hammen, Susa, Bogotá. 6 August 2022. Photo: Sergio Durán; Courtesy of Colectivo Camellones y Zanjas (María Buenaventura, Diego Bermúdez, Juliana Steiner, Lorena Rodríguez Gallo) 434

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Introduction El auge de lo humano (The Human Surge, 2016), Argentinian filmmaker Eduardo Williams’s staggeringly ambitious feature debut, seems at first to be about nothing in particular—which is to say, about everything in general. In quite literally disorienting fashion, the camera follows one restless character after another on their ramblings through savannah and rainforest, through dull suburban neighborhoods, clogged street markets and cavernous bedrooms, almost like an alien gaze trying to make sense of the multiple connections and paths crossing between, say, a supermarket cashier arriving late to work and a customer walking away with her groceries, the porn-on-demand channel on which some young men in Argentina and Mozambique live-stream themselves to in order to beef up their income, or even the tunnels of an anthill in Africa one of them urinates on and which may or may not run all the way to a tropical forest in the Philippines. Despite the incessant talking and texting of the human characters, including an automated voice at a cellphone assembly line confirming time and again that all is “okay,” a meaningful sequence refuses to emerge. The film leaves us meandering from one situation and one continent to the next because space and time have been flattened (as have the “identities” floating through them) to the point of interchangeability. Whether we are in someone’s basement at La Matanza or at a shipping company in Maputo, taking a splash into a forest pond in the Philippines or wading through a flooded street in Argentina following torrential rains, what could once have been sources of narrative development and conflict—the hardship after losing a job, the welling-up of desire and rivalry between youngsters, the flight of city-dwellers into the open spaces beyond—withers away as soon as the next Whatsapp message arrives or the wireless connection drops. There is little to look out for or look forward to when things are basically the same everywhere, Williams’s film seems to suggest, hence time (in the sense of diegetic development, driven by at least the possibility of change) turns into space, into a tracing of the ever-greater network of connections that make up an assemblage. Because these bonds are sustained by affects rather than cause-effect relations, their impact on film form is twofold: on the level of the image, bodies, objects and materials move in and out of focus without any clear distinction between who or what is figure and what is ground; on the level of the sequence, distraction and digression (as when we click on one of several open tabs on a browser) take over the function of narrative progress. El auge de lo humano, in its juxtaposition between bodies, things and immaterial signals, is also an attempt at forcing cinema to behold what Isabelle Stengers (2015: 43) calls “the intrusion of Gaia”, that is, “the assemblage of coupled material processes” that respond to, and trigger all kinds of minor and major convulsions within, global capitalism as a regime of accumulation increasingly founded on dematerialization (including both https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-001

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the deindustrialization of the metropolitan centers and concurrent outsourcing of manufacturing and waste management to the peripheries). What really “surges” before us in El auge de lo humano is, then, the nonhuman or more-than-human. In bold yet no less enigmatic fashion, Williams’s film takes hold of what Mary Louise Pratt, in the coda to this volume, terms “the millennial pivot from global to planetary, and from the post to the geo” (Pratt, this volume; see also Gabrys 2018). It uses the unique ability of the filmic medium as, at one and the same time, a photographic index of the real and as stringing together individual images and sequences into larger units that have the character of fictions, to offer a narrative of how man-made technologies and the regimes of production and forms of sociality that sustain them, are turning into a “force of nature” of planetary extensions, at the same time as these are also shot through with, and conditioned by, nonhuman existents and events (extreme weather, mould, insects). If the global is grounded in an anthropocentric notion of dominance over nature and on the promise of a world made as a projection of human scale and needs, the planetary instead “decenters the human” (Chakrabarty 2021: 3; see also, on the notion of scale, Fornoff et al. 2020: xiii; and Clark 2015: 71–114) by mobilizing non-human agents and forces that, under the sign of catastrophe and even extinction, present a limit to the dreams of endless extraction and profit. Even though they might appear desperately feeble, there are in fact two “storylines”—or perhaps we should better call them affective chains—unfolding in El auge de lo humano: on the one hand, the “virtual” networks of communications based on wireless technology and, on the other, the material and sensory ones that configure bodies and environments into different modes of symbiosis. The film highlights the interfaces between these two, interestingly, not in the more obvious fashion of foregrounding the global finance economy’s disavowed yet ever-expanding mass of discarded material that Marco Armiero (2021) calls the “wasteocene.” Rather, it does so by investigating the multiple reconfigurations of how bodies and environments, humans and nonhumans, relate and interfere with one another in the presence/absence of the virtual. As expressed most clearly in the anthill shot (but also in the one of the street that becomes a river), what Williams invites us to undertake is a foray into the geology of late capitalism, the moment when, as Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro put it, the “transformation of humans into a geological force, that is, into an ‘objective’ phenomenon or ‘natural’ object, is paid back with the intrusion of Gaia in the human world, giving the Earth System the menacing form of a historical subject, a political agent, a moral person.” Such an entanglement of agencies, they conclude, also entails an “inversion of the relationship between figure and ground, the ambiented becomes the ambient [. . .] and the converse is equally the case” (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2017: 14). To delve into the forms, knowledges and questionings put forward by El auge de lo humano, indeed, also means to acknowledge Gaia’s intrusion into the humanistic foundations of Western understandings of art, beauty and, ultimately, nature.

Introduction

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Aesthetics and the Planetary Turn What we call environmental aesthetics is lodged in the very moment of inversion called out by Danowski and Viveiros de Castro. Aesthetics is a concept that, at least since its re-introduction into modern critical thought by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the early eighteenth century, has been deployed as both referring to the sensory and imaginative experience of beauty—and thus also to a mode of accessing truth by way of “sensible discourse” rather than logical reasoning, in Baumgarten’s (1954: 6–10) expression—and as the “science of perception” that asks, as Kant would posit, for the general principles underwriting individual aesthetic judgements. The artwork, as it arranges the sensory in ways that strive towards perfection, thus making it accessible to “taste” as an experience of truth that is analog to yet also distinct from, critical reason, is therefore also invested with an implicit epistemic power that the discipline of aesthetics is entrusted with drawing out and making explicit. Aesthetics is, we might say, at once what goes on in El auge de lo humano and the critical effort Williams’s film urges us to make in order to develop from our reactions to it a re-imagination of the world at large. Going beyond the contemplation of nature in this tradition as a vehicle for the experience of beauty or the emergence of the sublime, the “environmental” in environmental aesthetics also complicates the idealistic baggage the term aesthetics carries with it. “Environment” is a notion first used in systematic fashion by the nineteenthcentury positivist thought of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, who used it to describe “the circumstances of an organism” (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016: 173)—before, it had been deployed colloquially to refer to the surroundings of towns and cities, i.e. “the countryside.” Ernst Haeckel, in 1867, coined the notion of “ecology” highlighting the symbiotic effects among living organisms and between those and their physical conditions of existence, in response to Darwin’s notion of the struggle for survival; in early twentieth-century biology, Johann Jakob von Uexküll further developed the biosemiotic dimension of the concept as an at once perceptive and life-sustaining entanglement between organisms and their surroundings. Yet, as David Arnold (1996) has shown, environmental determinism had already informed Western thought long before it became a systematic concept in its own right, underwriting and justifying imperial expansion and the enslavement and forced migration of non-Europeans, including in Montesquieu’s and Buckle’s climatology or the biological racism of Gobineau and Malthus.1 Nonetheless, and despite having been trained by late twentieth-century strands of thought such as poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism and performance theory to be suspicious of all appeals to “nature” as the ultimate cause of, and normative

 See also Bonneuil and Fressoz’s chapter on the “Polemocene” for a more nuanced history of protoecological ideas in the West beyond biological and climate determinism (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016: 253–255).

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benchmark for, human action, the surge of the planetary as encountered in Williams’s film (and in myriad forms of environmental emergency) also forces us today to double down on this critique of “nature” and rethink the agentiality of the nonhuman in different ways. For if “Gaia,” the earth system, or the “more-than-human” are no longer just objects of perception and of sensory pleasure, as Danowski and Viveiros de Castro contend, but have shown themselves to be agential, and thus also perceptive, in their own right, do we not need now to rethink the aesthetic itself as the fragile and precarious field of encounter, or even of “sympoiesis” (in Donna Haraway’s expression), between diverse existents engaged in imagining and in crafting a shared “becoming-with” (Haraway 2016: 4; 58)? The essays assembled in this volume take stock of the lines of critical revision and of the terms and concepts that have emerged in recent years in response to this question. Two principal tasks, in fact, seem to articulate the main coordinates at work in environmental aesthetics: on the one hand, to reconfigure the sensorium that allows us to imagine, perceive, narrate and think the passage from the global to the planetary; on the other, to re-conceptualize aesthetics—in a tradition that also involves the avant-garde as well as posthuman thinking—in a way that allows us to disrupt received notions of aesthetics and make room to other arrangements of the sensible that register the agency of the non-human and the non-living. Stengers’s “intrusion of Gaia” and the now-ubiquitous notion of the Anthropocene—referring to the “major and still-growing impacts of human activity on earth and atmosphere” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 17) to the point of becoming the dominant geological force of our age—as well as rival ones such as Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Gynocene or Chthulucene (all of which attempt to call into question the residual humanism of Anthropocene theory) are challenging the very foundations of modern Western aesthetics, politics and theory as premised on the ontological distinction between humanity (and hence “culture”), on the one hand, and of nonhuman “nature”, on the other (Latour 1993: 10; 32). Whichever position we choose to take with regard to its key concept, “the Anthropocene debate”—as postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021: 155) contends—“thus entails a constant conceptual traffic between earth history and world history,” and to help enable such traffic by way of new concepts and paradigms at a time of advancing deterioration of the biosphere and unprecedented mass extinction at a planetary scale is the urgent task that has been set for environmental aesthetics. Such an endeavor must of necessity be at once critical and speculative. In the former sense, it has to revisit the archive of modern arts and literature as well as that of the responses aesthetic theory has crafted from these, in order to understand their impact on, and even complicity with, the establishment and policing of the modern nature-culture boundary. In a compelling, hard-hitting book, Indian novelist and literary scholar Amitav Ghosh suggests that canonical forms of Western modernism such as the realist novel and abstract art have been of fundamental importance for establishing the primacy of human “current affairs” over their cataclysmic, short as well as

Introduction

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long-term, entanglements with cosmic forces. The exceptional, the wondrous, “the unheard-of and the unlikely [that] fiction delighted in” prior to the emergence of realism, he suggests, have been banished in modernity to the B-genres of sci-fi and fantasy, with abstraction upping the stakes even further in eliminating reference altogether and placing “human consciousness, agency and identity [. . .] at the center of every kind of aesthetic enterprise” (Ghosh 2016: 16; 120). Yet ecocritical approaches, particularly in the realm of literature, have also sought to re-appraise the areas and forms of dissidence that have always accompanied these hegemonic frameworks, attempting to track—in Richard Kerridge’s early description of the field—“environmental ideas and representations [and] to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis” (Kerridge 1998: 5). However, in addition to the important and necessary project of re-assessing the androcentric founding premises of modern aesthetics, and thus also of the histories of literature, art and film that underwrite the critical frameworks of our academic disciplines, environmental aesthetics as the two-way traffic between artistic production and the critical thought that draws out its interfaces with wider, socio-cultural as well as earthsystemic developments, is also in the business of imagining things differently—of mobilizing the powers of speculation to imagine but also create other ways of inhabiting the planet. The arts, as environmental humanities scholar Carolyn Merchant contends, “are an essential part of creating the large-scale public awareness and understanding of climate change that can bring about policy change,” in challenging “the standard human/ environment narrative, in which humans are both privileged over other species and separate from nature. Indeed, artists can change the way we think about the meaning of progress” (Merchant 2020: 46). An aesthetics of and in the Anthropocene, as literary critic David Farrier suggests referring to a line from Irish poet Seamus Heany, must open up and inhabit “the rift between what is going to happen and whatever we wish to happen [. . .] In doing so, it can point us to a careful retying of the knots that bind us together, in deep time, with the fate of the Earth” (Farrier 2019: 128). Indeed, if the speculative efforts of the epistêmê aisthetikê—the “science of what is sensed and imagined,” in Baumgarten’s (1954: 86–87) definition—will now have to be re-oriented towards “reading for the planet,” in energy humanities scholar Jennifer Wenzel’s (2020: 1) powerful expression, such “world-imagining” through and with art might also require us to expand our very notion of the artistic beyond conventional genres and expressive languages and toward the “sites of expanded creativity” that are in the business of “the experimental practice of world-making,” in art theorist T. J. Demos’s words. The environmental aesthetics, Demos suggests, concern themselves with the expanded field of “creative ecologies— practices that make new sensible materializations and connections (aesthetic, practical, jurisgenerative) between otherwise discrete realms of experience and knowledge, and that cultivate worlds to come” (Demos 2020: 18). On this note, literary scholar Florencia Garramuño has put forward the notion of “unspecificity” as a way of thinking about how contemporary aesthetic production, in novel and heterogeneous alliances with other realms of social practice that modernist aesthetics had kept separate from the

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domain of art as distinctive and “autonomous” from these, imagines and thus calls into being, “worlds-in-common”: unspecific aesthetics, for her, is the elaboration of “a language of commonality that encourages the invention of diverse modes of disbelonging” as the shared condition of existents in thrall to planetary crisis (Garramuño 2015: 26). Anthropologists Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser have suggested the notion of “the uncommons” to account for this paradoxical togetherness of diverse agents brought about by their shared exposure to climate breakdown and mass extinction, an allyship that necessarily relies on the creative faculty of humans and nonhumans alike to be willed into being. The uncommons, then, is “the heterogeneous grounds where negotiations take place toward a commons that would be a continuous achievement, an event whose vocation is not to be final because it remembers that the uncommons is its constant starting point” (Blaser and De la Cadena 2017: 19). In different ways, these voices resonate and dialogue with a persistent theme in the twentieth-century Latin American intellectual tradition.

Why Latin American Environmental Aesthetics? If we are challenged today with recharting the humanities in view of the “hyperobject” of planetary crisis—as ecocritical theorist Timothy Morton (2013: 60) calls the contemporary moment of “very large finitude” to which the Anthropocene has exposed us—why a Latin American environmental aesthetics? If, as Chakrabarty intimates, drawing on the work of stratigraphic geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, the challenge faced by humanities scholars today is to move from a human to a planet-centered thinking, for which “the impact on the lithosphere is what matters; the author of the impact is not important” (Chakrabarty 2021: 170), has the very notion of “cultural regions” (Rama 2007: 67–133) that underwrites the division of labor in the humanities therefore not also become obsolete today? “Would holding on to a specifically Latin American entanglement of culture and the environment (or, for that matter, a French, Chinese, or Slavic one) not amount to re-instating the primacy of human cultural divisions over planetary formations and, thus, end up “folding the concept of ‘force’—humans as a geophysical force—[back] into the human-existential category of ‘power’” (Chakrabarty 2021: 161)? Instead of staying within the boundaries of our disciplines, should we not rather focus now on representations of the complex flows of extracted and manufactured matter connecting, say, Bolivian lithium mines, Brazilian soy plantations, and Southeast Asian mega-factories, as well as all of these to European and North American warehouses and server farms; the impact of expanding fuel extraction in Amazonia and sub-Saharan Africa on Indigenous hunting practices and belief systems, with the concurrent mutations and planetary circulation of viral forms due to increased stress on interspecies relations and globalized trade in animals and foodstuffs; or the cultural consequences of the increasingly vicious war of attrition on

Introduction

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(human and nonhuman) labor through the erosion of productive and reproductive rights, the policing of migration, and a generalized outsourcing of “risk” to an everexpanding global periphery that has turned into late capitalism’s standing “reserve of life” (Bentes 2011; Streeck 2016)? Let us return one more time to El auge de lo humano in order to reframe this question about regionality and the meaning of Latin America in a context of planetary emergency. On one level, to ask whether Williams’s film should be considered a work of Argentinian (or, for that matter, of Mozambican or Philippine) cinema, seems beside the point. Co-produced by Argentinian, Brazilian, Portuguese and U.S. film companies and shot on-location with minimal equipment, assisted by local as well as multinational crews, the film’s own “making-of” reflects the rhizomatic, multidirectional and non-unitary unfolding of its narrative content—not to mention the “collaboration” of nonhuman agents such as the flood submerging suburban Buenos Aires or the ants crawling across a character’s hands in the Philippines. At the same time, from the vantage point of cinema studies, one might argue that this particular “transcultural landscape” (Lopes 2010: 91–107) is nevertheless inseparable from the peculiar mode of re-emergence proper to Argentinian cinema after the millennium, in the way it has been forced to re-configure its models of production and distribution from national, continuous and relatively homogeneous to multinational, fragmented and diverse funding sources, shooting routines and audiences, all of which have in turn radically transformed filmmaking styles, subjects, and casting politics (Andermann 2012: 1–25; González 2017: 71–84; Page 2009: 9–17). El auge de lo humano, from this point of view, also contains a self-reflexive dimension, in the sense of making its own conditions of possibility the very “subject” of the film’s narrative but also a decisive element of its formal make-up: an aspect that only a reading that benefits from a background in Argentinian (as well as transnational) cinema studies allows to fully understand and unpack. Such a reading, moreover, would not contradict the one we sketched out at the outset, which focuses on the “planetary” (rather than just “global”) nature of the space-time chronotope the film lays out. Rather, it would add additional layers of complexity to the former, by pointing to the way the filmmaker’s own locatedness in the open network of entanglements and interfaces informs the on-screen construction of this chronotope, and thus also enrich our reflection prompted by Williams’s film about the relation between localities and the bodies therein vis-à-vis the planetary dimension of “very large finitude” these refer to but which, in itself, remains beyond representation. As long as we are dealing with artworks, then—even in the extended sense of “creative ecologies” and of unspecific world-imaginations urged by Demos and Garramuño –, to consider where these works come from, both in terms of their geographical and genealogical provenance, remains a critical part of thinking about and thinking with them. At the same time, such an approach of bringing the local back into the planetary, by re-inserting individual works as well as wider trends and constellations into the conditions under which they emerge, would also challenge some of the assumptions

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about the place and purpose of the aesthetic that have been circulating in the environmental humanities as institutionalized in Europe and North America. Reading for the planet, therefore, does not mean letting go of the local and particular frameworks of meaning that enfold cultural production, at the same time as the latter often challenges or innovates on these frameworks. In fact, the planetary dimension lends additional weight and purpose to grounded ontologies in the measure that global, unitary patterns of thought and the mainstream Western (or perhaps we should better say: Northern) currents of theory underwriting these lose their explanatory power and exclusive claim on truth. Planetarity, as Pratt suggests in her conclusion to this book, and as the individual chapters demonstrate with respect to particular concepts and intellectual traditions, entails not unity but radical heterogeneity: the “term ‘planetary’— as she puts it—evokes a vast range of non-trivial consequential singularities, some of them geographical and historical, others of different orders.” In this sense, the provocation Latin American environmental aesthetics extends to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities is both reminiscent of and distinct from, debates towards the end of the twentieth century about the excentric position of Latin America vis-à-vis the “postmodern,” insofar as the region’s always already partial, failed or distorted modernity was deemed to have anticipated the very moment of exhaustion and collapse of the modern telos the metropolitan centers had now rediscovered for themselves (Beverley and Oviedo 1993; Colás 1994; Richard 1994). At the same time, these critiques contended, the fact that many of the supposed markers of a postmodern era had already proliferated beyond the boundaries of Europe during and even before the peak of metropolitan modernism, challenged not just the chronology of postmodernism’s narrative but also the latter’s alternately euphoric or doomed implications. If modernity had therefore to be rethought, they concluded, as an enabling fiction that had in fact existed nowhere fully and never more than partially, in “non-simultaneous simultaneity” (Rincón 1995) with other identities and temporalities, then the postmodern was in fact the very condition underwriting modernity, as cultural producers from the periphery (Martí, Borges, García Márquez) had always known. “Pivoting from the post to the geo,” to return to Pratt’s phrase, implies a displacement of this debate, from questions about the relation between culture and “uneven development”—modernism and technological and economic “modernization”—to the more-than-human, earth-systemic consequences of conquest and colonization. The colonial experience in the Americas is of critical importance to comprehend the character of our current planetary emergency. The Americas (as well as the Atlantic islands the rival Iberian powers used as springboards for colonial expansion and as strategic bulwarks for the trans-Oceanic slave traffic) were the key launchpad for Europe’s global expansion, as well as a laboratory of extractive practices wrought on territories and bodies alike, that were later exported to other colonial margins (Machado Aráoz 2017; Moore 2009; 2010). Insofar as their colonial history is the very condition that underwrites the emergence of global capitalism, the Americas

Introduction

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are also in a differential position in regard to debates about the current ecological emergency and the torsions between the global and the planetary. The first measurable effect of human history on the stratigraphic record, as geographers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin argue, was in fact the reduction in atmospheric carbon levels from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, ensuing from the demographic catastrophe sweeping through the Americas as a result of the combined effects of the wars of conquest, the labor regimes of plantation and encomienda, and the spread of epidemic diseases against which Indigenous populations held no residual immunity, all of which led to a large-scale reforestation of previously farmed and inhabited parts of the hemisphere (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 171–80). For his part, ecological historian Jason W. Moore has insisted on the centrality of the extractive frontier for the world-ecological event Karl Marx described as “primitive accumulation”: “the appropriation of biophysically rich frontiers” where “Cheap Nature” could be extracted in the form of unpaid (human and nonhuman) work, energy, food, and raw materials (Moore 2015: 115). Rather than dating the start of the Anthropocene from the invention of the steam engine or the nuclear bomb, Moore argues, what should more sensibly be called the Capitalocene arose with the production of colonial nature as “a Great Frontier that was not just there but had to be imagined, conceptualized, and seen” (Moore 2015: 190). The term Plantationocene, put forward by biologist Scott Gilbert (Gilbert and Epel 2015) and feminist historian of science Donna Haraway (2016: 206), aims to foreground this very centrality of coloniality, “as a system of multispecies forced labor” (Haraway and Tsing 2018: 5) and thus also as the very mode of capitalism’s earth-historical existence as enmeshed with the web of life. In this vein, rather than just adding local nuance and specificity to the environmental humanities in general, and to ecocriticism in particular as the sub-field tasked with addressing the particular relationship between literature (and subsequently also film and the visual arts) and the environment (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996: xviii; Buell 2005: 17–25), Latin American environmental aesthetics also present a direct challenge to this constellation as it has become established in Anglophone and (to a lesser extent) European academia, as well as an alternative way of thinking about relations among art, activism, and the production and sharing of knowledge in forms of extended community, many of which also exceed the human per se. As the chapters of the following section, “Itineraries,” discuss in more detail, such distinctiveness in the very configuration of the arena of debate stems (among other factors that differ between the various parts of the region) on the one hand, from the different division of intellectual labor with respect to the Anglosphere and, on the other, from the specific alliances within which environmentalist activisms have emerged over the last quarter-century. In regards to the first of these, Latin American Cultural Studies can lay claim to a long and rich tradition of thinking about the condition of mutual heteronymy, rather than autonomy, under which literary writing, political speech and epistemological

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inquiry have occurred in the region, and how these have in turn shaped interactions and interferences of public discourse with popular and “traditional” (including Indigenous, Afrodescendent and Mestizo) forms and modes of expression: just think of the continually generative iterations of Oswald de Andrade’s antropofagia as both concept and provocation, of the foundational work of Ángel Rama (1997), Antonio Cornejo Polar (2013) or Silviano Santiago (2001) on the “in-between space” of writing, or that of Martin Lienhard (1990), Ticio Escobar (1986) and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (1984), among others, on the dynamic exchanges between subaltern activisms, ancestral forms and new technologies. Because of this region-specific constellation of the cultural field these and other works have explored from a variety of angles, the production of “theory” occurs in different ways from those prevalent in European and North American academia, including its relation to (political and artistic) “practice.” As a result, critical paradigms and key concepts frequently emerge not primarily within academic frameworks (and much less, as in the case of the Anglosphere, within modern language departments that have turned into a refuge of critical theory) but, rather, within exchanges between Indigenous activists, environmental defenders and public intellectuals oscillating between community organization, pedagogical initiatives and public office. The rise, in Colombia, of Afrodescendent environmental activist and lawyer Francia Márquez to the vice-presidency and of Indigenous land rights and environmental activist Sônia Guajajara to head the newly created Ministery of Indigenous Peoples, in Brazil, is only the most visible tip of a much larger movement across the region, to which the constitutional reform attempts in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Chile, recognizing their “plurinational” character and assigning unalienable rights and personhood to nature or to Pachamama (Mother Earth, in Quechua and Aymara cosmology) also testify. Within the academic institution, the fields of anthropology and sociology (as well as, with regard to the constitutional debates, legal studies) have proven to be rather more receptive than literary criticism or art history; hence, elaborations of key concepts such as buen vivir (“the good life” or sumak kawsay in Quechua), the pluriverse, or multinaturalism, have mostly come from sociologists such as Eduardo Gudynas (2015; 2021) and Maristella Svampa (2019a; 2019b) or anthropologists such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2016; 2017), Marisol de la Cadena (2015) and Arturo Escobar (2018; 2020), among others. At the same time, artists and literary producers across the region, often long before scholars and critics joined them in the effort, have exchanged the gallery and the library in favor of novel forms of site-specificity and testimonial writing that turn the aesthetic function into yet another form of activist worldmaking (Andermann 2023; Blackmore and Heffes 2022; Gómez-Barris 2017). At the same time, and in part due to this much more direct cross-pollination between art practice and environmental activisms (as themselves producing, rather than triggered by, the development of concepts and ideas), Latin American environmental aesthetics have emerged in alliance less with conservationist ideas of environmental protection (as predominant in “first-wave” ecocriticism in the English-speaking world)

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and instead with the critique of “extractivism” as the core dynamic of colonialism and capitalism (Acosta 2017; Riofrancos 2020). As the chapters by Laura Barbas-Rhoden, Carolyn Fornoff and Mark Anderson in the “Itineraries” section draw out in more detail, recent cultural and epistemological production in Latin America has zeroed in on the extractive frontier as a zone of sacrifice and as the inescapable reinscription of the colonial within the contemporary moment of neo-extractive push.

Colonial Recurrences, Ancestral Resistances Current debates and studies on environmental aesthetics have revitalized in new manners the question of coloniality—a cornerstone of Latin American studies throughout its history—from the angle of the territorial devastation and the “geomemories” (Gosselin and Bartoli 2022: 333) shaped by processes of colonization and extractivism. This renewed interest does not limit itself to understanding the central role coloniality played in myriad forms of violence against human and more-than-human worlds; equally significant is the iteration of colonial relations within the contemporary and its place in debates on environmental politics and territorial struggles. At the same time, it places at the center of critical attention the notion of ancestrality as a key temporal and cultural category that defies modern historicity as well as the racialized cultural canons of the nation-state. As Brazilian Indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak points out, “[e]stamos vivendo num mundo onde somos obrigados a mergulhar profundamente na terra para sermos capazes de recriar mundos possíveis” (Krenak 2022: 20) [We live in a world where we are forced to dive into the depths of the earth to be able to re-create possible worlds]: in order to imagine alternative futures we need to go into the ancestral, to those “eras before time” (Krenak 2020: 57). Ancestral voices, memories, knowledges, excluded from or marginalized in official archives, emerge as a category that reorganizes enunciations and narratives. Coloniality and ancestrality, thus, seem to play a decisive role in the ways environmental aesthetics rethinks critical tools, traditions and temporalities. Elizabeth Povinelli has pointedly argued about the “ancestral catastrophe” as a specific temporality of the colonial in current Indigenous struggles (Povinelli 2020: 3); Malcom Ferdinand, talking from and about the “Caribbean tempest” and the Black Atlantic, speaks of the recurrence of colonial violence against racialized bodies as well as more-than-human worlds, and the urgent need for ecological struggles to engage with decolonial thinking against current discourses of eco-modernization and conservationism that reproduce colonial imaginaries and cartographies (Ferdinand 2022). Central in this debate is the temporality of the colonial once it is no longer exclusively understood in relation to processes of racialization and cultural domination, but also as a force ravaging and shaping more-than-human worlds. What we are beginning to understand thanks to these and other critical and aesthetic interventions—many of them present in the Handbook—is the extent to which

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this colonial modelling shapes non-human agencies, climates and territories. The many pasts and presents of coloniality are, we might say, written on the environment. Critical interventions from environmental aesthetics operate with these traces that we can read today not only in racial and cultural terms but also in the deep time of geological scales. This ongoing temporality of the colonial is at the same time past and future, ancestral and contemporary. While the spectral—and still very material—insistence of the colonial in the makeup of the modern nation-states has been a central debate in Latin American cultural studies, when the environment enters critical discussion this also challenges the entire premise of our critical traditions. How are the social and the cultural to be conceived of when the non-human takes a central role? What do anti-colonial struggles look like in worlds where the impact of colonialism and the many moments of capitalist accumulation are written on the surface of rocks and on the very web of life? How must we think the archives of colonial violence against more-than-human worlds? Does ancestrality operate as a counter-force rewriting colonial archives and their present (and future) consequences? To what extent? These questions shape many contributions to the Handbook and indicate new paths of research and vocabularies of public intervention from the vantage point of Latin American environmental aesthetics. It is precisely from the multiple reverberations and complex mixtures between coloniality and ancestrality that many cutting-edge approaches from and to Latin American environmental aesthetics take shape—in particular, those coming from Indigenous, Afro-descendant and feminist voices that bring up marginalized archives, foreclosed knowledges and histories of territorial struggles. Diverging from previous traditions within Latin American cultural studies that had mobilized Indigenous or women’s voices in terms of identity and constructions of personhood, in environmental aesthetics these subject positions are engaged in terms of hybrid knowledges, of alternative –and yet strategic– ways of living and therefore, as forms of survival and “practices of world-making” (to return to T.J. Demos’s expression quoted above) in the face of environmental and cultural devastation. In this sense, one of the most evident reconfigurations that emerge from environmental aesthetics is the new angle through which it showcases the centrality of voices and archives that challenge both patriarchal and racialized canons of Latin American literary and cultural studies and dominant readings of our cultural archives. The reconfigured visibility of Indigenous intellectuals and artists whose work is, to a great extent, inseparable from environmental struggles—from Davi Kopenawa and Jaime Huenún to Yacunã Tuxá and Denilson Baniwa—as well as alliances between Indigenous and nonIndigenous artists, is perhaps one of the most salient reconfigurations in current Latin American cultural production—as, for example, in Fome de Resistência—Fundamento Kayapó Menkragnoti (2019/2020), a collaboration between Kayapó painters and artist Jonathas de Andrade, analyzed in the chapter by Ricardo Duarte Filho on “Land/Body.” Although the centrality of Indigenous voices may not be new in itself, the “frame of intelligibility” through which these voices are read and their strategic positioning vis- à-

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vis new global visibility as well as the urgency of ecological catastrophe on a planetary scale, all contribute to reconfigure previous debates on cultural diversity, “cultural heritage” or on modernization, assimilation, expulsion and persecution. They usher in new ways of thinking alliances and conflictivities, creating territorialities, activating memories and, decisively, challenging the very foundations of the Latin American nationstates. We need, Kopenawa repeatedly tells us, to relearn how to dream and to engage with our dreams as a radical strategy for neutralizing the perceived inexorability of Western modes of life. Against the formulas that, throughout the 20th century, attempted to “integrate” the “Indian” into Latin American modernities—including the notion of “transculturation” or national discourses about mestizaje—contemporary Indigenous intellectuals, drawing on ancestral knowledges, complex temporalities and strategic positionings, point towards other world-makings, other configurations of the human, and even other “ends of the world” (Krenak 2019). This remapping of Indigeneity speaks of the new places from where the planetary is being re-imagined and re-conceptualized against the global and in friction with the national. Afro-descendent voices bring other perspectives and temporalities to Latin American environmental aesthetics, becoming a critical laboratory from where national and regional mappings are challenged and where the ancestral—referring to both the African cosmovisions and their transatlantic reconfigurations—plays a specific role. As Kathryn Yusoff argues, the Atlantic Middle Passage is inseparable from the emergence of territorial and geological assemblages that produce Black bodies as energy sources (Yusoff 2019: 80–81). This reverberates widely in Latin American environmental humanities as well as in hemispheric approaches to environmental memories and struggles more widely. If the Caribbean has been the global laboratory of these racialized assemblages (Ferdinand 2022), they also spread through what has been called the “American Plantation zone” (Allewaert 2013: 29–50) in ways that rewrite criollo national histories as well as current political cartographies. As exemplified, say, in the interventions by Afro-Peruvian choreographer and composer Victoria Santa Cruz, Brazilian bixa writer and performer Jota Mombaça, or Colombian photographer and performance artist Liliana Angulo, Latin American environmental aesthetics engages and amplifes these challenges to racialized cultural canons precisely by counteracting the equation between Black bodies and extraction that has so decisively shaped racial as well as territorial imaginaries. Last but not least, the intersections between coloniality and ancestrality bring to the fore feminist and anti-patriarchal interventions tied to environmental and territorial politics. These lines of research have demonstrated an exceptional energy in the last decades, and mobilize many layers of cultural memories in which communities, territories and knowledges are reconsidered under the lens of anti-patriarchal struggles together with processes of racialization and body expropriation. The outstanding theoretical and activist work done by Central American feminisms, for instance—insistently invoked in the widespread formula of “cuerpo-territorio” as a conceptual and militant tool in the work of Lorena Cabnal –, testify to the numerous ways

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through which feminist struggles have shed new light onto environmental issues (see the chapters by Cynthia Francica on “Feminisms” and Gisela Heffes on “Toxicity”). At the same time, the re-conceptualizations of gendered themes such as motherhood, care and reproduction under the light of environmental crisis also have a central place in recent cultural production, as exemplified in acclaimed novels such as Fruta podrida (2007) by Lina Meruane, Distancia de rescate (2014), by Samanta Schweblin, or La mucama de Omicunlé (2015), by Rita Indiana, or by the work of performance artist Sebastián Calfuqueo, engaged in glttbiq struggles in the context of Mapuche resistance. Read from the vantage point of some of these materials (such as Calfuqueo’s work, analyzed in Francica’s chapter), these interventions counteract reductive readings that, willingly or not, assert the primacy of Western (and modern) epistemes in their approach to gender and sexual dissidence. Instead, such voices put into evidence their multiple temporalities and their ancestral iterations. These situated reconfigurations, then, also speak of the new weight of debates on environmental justice and their emphasis on how the damages caused by forms of expropriation and destruction are unevenly distributed by region, race, culture and gender. It is at this inflection point that the intersections between ancestrality and coloniality acquire a renewed force in environmental aesthetics: as archives and critical laboratories in urgent dialogue with present and future struggles.

Formal Mutations A recurrent critical question at work in the Handbook is the mapping of formal transformations that different artistic genres—from literature to cinema and the arts—go through when they engage with environmental issues. Traditional formats—such as the novel or the feature film—and the very differentiation between genres and media are being challenged today by a variety of modes of mixture and hybridization that need to be critically addressed and conceptualized. These formal experimentations, moreover, respond to the pressure of environmental forces, from climate change to vegetal and animal agencies, as well as new enunciations, archives and knowledges that come with territorial and ecological struggles. This “unspecificity” (Garramuño 2015) features prominently in many of the materials studied in the Handbook, as several of the contributions discuss how formal experimentations channel non-human perspectives and agencies, ambivalent configurations between the living and the non-living, subaltern cosmovisions and archives and militant practices directly connected to territorial rights. Literary productions such as the poetry of Mapuche-Huilliche writer Jaime Luis Huenún, the book/installation La compañía by Mexican writer-artist Verónica Gerber Bicecci or The Falling Sky, the book co-authored by Yanomami intellectual Davi Kopenawa and anthropologist Bruce Albert are so many examples, from diverse angles, of the need to challenge

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literary forms in order to give visibility to suppressed memories, archival practices or Indigenous militant voices that refuse the ethnographic pact in order to create new public enunciations. Similarly, artistic practices mix different media and modes of bodily performance in order to register the myriad ways in which environmental forces and perspectives –from water to minerals—impact our sensibilities and perceptions and challenge the very limits between art and living practices. Thus, for instance, the work of Venezuelan duo Yeni y Nan involves performance, cinema and non- traditional spaces to explore interactions and memories with and of water, as do the interventions by Colombian Carolina Caycedo, moving between art, film and performance to articulate the political resistance of “hydrocommunities” in Colombia and Brazil, as analyzed in this volume by Lisa Blackmore in her chapter on “Water”. The Handbook, in response to these aesthetic endeavors, aims to gather critical tools capable of reading and activating the formal reconfigurations of Latin American artistic practices as they absorb the challenges from environmental politics and planetary imaginaries. This is, of course, an open process: here we set out merely to explore the initial steps of an inquiry that, we hope, this volume will help to expand in the years to come. The Handbook, on the other hand, also pays attention to marginalized archives and materials that have not received due attention at the same time as it invites to read canonical works under new light and through unexpected connections. Some of the critical interventions gathered in the volume re-address canonical works—such as Os sertões (1902), by Euclides da Cunha, discussed in Javier Uriarte’s chapter on the “Desert,” or Julio Cortázar’s “La autopista del sur”, analyzed by Victoria Saramago in “Oil” —, while others focus on overlooked pieces and archives, such as the geological knowledges and debates in nineteenth-century Mexico, featured in Jorge Quintana’s chapter on “Geology,” or the writing on and of trance, including César Calvo’s novel Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo (1981), analyzed by Jens Andermann in his chapter on “Trance.” Working on both the contemporary and the archival as well as at their intersections, the Handbook aims at mapping the reconfigurations of sensibility—of ways of seeing, reading, sensing—that are demanded by current environmental struggles and by the speculative imaginaries of other ways of living.

New Critical Vocabularies: Itineraries and Keywords The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics joins the effort undertaken by a number of scholars in recent years of mapping the intersections between cultural production, environmental activism and academic debates in Latin America. Aimed at an audience of students and researchers in Latin American studies as well as in the environmental humanities at large, it offers the first comprehensive overview of Latin American conceptual and aesthetic contributions to an emergent field

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that proposes to reconstellate the humanities in response to the challenging prospect of human species extinction as the historical horizon of our time as well as to the increasingly relevant discourses and socio-political struggles for environmental justice. As such, it builds on (and should be taken as a companion volume to) previous endeavors, several of them initiated by contributors to this collection, including The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth-Century Writings (Taylor Kane 2010), Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America (Anderson and Bora 2016), and Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature, and the Arts (Marrero Henríquez 2016). More recent collections continue to reflect the growing complexity of debates as well as the unfolding of subfields and approaches this volume seeks to map out in more comprehensive and inclusive fashion: in particular, Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World (Kressner, Mutis, and Pettinaroli 2019), Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (Bollington and Merchant 2020), Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art (Blackmore and Gómez 2020), The Latin American Ecocultural Reader (French and Heffes 2020), and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (Fornoff and Heffes 2021), deserve special mention among recently published compilations. Taking advantage of the groundwork laid out by these collections of essays as well as by a host of recent, single-authored works, this Handbook offers a resource for the classroom as well as for students and researchers seeking an authoritative, state-of-theart survey of major themes and objects of discussion. As a way of orienting readers through the field, we have organized the volume in two major sections, followed by a conversation on “Planetarity as Radical Heterogeneity” with Mary Louise Pratt—one of the leading voices of Latin American literary and cultural studies over the last decades, and also a guide and inspiration for the field’s more recent environmental turn. In the two main sections, we revisit and discuss some of the principal tropes and challenges the project of Latin American environmental aesthetics is occupied with today. In the first of these, “Itineraries,” we have asked three intellectual protagonists to share their account of the main critical paradigms underwriting the crossroads of fields the environmental aesthetics concern themselves with: “ecocriticism,” “extractivism,” and “multinaturalism”—concepts which also stand in a more general sense for the impulses coming from literary, film and art criticism, on the one hand, and from the social sciences and from anthropology and non-Western ontologies, on the other. The second section, “Keywords,” offers a glossary of the tropes and themes around which discussions intersecting these critical vectors have clustered—sometimes by way of re-signifying a notion that had already been at the core of previous critical turns (such as the ones of “Desert” and “Forest,” the re-iterations of which across successive moments of cultural production and their critical reception are the subject of Javier Uriarte’s and Catalina ArangoCorrea’s chapters, respectively), sometimes entering the field from different, and previously remote, disciplinary lexicons, as in the case of “Monoculture” (Sebastián Figueroa), “Infrastructure” (Adriana Campos Johnson), or “Toxicity” (Gisela Heffes). By reworking

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traditional critical notions and testing new ones, the Handbook suggests that we are not in front of an “environmental turn” that will add to the long sequence of critical turns across the last decades, each one more or less associated with a theoretical pedigree; it rather signals the need to formulate and conceptualize a cultural and aesthetic field that requires new ways of naming, of connecting fields and traditions, and tracking resonances with other disciplines, knowledges and areas of intervention. The Handbook, in this sense, offers a critical cartography of a shifting field of cultural and aesthetic practices rather that a totalizing “theory” about environmental aesthetics, acknowledging the exploratory dimension of artistic fields that are in a stage of experimentation, of critical revision of traditions, and of changing tactics of public intervention. The three essays included in the first section, “Itineraries,” map out the crossroads of disciplinary, political, and cosmological traditions and the genealogies of their encounters and mutual tensions that have framed discussions in the field across the last quarter-century or more. Even though Latin Americanist scholars such as Jorge Marcone, Jennifer French, Jerry Hoeg or Roberto Forns-Broggi had already been participants of ecocritical debates in the English-speaking academy from early on, “first-wave” ecocriticism—in Lawrence Buell’s (2005) expression—largely failed to establish itself as a major conceptual area of reference in Latin American literary and cultural studies. As Laura Barbas-Rhoden discusses in her chapter “Ecocriticism,” the language barrier between a field the almost exclusive language (and literary object) of which continued to be English, may have played its part in this missed encounter. However, ecocriticism’s early focus on literary and philosophical traditions specific to Anglophone, settlercolonialist cultural archives (such as “nature writing”) as well as its relative lack of attention to transhemispheric networks and processes of resource extraction, cultural and environmental de-Indigenization, and the longues durées of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011), frequently left ecocritical discussions out of sync with Latin American(ist) attempts to devise new frameworks for reflecting on the “coloniality of power” (Quijano 2000) in a non-anthropocentric, “ontologically diverse” encounter of multiple strands of thought with militant trajectories. At the same time, as Barbas-Rhoden shows, many of these intellectual projects including Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation, Leonardo Boff’s eco-theology, or Enrique Leff’s environmental epistemology, already shared many of ecocriticism’s concerns even without engaging directly with its emergent configuration in the Anglosphere. In a parallel and partially overlapping movement, as Carolyn Fornoff explains in the following chapter (“Post-Extractivism”), the critique of extractivism emerged in Latin American social and political sciences as a mode of describing, and of mobilizing the resistance against, a region-wide regime of production “based on the large-scale removal of natural resources for export, so that they can be processed and utilized elsewhere.” Extractivism, as Fornoff explains (unlike conceptual forerunners such as “dependency,” which had already enjoyed considerable fortune in world-systems analysis), in addition to identifying a particular, colonial and neocolonial mode of destructive production of surplus, also aims at pointing us toward its subjacent, instrumentalist logic of stripping

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nonhuman nature of all intrinsic or relational value, and of all cultural or spiritual import beyond the exchange value that defines it as exploitable “resource.” In the humanities, the impulse of what is sometimes referred to as “postextractivist” critique was taken up, in particularly acute and productive fashion, in the field of colonial studies where it inspired novel kinds of readings of extractive apparatuses and their epistemological and ontological underpinnings: Orlando Bentancor’s chapter on “Mining,” in the “Keywords” section of this volume, showcases in exemplary fashion the possibilities and implications of such an approach for an eco-Marxist decolonial thinking. In the field of literary criticism, scholars such as Ericka Beckman, Amanda Smith, Oscar Pérez, and Héctor Hoyos have analyzed the role of writing in the forging of an extractivist matrix at the same time as they show how literature and the arts developed ways of countering extractivism’s tendency to remain invisible due to the out-of-placeness of its frontier locations and the gradual and corrosive nature of its effects. By “making extractivism thinkable through multiscalar narration, firsthand testimony, or different techniques of visualization,” in Fornoff’s synthesis, the arts also collaborate in the forging of a “postextractivist language” of critique and of imagining other forms of commonality beyond ruination. “Multinaturalism,” the chapter by Mark Anderson, last but not least, maps out the ongoing dialogue that has opened up in recent years between, on the one hand, the “ontological turn” in anthropology and philosophy, with the emergence of various strands of new materialism, and the translational and speculative work of Indigenous intellectuals working in and through the repertoire of nonwestern analytics of the living and of the earth, on the other. “Multinatural perspectivism”—in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s coinage—thus also measures out an emergent field of theorizations, in which the literary, speculative and political work of authors such as Ailton Krenak, Elisa Loncón, Davi Kopenawa or Elicura Chihuailaf is no longer the object of testimonial mediation and exegesis on behalf of nonindigenous specialists, but rather enters into debate, dialogue and cross-fertilization with academic research on the semiotics of life-matter “intra-actions” (Barad 2007), including not just anthropology (Marisol de la Cadena, Eduardo Kohn, Philippe Descola) but also the notion of representation as underwriting modern literary and artistic theory. Indeed, Marília Librandi Rocha (2013: 173), whose work Anderson puts in dialogue with Luiz Costa-Lima’s prior rethinking of the notion of mimesis, has argued for understanding the aforementioned dialogue also as the coming into its own of an “Amerindian theory of literature” grounded in “the ontology of the fictional.” “Keywords,” the following and largest section of this book, adds to this overview of critical genealogies a (non-exhaustive) updated critical dictionary of the field, building on as well as reconsidering previous endeavors at mapping the repertoire of terms and concepts such as Mónica Szurmuk’s and Robert McKee Irwin’s Dictionary of Latin Cultural Studies (Szurmuk and McKee Irwin 2012). As revisited from the angle of environmental aesthetics, key notions and strands such as “Indigeneity” (Jamille Pinheiro Dias), “Race” (Ignacio Aguiló), “Feminisms” (Cynthia Francica), “Labor” (Michel Nieva) or indeed

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“Landscape” (Gabriel Rudas) need to be rethought and repositioned today vis-à-vis the nonhuman and even the nonliving. Rather than just to draw out, as literary and cultural studies have learned to do over the last thirty or forty years, the constructed, performative and thus also imaginative and “invented” character of such apparatuses of “naturalization,” our current challenge is also to imagine their potential co-agencies with morethan-human existents. Such a challenge emerges precisely from the long histories of racializing, and of gendering, nonhuman life and matter that not just generate the “natural order” resulting from such inscriptions, but also reaffirm the normative mandates underwriting a heteropatriarchal, racially segregated, and extractivist modern-colonial matrix. It is at this very juncture of revisiting the “constructivist” critiques which, in their poststructuralist, deconstructive, new-historicist, queer or subalternist articulations, had dominated the field shortly before and after the millennium, and of measuring what ground those approaches still hold, quite literally speaking, in the moment of an irate and unpredictable Gaia’s bursting-forth, that the chapters on “Animal” (Ximena Briceño), “Climate” (Dana Khromov), “Geology” (Jorge Quintana Navarrete), or “Strata” (Gabriel Giorgi) probe the arsenal of cultural history and discourse analysis, asking how the arts can help us retool for a different kind of analytics. Other terms have entered the field from the lexicons of agriculture, engineering, stratigraphy, epidemiology or evolutionary biology: the case, for instance, of “Contagion” (Carolina Sá-Carvalho), “Extinction” (Valeria de los Ríos), “Monoculture” (Sebastián Figueroa), “Resilience” (Matías Ayala Munita), or “Toxicity” (Gisela Heffes), few if any of which would have featured in a Latin Americanist glossary even a decade ago. Much the same is true, in fact, for the forms of living and nonliving matter the particular weight, impact, and critical importance for what we might want to start thinking of as nature-culture formations or assemblages, is explored in the chapters on “Oil” (Victoria Saramago), “Plants” (Lesley Wylie) and “Water” (Lisa Blackmore), or indeed in the chapter on “Matter” contributed by Héctor Hoyos. Our critical efforts for re-assessing and re-imagining these materialities, and the complex gatherings of existents they facilitate, is becoming all the more urgent as these latter increasingly begin to fall apart. Critique, perhaps, is today in a position not altogether unlike that of Miguel Fernández de Castro’s and Natalia Mendoza’s stone cube that is the centerpiece of their project The Absolute Restoration of All Things (2022), and which also features on the cover of this volume. As Carolyn Fornoff analyzes in more detail, the duo’s intervention of an abandoned gold mining site in Sonora, Mexico, references the impossibility for all actors involved in the court case ensuing on a mining company’s illegal exploitation of communal lands, to make good on the verdict mandating the complete restoration of the preexisting ecosystem, at the same time as forcing us to imagine how “environmental justice” might nonetheless be done in the knowledge of such impossibility of remediation. In the aftermath of destruction—or better, in the presence of its ongoing escalation—how might we hold, in our analytical and speculative endeavors, the presence of what has been taken away, at the same time as

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imagining a community coming together precisely in mourning its absence? Such is the challenge that has brought us together in this enterprise.

Works Cited Acosta, Alberto. “Post-Extractivism: From Discourse to Practice – Reflections for Action.” International Development Policy 9 (2017): 77–101. https://doi.org/10.4000/poldev.2356. Allewaert, Monique. Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Alvaray, Luisela. “Transnational Networks of Financing and Distribution: International Co- Productions.” The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema. Ed. Marvin D’Lugo, Ana M. López, and Laura Podalsky. London: Routledge, 2018. 251–265. Andermann, Jens. New Argentine Cinema. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. ——. Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2023. Anderson, Mark, and Zélia M. Bora, eds. Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. Armiero, Marco. Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Arnold, David. The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture, and European Expansion. London: WileyBlackwell, 1996. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Reflections on Poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus. Translated by K. Aschenbrunner and W. B. Hoelther. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. Bentes, Ivana. “Subjective Displacements and ‘Reserves of Life’.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 20.1 (2011): 5–19. Beverley, John, and José Oviedo. “Introduction: The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America.” Boundary 2 20.3 (1993): 1–17. Blackmore, Lisa, and Gisela Heffes, eds. Treading Lightly on the Earth: New Directions in Latin American Environmental Research and Practice. Review dossier, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 31.1 (2022). Blaser, Mario, and Marisol de la Cadena. “The Uncommons: An Introduction.” Antropologica 59.2 (2017): 185–193. Bollington, Lucy, and Paul Merchant. Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020. Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean Baptiste Fressoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene. Trans. David Ferbach. London: Verso, 2016. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Clark, Timonthy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Colás, Santiago. Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

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Cornejo Polar Antonio, Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures. Trans. Lynda Jetsch. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Crutzen, Paul J. and Stoermer, Eugene F. “The Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17. Danowski, Déborah, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The Ends of the World. Trans. Rodrigo Nunes. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017. De la Cadena, Marisol. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Demos, T. J. Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. ——. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Escobar, Ticio. El mito del arte y el mito del pueblo: cuestiones sobre arte popular. Asunción: Centro de Artes Visuales Museo del Barro, 1986. Farrier, David. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Ferdinand, Malcom. Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Trans. Antony Paul Smith. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2022. Fornoff, Carolyn and Heffes, Gisela, eds. Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema. New York: SUNY Press, 2021. Fornoff, Carolyn, Patricia Eunji Kim, and Bethany Wiggin, eds. Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. French, Jennifer, and Gisela Heffes. The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Gabrys, Jennifer. “Becoming Planetary.” E Flux Architecture, 2018. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accu mulation/217051/becoming-planetary/ (6 February 2023). Garramuño, Florencia. Mundos en común: ensayos sobre la inespecificidad en el arte. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Gilbert, Scott F. and David Epel. Ecological Developmental Biology: The Environmental Regulation of Edevelopment, Health, and Evolution. Oxford: Sinauer, 2015. Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Gómez, Liliana, and Lisa Blackmore, eds. Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art. London: Routledge, 2020. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Gosselin, Sophie, and David Bartoli, eds. La condition terrestre: habiter la terre en communs. Paris: Seuil, 2022. Gudynas, Eduardo. Extractivismos: Ecología, economía y política de un modo de entender el desarrollo y la Naturaleza. Lima: RedGE/CooperAcción, 2015. ——. Extractivisms: Politics, Economy and Ecology. Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2021. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Haraway, Donna, and Anna L. Tsing. Reflections on the Plantationocene. A Conversation moderated by Gregg Mitman. Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2018. Kerridge, Richard. Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. London and New York: Zed Books, 1998. Krenak, Ailton. Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019.

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——. A vida não é útil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020. ——. Futuro Ancestral. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022. Kressner, Ilka, Ana María Mutis, and Elizabeth Pettinaroli, eds. Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World. New York: Routledge, 2021. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519 (2015): 171–180. Librandi-Rocha, Marília. “Becoming Natives of Literature: Towards an Ontology of the Mimetic Gane (LéviStrauss, Costa Lima, Viveiros de Castro, and the Nambikwara Art Lesson).” Culture, Theory and Critique 54.2 (2013): 166–182. Lienhard, Martin. La voz y su huella: escritura y conflicto étnico-social en América Latina. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1990. Lopes, Denilson. “Paisagens transculturais.” Cinema, globalização e interculturalidade. Ed. Andréa França and Denilson Lopes. Chapecó: Argos, 2010. 91–108. Page, Joanna. Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Machado Aráoz Horacio, “‘América Latina’ y la ecología política del sur. Luchas de re- existencia, revolución epistémica y migración civilizatoria.” Ecología política latinoamericana: pensamiento crítico, diferencia latinoamericana y rearticulación epistémica. Ed. Héctor Alimonda, Catalina Toro Pérez, and Facundo Martín. Buenos Aires, CLACSO, 2017. 193–224. Marrero Henríquez, José Manuel, ed. Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature, and the Arts. Alcalá de Henares: Editorial Universidad de Alcalá, 2017. Merchant, Carolyn. The Anthropocene and the Humanities: From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Moore, Jason W. “Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the ‘First’ Sixteenth Century, Part 1: From ‘Island of Timber’ to Sugar Revolution, 1420–1506.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32.4 (2009): 345–390. ——. “Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the ‘First’ Sixteenth Century, Part 2: From Local Crisis to Commodity Frontier, 1506–1530”. Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 33.1 (2010): 1–24. ——. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso, 2015. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views From South 1.3 (2000): 533–580. Rama, Ángel. Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. Buenos Aires: El Andariego, 2007. Richard, Nelly. “Latinoamérica y la posmodernidad.” Escritos 13–14 (1996): 271–280. Rincón, Carlos. La no simultaneidad de lo simultáneo: posmodernidad, globalización y culturas en América Latina. Bogotá: Editorial Universidad Nacional, 1995. Riofrancos, Thea. Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Rivera Cusicanqui Silvia, Oppressed but not Defeated: Peasant Struggles Among the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia. Geneva: UNRISD, 1984. Santiago, Silviano. The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture. Trans. Tom Burns, Ana Lúcia Gazzola, and Gareth Williams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

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Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2015. Streeck, Wolfgang. How Will Capitalism End?. London: Verso, 2016. Szurmuk, Mónica, and Robert McKee Irwin, eds. Dictionary of Latin Cultural Studies. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012. Svampa, Maristella. Neo-Extractivism in Latin America: Socio-Environmental Conflicts, the Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. ——. Antropoceno: lecturas globales desde el sur. Córdoba: La Sofía Cartonera, 2019. Taylor Kane Adrian, ed. The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on TwentiethCentury Writings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds. Trans. Martin Holbraad. Chicago: HAU Books, 2016. ——. Cannibal Metaphysics. Trans. Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Itineraries

Laura Barbas-Rhoden

Ecocriticism In reflecting about ecocriticism, the metaphors that are resonant for me are watery, fluid ones that evoke landscapes where contours and boundaries change.1 As I consider specifically ecocriticism emergent from Latin American worlds, these conceits resonate even more. I imagine rivers, deltas, and tidal streams that exist in a state of continuous dynamism shaped by the agency of substrate, winds, currents, and beings. Some flows have cut terrain like the passage of glacial ice. Among these currents, these profoundly cutting ones, are the ones colonial projects set in motion: occupation of territory, appropriation of labor, and all its attendant violences, as well as creative, shape-shifting resistances, contestations, and world-making. Ecocriticism is an expansive, fluid space of multi-agentic creation, and Latin American(ist) ecocriticism, within it, is marked by socioenvironmental dynamics experienced differentially within Latin American territories and its diasporas. Latin American critical interventions have long offered concepts helpful for contextualizing in broad, global, or planetary panoramas, inquiry into cultural expressions from abundantly varied local spaces which are marked by dynamics interacting across spatial scale and time. Some Latin American(ist) ecocriticism offers perspectives akin to those we might imagine migratory avian species hold: deep knowledge of two or more localities, along with a sense of dynamism, spatiality, relationality, and of the currents that shift space. Other Latin American(ist) ecocriticism conveys profound understandings of specific regions and, from this rootedness, registers the currents that have shaped cultural expressions in a specific place. A predisposition to relationality is a trait of each. Inquiry such as the practice of ecocriticism is, of course, situated in and emergent from material contexts: geophysical realities and anthropogenic environmental degradation shape creative and critical labors worldwide. Increasingly in the twenty-first century, ecocriticism from Latin American(ist) positions shapes critical work within Latin American literary and cultural studies and beyond them, for example, in inquiry into world literature and topics which transcend political borders, like energy, extraction, and climate change. This essay historicizes the emergence of diverse streams of Latin American ecocritical thought from Latin American(ist) critical traditions, as well as social and material contexts, and attends to its points of divergence with ecocriticism emergent from other contexts, such as Anglophone ones, particularly prior to the 2010s. Finally, it considers how Latin American ecocritical endeavors

 In a 2014 essay I called for movement toward a transnational ecocriticism shaped by intellectual engagement with the socioenvironmental realities of Latin America. And in a co-authored piece (2020) for ASLE, fluid metaphors were the ones Gisela Heffes and I chose. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-002

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in literary and cultural studies are reframing canons and influencing lively exchanges in world literature across languages and cultures.

Resituating Ecocriticism In addition to studying different texts, ecocritics in literary and cultural studies approach their work from different positionalities, including critical traditions. The way ecocritics understand the enmeshment of the local and planetary, the social and the “environmental,” results from complex interactions among many factors whose interplay varies by culture. Latin Americanists have crafted ecocritical practice from milieu experienced, understood, and imagined differently than it was by many counterparts working in other traditions. Therefore, the history of the emergence and circulation of Latin American ecocritical scholarship in literary and cultural studies differs in important ways from that of Anglophone ecocriticism. Furthermore, Latin American critical traditions are robust, comprising work in numerous fields, and this vastness means negotiating a shared vocabulary with ecocriticism emergent from other cultural and critical contexts is often a challenging one. A pause here is advisable for establishing definitional clarity related to key terms: ecocriticism, as it is used in the Anglosphere; Latin American ecocritical scholarship; and Latin American(ist) ecocritical approaches to cultural texts. Let’s start with ecocriticism in the Anglosphere, which can be imagined as the “you are here” place on a map. If ecocriticism in the Anglosphere is, in its simplest definition, the study of literature and the environment, then for Latin Americanists, the conversation has already become complicated, as by the 1990s when ecocriticism emerged as an academic field in the Anglosphere, both key concepts in the definition were being robustly challenged in Latin American(ist) scholarship. Publications in Latin American cultural studies vigorously questioned categories and canons: the title, and content, of John Beverley’s Against Literature (1993) states the challenge boldly. Moreover, at roughly the same time, Latin American critical interventions were taking an ecocritical turn that challenged, from decolonial positions, concepts like “environment” and “nature.” I use the phrase Latin American ecocritical scholarship to refer to these critical interventions, which were frequently in dialogue with and sometimes emergent from embodied knowledge and practice. So here we are: instead of representing a shared starting point for a field of inquiry, key concepts for Anglophone ecocriticism, like literature and environment, from Latin American(ist) perspectives are (1) much more complex, and (2) entangled with the geopolitical and the onto-epistemological. These complexities and entanglements are not perceptible from within the perspective of the starting premise, that is, perception from the zero point produces “the invisibilization of a particular place of enunciation” (Castro-Gómez 2008: 279). It is only from outside the perspective of the

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starting premise that one can perceive what it is and what it excludes. Latin Americanist ecocritical thought thus resituates the “you are here” point on the map as one to which Anglophone ecocriticism has arrived because of a particular way of understanding the world. Latin Americanist critical theory, in fact, offers numerous concepts for thinking about what has always already been a pluriverse, a world of worlds. The concept of the pluriverse challenges two premises that have been normalized in the West: a teleological view of history (and terminology that is grounded in such understanding, such as “progress” and the various “posts,” i.e., postmodern, postcolonial) and the notion of a superior (or singular) onto-epistemology anchored in the Enlightenment era (and before that, the Renaissance). It is through the concept of the pluriverse that I situate Anglophone ecocriticism about Anglophone cultural texts (i.e., the earliest work constituting the academic field now known as ecocriticism) in relationship to both Latin American ecocritical scholarship and Latin Americanist ecocritical approaches to literary and cultural texts. That is, my working premise is that of an ontologically diverse world; fields of ecocriticism that consider cultural products are emergent from this onto-epistemological diversity, which is not fixed, but dynamic. So, let us briefly situate ecocriticism in the Anglosphere in relationship to early Latin American ecocritical studies of cultural texts, before situating the latter in relationship to Latin Americanist ecocritical scholarship.

Emergence and Circulation of Ecocritical Approaches to Cultural Texts Situating Anglophone and Latin American(ist) ecocritical work on cultural texts in relationship to one another, keeping in mind that each area is shaped by ways of perceiving, knowing, and being, deepens an appreciation of the dynamics of each field, as well as the challenges and prospects of dialogue across fields. What is now called ecocriticism found institutional expression in the United States first in publications such as Cheryl Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s The Ecocriticism Reader (1996); in the formation of professional organizations such as the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, founded 1992; and in the establishment of the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment in 1993. The scope and methods of Anglophone ecocriticism have evolved over the years. In The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005), Lawrence Buell catalogued waves of ecocriticism (17–28), and Ursula Heise in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism” (2006) succinctly conveyed the history and dynamics of the field. At the time of publication of both pieces, new ecocritical scholarship challenged the dominance of texts and approaches that centered (white) Anglophone, Western, patriarchal, and heteronormative perspectives. The definition of terms and tropes taken for granted in earlier Anglophone

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ecocriticism, such as “wilderness” or “nature,” began to be historicized and acknowledged as culturally contingent. If waves are produced by currents of energy, then the energy of critique of modernity coursed through both Anglophone and Latin American(ist) theory and ecocriticism in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but it emanated from distinct sources and flowed differently across terrains. For example, though postcolonial studies was a very developed field by the 1990s, with useful conceptual tools, there was no getting around the fact that the application of “postcolonial” approaches was often effortful when it came to Latin America. The start and end points for the political projects of colonialization, by different imperial powers, spanned a wide range of dates, and neocolonial dynamics, both within nations and in geopolitical terms, marked experiences long after independence. What is more, by the early 2000s, the utopian aspirations that nourished revolutionary movements in Latin America had largely been dashed, and there was a broadly shared understanding among Latin Americanists that the “transition to democracy” in a post-dictatorial era was not going to resolve entrenched problems like inequality. Critiques of neoliberalism (“the Washington Consensus”) were ascendant; Indigenous groups made demands for pluricultural legal frameworks; and interest in “other knowledges” (otros saberes) appeared as a counterforce to ways of being and knowing that had been normalized by coloniality/ modernity. There were resonances between emergent Latin American(ist) ecocriticism and environmental justice criticism in Anglophone contexts, but it would take another decade for these points of connection to develop. Much work that was first labeled “Latin American ecocriticism” was carried out by faculty members in predominantly Anglophone academic institutions in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Panels and publications by Latin American(ist) ecocritics appeared in increasing numbers during the first decade the of the 21st century. The co-editors of Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2005) note that they benefited from being brought together on a 2001 MLA panel (DeLoughrey, Gosson, and Handley 2005: xi). The 2004 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association featured one panel dedicated to ecocriticism: “Ecocritical Perspectives on Latin American Literature” (66). The ASLE 2007 conference had two panels on Latin America and the environment; the 2005 program listed none. Latin American(ist) scholars developed ecocritical approaches to specific periods and/or regions of literature, histories and interpretations of which were shaped by work in these subfields, and often used tools from Latin American critical traditions to a much greater extent than those developed in Anglophone contexts, though they also made connections to the latter. Some of the earliest works revisited “la novela de la selva” and regional novels, producing new readings that illuminated experiences and critiques of modernity in Latin America (Marcone 2000; French 2005). Others took up Central American literature (White 2003 and 2004; Barbas-Rhoden 2005) and the entangled, contested worlds of the isthmus. Gisela Heffes’ earliest work elevated urban imaginaries (2009). Considerations of the Caribbean engaged fruitfully with

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postcolonial studies (DeLoughrey, Gosson, and Handley 2005). Dialogue and collaboration across borders, and an inclination for creating and sharing learning in different modalities, have meant the contours of the work shift with a constant and lively flow of ideas.

Latin American Critical Theory and Implications for Ecocritical Thought Though they have not primarily originated in literary or cultural studies, ecocritical insights present in Latin American critical scholarship are important for informing and understanding Latin American(ist) ecocritical approaches to cultural texts. Below in brief are some key contributions with ecocritical implications. 1. Frameworks for reflection upon the coloniality of power, including its dynamic expression across space and time, and its persistence:2 Latin American critical theory articulates, from a peripheral positionality, an awareness of what becoming and being part of modernity entails. In fact, among the most foundational contributions has been the reframing of modernity, or modernity/coloniality (Mignolo 2011; 2012), as inextricably entangled and co-constituting, and the location of its genesis in the contact, invasion, and conquest by Europeans of the Americas and the connection of regional circuits of trade into new, global networks ordered by the logic of capitalism (Quijano 2000). Furthermore, the implications of these events and processes have been material, spatial, epistemic, and technological. The construction and operations of knowledge, social and spatial organization, and imaginaries in European/Western traditions is inextricable from coloniality/modernity, and hierarchies and operations born of colonial logics still order the world. The coloniality of power is embodied and replicated in institutions, including the academy, and enacted upon bodies and territories, differentially. This body of theory about coloniality/modernity has ecocritical implications in its naming of epistemic violence as inherit in colonial/modern projects; interrogation of the ways racialized hierarchies have been constituted with respect to bodies, territories, and labors; and in its historicization of science, among other academic disciplines. 2. An insistence on understanding that coloniality has been co-produced by many across time and place and thus analysis of its expression requires attention both to nuance and to broader contexts and patterns: for example, though European colonizers shared

 “Coloniality of power” is a concept offered by Aníbal Quijano to communicate the ordering of the world along axes of race, labor, and resources in/through the constitution of “America” was “as the first space/time of a new model of power of global vocation” (Quijano 2000: 1).

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desires for control of land and labor for imperial (and their own individual) purposes, these desires were expressed in function of the worldviews (including different religious worldviews), geopolitical and economic aspirations, and power dynamics within and among different colonizing powers, and in function of the distinct territories, inhabited by diverse people, over which different colonizers attempted to assert control. These colonizing groups have been numerous, with divergent and convergent interests: the Spanish Crown, Portuguese Crown, and conquistadors; all three of these negotiating challenges from various agents associated with the Catholic Church, whose own projects also rivaled and at times contradicted one another; and as Iberian powers set up a governing administrative apparatus, Dutch, French, and British actors with their own imperial (and personal) agendas. Independence and nation-formation in Latin America likewise did not mean an end to coloniality; it meant new expressions of its logics, whether in the symbolic/cultural sphere, such as the absorption of indigeneity into mestizaje in some national imaginaries; in the social and economic sphere, in the persistence of plantation and mine, with debates over to whom their benefits might accrue; or the territorial and juridical, in efforts by nation-states to allocate territory-forautonomy without destabilizing their own legitimacy. Nation-formation also occurred within geopolitical dynamics shaped by industrialization and a relentless demand for resources, markets, and on-demand labor; these dynamics persist, though their particular expression in a given time and place may shift. Since coloniality is co-produced and ongoing, it has numerous spatial, social, epistemic, technological, material, and symbolic expressions and implications, and this heterogeneity invites a variety of ecocritical approaches to the analysis of phenomena like cultural texts. 3. The concept of an ontologically diverse world, emergent from a rich abundance of materialities and ways of being, knowing, and doing, and relationality within it: this is the “world of worlds” of the Zapatista movement, the pluriverse associated with Andean cosmological thought, the “perspectivism” of Amazonian cosmologies. An extensive corpus of work from or about Latin American(ist) contexts has examined how radically different understandings of territory, and the place of beings in it, interface with one another. The intertwined histories of Iberian and Native American worlds, along with the worlds held and made by peoples forcibly uprooted from other parts of the world, most especially Africa, require an acknowledgement of the complexity of socio-political structures, languages, and territories. There are ways of knowing and being in the world that exceed the categories of Western thinking, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998) emphasizes in work on “perspectivism” and Marisol de la Cadena (2010) notes in her work on cosmopolitics. People experience and understand phenomena on this planet differentially, in many ways and in different modalities and languages. This vein of thinking disturbs assumptions that have been commonplace in the academy about the nature of reality and history and invites ecocritical thinking that interrogates the ways experiencing, being, and knowing are entangled.

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4. A praxis of dialogue in co-created efforts, such as in exchanges among artists, academics, and organizers, often in conversations that exceed national, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries: collaborative efforts for knowledge creation, knowledge to practice, and practice to knowledge may be housed under institutional umbrellas, or they may be emergent from collectives among whose participants are people with academic affiliations. Arturo Escobar, Eduardo Gudynas, Mina Lorena Navarro Trujillo, Maristella Svampa, and Paulo Tavares, among many others, are all scholars whose research and public engagement is situated in this way. The praxis of dialogue beyond the academy is made easier by new media platforms (i.e., podcasts, video sharing services like YouTube and Vimeo, and technologies, such as those that facilitate live video interaction, widely adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic). This sort of engagement offers examples of collaboration and candor about the implications of thinking and acting together in a pluriverse shaped profoundly by anthropogenic socioenvironmental change. Taken together, the Latin American(ist) critical thought referenced here represents a challenge, an invitation, and a practice of sense-making and action. Importantly, it operates along three significant axes: critique of what has been normalized; acknowledgment and/or imagination of alternatives; and a self-reflexive grappling with wayfinding for a different way of learning and being. I will expound on each axis in the next section, which considers how the ecocritical turn begins to be expressed; ways it is in relationship with ecocritical approaches to cultural texts; and how it anticipates the emergence of environmental humanities.

The Ecocritical Turn in Latin Americanist Thought Consideration of socioenvironmental dynamics has figured significantly in Latin American critical interventions for several decades. For example, the work of prominent intellectuals, such as Leonardo Boff, Enrique Dussel, and Enrique Leff, in religion, philosophy, and political ecology, respectively, has shared an orientation toward the question of the possibility and expression of just socioenvironmental relationships in a world always already marked by the coloniality of power. In attending to inequities, exclusions, and harms experienced differentially in Latin American contexts (to which dependency theory also gave attention in the social sciences), their early work created some of the intellectual conditions for an ecocritical turn in Latin American scholarship. The ecocritical turn in Latin America has generally been marked by an interest in the material and the ontological and by a predisposition for not just critique, but also action. Importantly, an emerging body of critically reflective scholarship makes transparent the difficulties, possibilities, and joys of way-finding for co-inhabiting an ontologically diverse world. I proceed in the paragraphs below along the three axes – critique; alternatives; and way-finding – though all three are often present within the same work.

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Critique Ideas and concepts of an ecocritical nature have come, in Latin America, from disciplines like philosophy, theology, anthropology, and sociology, that are different from the ones where ecocriticism thrived, at least initially, within the Anglosphere. Critiques of developmentalism in Latin American contexts, were, by the mid-1960s, being made robustly by specialists in the social sciences like Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado. Critiques were also expressed in numerous popular resistances to dominant socio-political paradigms by the ecclesiastical base communities of liberation theology and organizations of rural dwellers (for example, the rubber tappers’ organizations most famously associated with Chico Mendes), among many others. A bourgeoning of ecocritical thought occurred within this intellectual and socio-political milieu. In the social sciences, political ecology began to take up the implications of co-participation in politics by culturally diverse inhabitants of territories in which socioenvironmental challenges proliferated (PortoGonçalves and Leff 2013: 67). In the humanities, the work of influential thinkers in philosophy and theology set foundations in the 1970s for later, more explicitly ecocritical work. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, more popularly known as the “Earth Summit,” held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June of 1992, meant additional attention to ecocritical thought in Latin American in its many expressions, including the scholarly, popular, and creative. Latin American philosophy, for its part, has examined and challenged the universal claims of Western thought as a central project. Latin American philosophers have done so, in part, by insisting on thinking from positionalities other than Western European ones. As Linda Martín Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta (2003: 1) note: “the project to develop a Latin American philosophy is the project of overcoming the neocolonialism of Eurocentric thought, of provincializing European philosophy, and of bringing Latin American and, indeed, Third World realities to the center of critical thought.” In an interview with Fernando Gómez (2001: 21), philosopher Enrique Dussel, on a more personal level, averred that “I would never have discovered what it means to be a Latin American solely from textbooks. Quite the contrary: It was sitting in European classrooms that made me feel like a barbarian from the Third World.” As Latin American philosophers attended to the logics which produced both hierarchies of knowledge and anthropogenic socioenvironmental crises, they made important ecocritical contributions. In Filosofía de la liberación (1980 [originally published in 1977]: 18–19), for example, Dussel critiques Western philosophies which, from the “ego conquiro (yo conquisto, protohistoria del ego cogito)” [I conquer, protohistory of the ego cogito] situate others as objects to be known, named, and used by instrumentalist reason. By 2001, Dussel cites environmental crisis explicitly as evidence of the shortcomings of a way of knowing and being legitimized in modernity and extended via globalization: “the globalization of one culture does not, in the long run, demonstrate the intrinsic superiority of that culture, and we see this today with the ecological problem” (Gómez 2001: 27). Complementing critique concerned with the phenomenological and epistemological is

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interest in the material and the ontological, ascendent in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Ramón Grosfoguel (2016: 126), for example, offers the notions of “epistemic extractivism” and “ontological extractivism,” practices which he asserts enable economic extractivism. Grosfoguel makes this argument with explicit reference to two Indigenous thinkers, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and asserts that some decolonial scholarship replicates epistemic and ontological extractivism (Grosfoguel 2016: 131–135).3

Alternatives As the above section on critique makes clear, Latin American critical scholarship has often coupled critique of the dominant order with attentiveness to the co-presence of alternatives to it and to possibilities for the co-creation of more.4 Examples include Dussel’s scholarship on a philosophy of liberation, and Boff’s interventions working from religious frameworks, particularly those of liberation theology. By the 1990s, their critiques of modernity take explicitly ecocritical positions. The philosophy of liberation, of which Dussel is the main developer, centers on a movement away from harm and toward more life-giving alternatives; as such, it shares an important impulse in common with Buen Vivir, which circulates (as a conceptual framework) later. Like liberation theology, according to Dussel, the philosophy of liberation emerges from experiences of dependency and marginalization (Gómez 2001: 28). It acknowledges the co-presence in modernity of alternatives: “that what has not been subsumed by modernity stands a good chance of emerging strongly” (Dussel 2002: 221). In statements such as these, Dussel positions historically marginalized people and their lifeways as important for future-making. Attentiveness to their persistence and creativity are, in fact, imperative “if humanity is to redefine its relationship with nature based on ecology and interhuman solidarity, instead of reductively defining it on the solipsistic and schizoid criterion of increasing rates of profit” (Dussel 2002: 235). Projects for liberation therefore center on creating the conditions whereby other ways of being can thrive, not simply persist.5

 Among other ideas, Grosfoguel explicitly cites critiques made by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in Ch’ixinakax utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores (2010).  Though writers like Boff and Dussel have access to platforms like academic appointments that enable circulation of their thinking, it is emergent from lively social contexts to which they are attending (and sometimes reference explicitly). These social contexts are shaped by the cosmological thought and material practices of diverse communities, including Indigenous and Afrodescent communities.  The demand for a change in the political order that allows for the re-emergence of other ways of being in the world is present in many social movements, from urban protests to Indigenous movements in the Andes and Guatemala. Dussel references such movements explicitly in Twenty Theses on Politics (2008: xv).

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The writings of Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff express similar aspirations for liberation, though they are framed in religious terms. Liberation theology, emergent in Latin American in the 1960s, advocated thinking and acting with a “preferential option for the poor,” thereby taking a critical position within theology. Boff has been a leading voice in liberation theology in bringing socioenvironmental challenges the poor experience increasingly to the fore, in what has come to be called an eco-theology of liberation. The turn from liberation theology to an eco-theology of liberation is explicit in Boff’s writing by the mid-1990s in works like Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (1995 in Portuguese; English translation 1997) and Ecology & Liberation (1995), both of which were published after he left the Franciscan order. In Boff’s writing, which like Dussel’s is prolific, relationality and interdependence are conditions of existence, and an appreciation of relationality shapes action for liberation. Like the philosophy of liberation, eco-theology of liberation has political implications. An eco-liberation practice undertakes first, collective action to claim rights within the present system, and second, works towards “the transformation of present society in the direction of a new society characterized by widespread participation, a better and more just balance among social classes and more worthy ways of life” (Boff and Boff 2003: 30). These more worthy ways of life are relational and full, not the expression of logics of extraction premised on fragmentation and exploitation.

Way-finding Intrinsic to coloniality is a tension between onto-epistemologies of/for relationality (social, spatial, territorial), which persist despite pressure to suppress or eliminate them, and those of extraction and accumulation, which are legitimated and normalized and which narrow the possibilities for their alternatives. This tension has practical implications, including for academics, such as many ecocritics, who wish through critique and co-creation to be participants in cultivating a world with more just and regenerative possibilities. Attending to alternatives in ways that respect their difference expresses in neologisms like “r-existência” (Porto-Gonçalves and Pereira Cuin 2013)6 or, in Anglophone contexts, survivance (Vizenor 2008; Povinelli 2021), which signal practices that exceed existing categories in languages in which the scholarship is produced. This third axis – what it means to work for co-inhabiting the world when the world is ontologically diverse –uplifts way-finding (listening, learning, de-centering the academic) as an aspect of co-creating in the world. Enrique Leff, whose work in philosophy centers on epistemology, states plainly in Aventuras en la epistemología ambiental (2006) that the environmental crisis is a crisis of knowledge (Leff 2006: 27).

 In his entry on “Reexistencia” for Biodiversidad LA, Enrique Leff notes that Porto-Gonçalves first published the term in 2002.

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Part of the remedy for the crisis is an environmental episteme that accounts for ontological diversity; as diverse peoples (with distinct onto-epistemologies of their own) co-participate in the political sphere, a context is created in which new knowledgegenerating subjectivities (“nuevas formas de subjetividad en la producción de saberes”) emerge (Leff 2006: 52). In addition to Leff, a rich and growing body of Latin American scholarship elevates the implications that impulses for creation, emergent from critique, have for praxis. The concepts and metaphors are revelatory: Catherine Walsh’s thinking about interculturality within efforts for decolonization (2010); Arturo Escobar (2020: xix) on “rhizomatic and meshwork processes;” Navarro Trujillo’s work (solo and with collaborators) on thinking and co-creating commons (Navarro Trujillo 2013; Navarro Trujillo and Linsalata 2021). Their candid insights about way-finding have potential for informing ecocritical approaches to cultural texts, including expressions emergent from social movements, and are also of relevance for theorizing the growing field of public environmental humanities.

Latin American Ecocritical Work in Literary and Cultural Studies from 1990s–2020s Latin American critical perspectives, such as those referenced briefly above, have attended to what coloniality/modernity has obscured, such as the presence of dynamic, multispecies, multi-being, relational worlds; how this presence has been obscured; and what might be done to cultivate conditions not just for survival but also for coflourishing. Latin American(ist) ecocritical readings of literary and cultural texts emerged in parallel and in dialogue with these Latin American ecocritical interventions in fields like political ecology, philosophy, and religion. So, too, did literary texts, including those that have circulated as “Latin American environmental writing,” such as the novels Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (1989) by Luis Sepúlveda and La loca de Gandoca (1992) by Anacristina Rossi. Latin American(ist) scholars, often working outside of Latin America, turned attention increasingly in the 1990s and early 2000s to ways in which cultural production from the region imagined the heterogeneity of socioenvironmental worlds and the longue durée of anthropogenic environmental change. Importantly, they have been in dialogue with critical interventions (both scholarly and sociopolitical) in/from the region, as well as elsewhere, such as the biopolitical critiques of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. Readings have considered what cultural texts have resisted, normalized, and imagined alternatively; how ecocritical imaginaries challenged genres; what logics ordered canons; and what canons have done to legitimate certain imaginaries and delegitimize others. By taking up cultural expressions

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like performance and protest, in various modalities, they have continued to expand the scope of inquiry. Work in the third decade of the twenty-first century in Latin American(ist) ecocriticism is emergent from multiple locations worldwide. Ecocritical work circulates in Spanish, English, and Portuguese in journals, edited volumes, and manuscripts, as well as in other modalities, such as essays published through digital outlets or recorded roundtables. Returning to the watery metaphors with which this essay began, here are some of its currents: 1. Rereading of texts associated with particular regions and/or periods, attending to the way literary imaginations engaged with modernizing projects and more-thanhuman worlds, such as Victoria Saramago’s Fictional Environments. Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America (2020) and Amanda Smith’s Mapping the Amazon. Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom (2021). 2. Forms and modes of aesthetic expression that offer resistances and/or create or hold space for alternatives, such as Tierras en trance. Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje (2018) by Jens Andermann, The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature (2020) by Lesley Wylie, The Language of Plants. Science, Philosophy, Literature (Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira 2017), and contributions in the edited volume Ecofictions, Ecorealities, and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World (Kressner, Mutis, and Pettinaroli 2019). 3. Interest in posthumanism, animal studies, and necropolitics, such as Gabriel Giorgi’s Formas communes. Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica (2014), Valeria de los Ríos’ Vida animal. Figuraciones no humanas en el cine, la literature y la fotografía (2022), and studies included in the edited volumes Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (Bollington and Merchant 2020), Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (Fornoff and Heffes 2021), and Literature Beyond the Human. Post-Anthropocentric Brazil (Bacchini and Saramago 2022). 4. Transdisciplinary tendencies that exceed the ecocritical, often taking shape as collaborative work in public environmental humanities, such as the web-based projects Rizoma. A Latin American Laboratory of Art, Ecology and Science by Azucena Castro and Gianfranco Selgas and Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas by Jill Pflugheber and Steven F. White or the series Estéticas del Antropoceno by Gisela Heffes in collaboration with the Hablemos escritoras podcast. These currents interact in a dynamic landscape shaped by many more scholars working in ecocriticism, as well as those with primary interests in other areas of inquiry, for example, gender studies. The currents and names above, inclusive of only the most recent scholarship, are suggestive of abundance.

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Latin American(ist) Ecocriticism, Canons, and World Literature As the sampling of scholarship above suggests, ecocritical inquiry gives rise to reconsiderations of work once thought familiar, such as canons, and also affords opportunities for connections across cultural traditions, for example, in dialogues about world literature. Within Latin American(ist) studies, ecocritical work fruitfully considers cultural expressions associated with nation formation and the forging of national imaginaries, revisiting cultural production from foundational texts from the nineteenth century to those of social realism and the indigenista tradition. Anthologies like the Latin American Ecocultural Reader (French and Heffes 2021) aggregate primary texts from five centuries, and in addition to tracing ecocultural thinking across time and geography, make more primary texts readily accessible for Anglophone audiences. Conversations in world literature have been enlivened by publications that bring languages and cultures into conversation through scholarship that considers primary texts from more languages and cultures than Anglophone ones, and by critics who think with concepts emergent from Latin American (and other) contexts. Since the 2006 publication by Ursula Heise of “The Hitchhiker’s guide to ecocriticism,” ecocritical consideration of literature around the world has grown, though some challenges she identified, such as citation practices (Heise 2006: 513), one marker of dialogue across cultural traditions, are only recently becoming more inclusive across regions. Héctor Hoyos (2019), Sharae Deckard (2009), Sophie Esch (2021), and Stacy Balkan (2021) all bring Latin American(ist) critical theorizations, as well as literary texts, into dialogue with literature from other parts of the world. Cajetan Iheka and Stephanie Newell (2020: 5–6), as well, in Environmental Transformations. African Literature Today 38 reference Marisol de la Cadena’s term “earth beings” in explaining that African indigenous cosmologies and communities express “an ecological poetics and praxis that are respectful of more-than-human lives.” Efforts like ASLE translation grants have sought to make both critical and creative work available in different languages to bridge gaps in the conversation. This handbook, likewise, offers an accessible starting place for Anglophone scholars seeking to deepen their understanding of Latin American contexts. The circulation among ecocritics of concepts of broad resonance has been particularly generative of dialogue that brings ecocritics into conversation across areas and languages of study. Concepts from the Global South have begun to shape the ecocritical lexicon: coloniality of power, the pluriverse, r-existência, extractivism (various scholars, including Gómez-Barris 2017), and necropolitics (Mbembe 2019). Also of import are provocations by prominent writers from the Global South, like Amitav Ghosh (2016), about the adequacy of genre, poetics, and aesthetics for the realities of rapidly accelerating and deepening anthropogenic crises. Additionally, there have been changes within Anglophone ecocriticism in United States contexts that are propitious for new conversations with Latin American(ist)

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ecocriticism. In the 2010s and 2020s, Anglophone ecocriticism that had been more narrowly focused on texts emergent from Anglophone cultural contexts became resituated by Black, Indigenous, and first- and second-generation immigrant scholars writing in English. As a whole, the field became more attuned to the dynamics of power to which Latin American ecocritical thought has attended since its first appearance. Scholarship about settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and decolonization is robust and growing, and Latin American(ists) can learn much from it. Finally, it merits stating that the wide-ranging, transdisciplinary example of Latin American critical traditions anticipates the broad dimensions of environmental humanities. Latin American(ist) environmental humanities work includes scholarship in energy humanities; post-humanism; science and technology studies; medical humanities; and public environmental humanities. Public environmental humanities, which has resonances with political ecology and synergies with digital humanities, is rising in significance, with involvement by established ecocritics and early career scholars. Ecocritical approaches stretch the capacity of languages and metaphors to convey a changing perception of the world. Heise’s 2006 essay uses the word “matrix” to talk about ecocritism; Escobar uses the term “meshwork” in his writing about pluriversal politics. What is present in each is a sense that we inhabit a shared space, with varied, partial, and contigent understandings of it. Thinking together, and apart, in ecocriticism enlivens the field.

Works Cited Alcoff, Linda, and Eduardo Mendieta, eds. Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Andermann, Jens. Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje. Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados, 2018. Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. “2005 Conference Program.” ASLE Archive. https://www.asle.org/conference/biennial-conference/archive/ (8 Feb 2023). ——. “2007 Conference Program.” ASLE Archive. https://www.asle.org/conference/biennial-conference/archive/ (8 Feb 2023). Bacchini, Luca, and Victoria Saramago, eds. Literature Beyond the Human: Post-Anthropocentric Brazil. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2022. Balkan, Stacey. “Energo-poetics: Reading Energy in the Ages of Wood, Oil, and Wind.” Etudes anglaises 74.1 (2021): 12–33. Barbas-Rhoden, Laura. “Greening Central American Literature.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 12.1 (2005): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/12.1.1. Barbas-Rhoden, Laura, and Gisela Heffes. “A World of Worlds: Latin American, Iberian, and Latinx Environmental Humanities.” ASLE.org. 2020. https://www.asle.org/features/a-world-of-worlds-latinamerican-iberian-and-latinx-environmental-humanities/ (8 February 2023). Beverley, John. Against Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Trans. Philip Berryman. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997. ——. Ecology and Liberation: A New Paradigm. Trans. John Cumming. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995.

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Boff, Leonardo, and Clodovis Boff. “The Basic Question: How to be Christians in a World of Destitution.” Social Policy 33.4 (2003): 28–32. Bollington, Lucy, and Paul Merchant, eds. Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2020. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Castro, Azucena, and Gianfranco Selgas. Rizoma. A Latin American Laboratory of Art, Ecology and Science. https://rizomalabeco.com/ (9 February 2023). Castro-Gómez, Santiago. “Coloniality for Dummies: Latin American Perspectives on Modernity, Coloniality, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge.” Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Eds. Mabel Moraña, Enrique D. Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 259–285. Deckard, Sharae. Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden. New York: Routledge, 2009. De la Cadena, Marisol. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond ‘Politics’.” Cultural Anthropology 25.2 (2010): 334–370. De los Ríos, Valeria. Vida animal. Figuraciones no humanas en el cine, la literatura y la fotografía. Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados, 2022. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, eds. Caribbean Literature and the environment: Between Nature and Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Dussel, Enrique D. Filosofía de la liberación. Bogotá: Universidad Santo Tomás, Centro de Enseñanza Desescolarizada, 1980. ——. Twenty Theses on Politics. Trans. George Ciccariello-Maher. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. ——. “World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity.” Nepantla: Views from South 3.2 (2002): 221–244. Escobar, Arturo. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. Esch, Sophie. “Hippopotamus Dead or Alive: Animals and Trauma in Narratives of the Drug War.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 74.2 (2021): 184–199. Fornoff, Carolyn, and Gisela Heffes, eds. Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2021. French, Jennifer. Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2005. French, Jennifer, and Gisela Heffes, eds. The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Giorgi, Gabriel. Formas comunes: animalidad, cultura, biopolítica. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia Editora, 2014. Glotfelty, Cheryl, and Harold Fromm. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Gómez, Fernando. “Ethics is the Original Philosophy; or, the Barbarian Words Coming from the Third World: An Interview with Enrique Dussel.” boundary 2 28.1 (2001): 19–73. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Del extractivismo económico al extractivismo epistémico y ontológico.” Revista Internacional de Comunicación y Desarrollo 1.4 (2016): 33–45. Heffes, Gisela. “Estéticas del Antropoceno.” Hablemos escritoras. https://www.hablemosescritoras.com/ (9 Feb 2023): 123–43. ——. “Reimagining Contemporary Latin American Cities.” World Literature Today 83.2 (2009): 42–45. Heise, Ursula K. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism.” PMLA 121.2 (2006): 503–516.

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Hoyos, Héctor. Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Iheka, Cajetan Nwabueze, and Stephanie Newell. Environmental Transformations: African Literature Today 38. Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2020. Kressner, Ilka, Ana María Mutis, and Elizabeth M. Pettinaroli, eds. Ecofictions, Ecorealities, and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World. New York: Routledge, 2019. Latin American Studies Association. “Program of the 2004 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association.” https://www.resdal.org/experiencias/lasa-04-programa.pdf (8 Feb 2023). Leff, Enrique. Aventuras de la epistemologia ambiental. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2006. ——. “Rexistencia.” BiodiversidadLA. 2018. https://www.biodiversidadla.org/Documentos/Rexistencia (9 Feb 2023). Marcone, Jorge. “Jungle Fever: Primitivism in Environmentalism: Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima and the Romance of the Jungle.” Primitivism and Identity in Latin America: Essays on Art, Literature, and Culture. Eds. Erik Camayd-Freixas and José Eduardo González. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000: 157–72. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Trans. Steve Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. ——. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Navarro Trujillo, Mina Lorena. “Luchas por lo común contra el renovado cercamiento de bienes naturales en México.” Bajo el volcán 13.21 (2013): 161–169 Navarro Trujillo, Mina Lorena, and Lucía Linsalata. “Capitaloceno, luchas por lo común y disputas por otros términos de interdependencia en el tejido de la vida. Reflexiones sesde América Latina.” Relaciones Internacionales 46 (2021): 81–98. https://doi.org/10.15366/relacionesinternacionales2021. 46.005. Pflugheber, Jill, and Steven F. White. Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas. https://www. microcosmssacredplants.org/ (9 Feb 2023). Porto-Gonçalves, Carlos Walter, and Danilo Pereira Cuin. “Geografia dos conflitos por terra no Brasil (2013). Expropriação, violência e r-existência.” Conflitos no campo–Brasil (2013): 18–26. Porto-Gonçalves, Carlos Walter, and Enrique Leff. “Political ecology in Latin America: the social reappropriation of nature, the reinvention of territories and the construction of an environmental rationality.” Desenvolvimento e meio ambiente 35.1 (2015): 65–88. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. “Divergent Survivances.” e-flux Journal 121 (2021). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/ 121/424069/divergent-survivances/ (8 Feb 2023). Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality of Power, Knowledge, and Latin America.” Trans. Michael Ennis. Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (2000): 533–580. Rivera Cusicanqui Silvia, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. Buenos Aires: Tinta limón, 2010. Rossi, Anacristina. La loca de Gandoca. San Joseé, Costa Rica: Educa, 1992. Saramago, Victoria. Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020. Sepuùlveda, Luis. Un viejo que leía novelas de amor. Madrid: Juùcar, 1989. Smith, Amanda M. Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021. Vieira, Patricia I., John Ryan, and Monica Gagliano, eds. The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4.3 (1998): 469–488.

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Vizenor, Gerald, ed. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Walsh, Catherine. “Interculturalidad crítica y educación intercultural.” Construyendo interculturalidad crítica 75.96 (2010): 167–181. White, Steven. “El mundo ecocéntrico en Siete árboles contra el atardecer de Pablo Antonio Cuadra.” Revista Iberoamericana 69.204 (2003): 555–563. ——. “Ecocrítica y chamanismo en la poesía de Pablo Antonio Cuadra.” Anales de literatura hispanoamericana 33 (2004): 49–64. Wylie, Lesley. The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.

Carolyn Fornoff

Extractivism

Figure 1: Miguel Fernández de Castro and Natalia Mendoza, The Absolute Restoration of All Things, 2022. Image courtesy of the artists.

A 70 x 70 centimeter cube made of stone sits in an open-pit mine in the Sonora desert. The cube renders material the amount of gold, valued at $436 million dollars, extracted by Penmont Mining during its three years of operation there from 2010–2013. The juxtaposition of the solitary cube set against the enormity of the surrounding destruction underscores the high socio-environmental toll of producing a small amount of gold, a massive and irreversible transformation undertaken for the benefit of the very few. The cube is the centerpiece of The Absolute Restoration of All Things, an exhibit that debuted at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2022 as the result of a collaboration between Sonora-based visual artist Miguel Fernández de Castro and anthropologist https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-003

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Natalia Mendoza (Figure 1). The installation’s title refers to a 2014 agrarian court case that was successfully won by Ejido El Bajío against Penmont Mining that forced them to cease illegal mining operations on ejido (communally owned) lands in Sonora where the cube now sits. In a radical and unprecedented gesture, the court ruled that Penmont must return the proceeds, as well as “completely restore the ecosystem that prevailed in that place, with its hills, mountains, waters, air, flora, and fauna that had existed before” (Fernández de Castro and Mendoza 2022). After the ruling, Penmont ceased operations at the mine, but did not comply with the rest of the order. Ever since, ejidatarios of Ejido El Bajío have been subject to violent intimidation, criminalization, and murder, as chronicled in the 2021 documentary Tolvanera directed by Ángel R. Melgoza Cortés. More recently, in 2022, ejido members travelled to London to attend a shareholder meeting of Fresnillo Group, Penmont’s holding company (and itself spun-off from Grupo Peñoles, a mining conglomerate owned by Mexican billionaire Alberto Bailleres), to denounce the ongoing violence and to demand that the company comply with the court order (Siddique 2022). The ruling against Penmont, artist Fernández de Castro observed in an interview about The Absolute Restoration of All Things, is a “legal fiction,” a sort of wishful thinking that will never come true (Pearl 2021). In part this is because the magistrate who handed down the ruling, Manuel Loya Valverde, was never ratified by the Senate, nor did subsequent judges on the agrarian court execute the sentence against Penmont. In Tolvanera, Loya Valverde attributes this inaction to political pressure by Bailleres to bury the sentencing. Thus, impunity reigns even when the legal system acts on behalf of communities harmed by extractivist enterprise. But even if the sentence were to have been carried out, the ruling would nonetheless still be a legal fiction because its mandate that the ecosystem be completely restored is impossible. There is no way to bring back the mountain that has been defaced, no way to bring back the four ejido members who were murdered after speaking out against Penmont, no way to fully remediate the tailings and acid-run off that leached into the surrounding soil and groundwater. Through images that document the abandoned mining site, The Absolute Restoration of All Things imparts the impossibility of restitution in the wake of extractivism at the same time that it invites utopian speculation about what the “absolute restoration of all things” might look like through its title. The project at once critiques extractivism and evokes a post-extractivist horizon, one that is being fought for and defended by communities like Ejido El Bajío throughout Latin America. 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.1 Extractivism drove empire and it funded its expansion; it also

 In Extractivismos, Eduardo Gudynas provides a succinct overview of the origin of the term extractivism. The phrase “industrias extractivas” emerged in the early twentieth century and was increasingly used by economists by the 1950s, and then further popularized by the World Bank and the United Nations to describe a strategy for development. Indigenous and environmental activists and public intellectuals in Latin America subsequently seized on the term to describe the exploitative appropriation of nonhuman nature and human labor (Gudynas 2015: 10–11). Academic and activist use of the

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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. Unlike conceptual forerunners like dependency or uneven development theories, extractivism has great purchase in the environmental humanities because it knits environmental crisis together with empire and capitalism, the material with historical materialism, the human with the nonhuman. It names an instrumentalist logic that is underwritten by the assumption of infinite resources and the pursuit of endless growth and accumulation. It simultaneously toggles the local and the far away, the materiality of matter and the abstraction of capital, the need for degrowth and equitable redistribution. 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. By means of opening, The Absolute Restoration of All Things demonstrates how visual art can amplify site-specific activist efforts to contest the imposition of extractivist industry and its accompanying logic of privatization, accumulation, and wasting, bringing Ejido El Bajío’s ongoing fight against Penmont to new, international publics. The evidentiary thrust of Fernández de Castro and Mendoza’s project, evident through its documentary focus on the devastated landscape and the accurate replication of extracted gold, demonstrates how art can make extractivism thinkable through forensic strategies that teach viewers to see gold production in concrete terms. This evidentiary thrust is complemented by its titular subjunctive orientation, which invites viewers to imagine what a world grounded in the absolute restoration of all things would or should look like. The combination of activist, evidentiary, and speculative currents makes The Absolute Restoration of All Things exemplary of post-extractivist Latin American aesthetics: works that signal how capitalist modernity relies on the uneven and racialized appropriation of nature and labor from the periphery, and that gesture at the imperative to imagine other socioeconomic models that are not export-oriented, inequitable, or dependent on the destruction of territory, and that instead facilitate the flourishing of life.

The Logic of Extractivism Extractivism describes a mode of production based on the large-scale removal of natural resources for export, so that they can be processed and utilized elsewhere. Mining and oil drilling are ready examples, as are monocrop agribusiness and logging. To

term increased in the 2010s, in response to the acceleration of extractivist enterprise in Latin America by governments across the political spectrum, described as “neo-extractivism” (Svampa 2015).

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put a finer point on it, whereas the word “extraction” refers to the physical act of removing nonhuman resources from the earth, “extractivism” is the logic, ideology, or system predicated on the large-scale appropriation of nonhuman nature and human labor that has fueled and continues to fuel capitalist modernity. Parsing these two terms is important; to critique extractivism is not the same as rejecting any and all instances of extraction, which can and has been practiced in ways that are not worlddestroying and are indeed essential to artisanal livelihoods or dreams of resource sovereignty (Aguilar Gil 2023). Rather, the critique of extractivism is a critique of its structural implementation in capitalist modernity. As Horacio Machado Aráoz has explained, there is no capitalism without extractivism, nor can either of these terms be understood apart from their colonial origins (Machado Aráoz 2018: 13). Today, the scale and ever-accelerating pace of extractivism, in the words of Alberto Acosta, perpetuates “saqueo y devastación” (plundering and devastation), entrenching neocolonial power imbalances, eroding human and nonhuman territories, and fomenting political and economic instability (Machado Aráoz 2018: 26). This applies even to purportedly green, renewable energies like wind and solar, which have been implemented in extractivist ways: placed for instance on Indigenous lands without local consent (Dunlap 2018). Within the instrumentalist logic of extractivism, nonhuman nature is reduced to its exchange value. It is stripped of its relational or intrinsic value, or of its cultural or spiritual import, and instead framed as a mere resource to be leveraged in the pursuit of future prosperity, growth, and development (Gudynas 2019: 93). The consolidation of the “extractive view,” a term that Macarena Gómez-Barris uses to describe how territories are rendered commodities by ignoring or eradicating the rich human and nonhuman assemblages and cultures that constitute them (Gómez-Barris 2017: 7), is at work in language itself. Just in the writing of these initial paragraphs, I have found myself slipping into describing minerals like ore and oil as “resources.” The extractive view is thus naturalized through discourse, laying the groundwork for its forcible implementation through the erasure of other ways of living within or imparting meaning onto territories. A moment that elucidates the early epistemic clash between the European extractive view and Amerindian approaches surfaces in French Calvinist Jean de Léry’s 1578 account of his time spent with the Tupinambá Indians in Brazil. He recounts for readers back in France how a Tupinambá elder “charitably mocks” him and his countrymen for being so intent on amassing riches through logging brazilwood, a timber tree used to produce dye—and whose robust trade gave Brazil its name, exemplifying the collapse of commodity and territory within the extractive view. “‘[M]ust you labor so hard to cross the sea, on which (as you told us) you endured so many hardships, just to amass riches for your children or for those who will survive you? Will not the earth that nourishes you suffice to nourish them? We have kinsmen and children, whom, as you see, we love and cherish; but because we are certain that after our death the earth which has nourished us will nourish them,

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we rest easy and do not trouble ourselves further about it’” (Léry 2021: 40). Whether or not this dialogue by de Léry’s Tupinambá interlocutor is accurate or a figment of de Léry’s imagination matters less than the fact that these divergent interpretations of the relationship between territory and futurity were already evident to Europeans traversing the Americas in the sixteenth century. For French loggers, the New World’s natural bounty was the raw material that would ensure the future prosperity of France. By contrast, the Indigenous vantage point associated territory and futurity as ontologically inextricable. The bifurcation between land as resource and land as nourishment and the relative implications of each for the future continues to underlie present day polemics. The poem “What Is It Worth?” (Jujchere’? / Cuánto vale?), by Zoque poet Mikeas Sánchez from Chiapas, can be understood as a contemporary take on the Tupinambá mockery glossed by de Léry. The poetic voice scoffs at how the “masters of barbarity” offer the Mokayas (the Zoque people) “a millionaire’s bank account, / in exchange for your blue sky / . . . a nice supermarket / in exchange for your mountains” (Sánchez 2019). The Mokayas laugh off this absurd and ignorant proposition, dismissively noting that “even the smallest children / know that money turns to manure / when you pass over to Tzuan,” the afterlife. Sánchez inverts the colonial association of extractivism with civilization and Indigenous values with barbarous ignorance to great effect. What is ignorant, she posits, is the notion that any amount of money might make up for all that is lost to extractivist industry: not only the mountains and the air, but territory, the fabric that allows for “children’s smiles” and without which, one is left with “sadness from the soul.” Running parallel to Sánchez’s involvement in ZODEVITE, a faith-based activist movement in Defense of Life and Earth that contests the imposition of mining, fracking, and hydroelectric dams on Zoque lands in Chiapas, Sánchez’s poem lays bare the wildly uneven terms of exchange upon which extractivism is premised, in which a bank account or a nice supermarket are often not even offered in exchange for the loss of ecosystems like mountains and rivers that sustain the community. Or, as in the aforementioned case of Ejido El Bajío, even when the terms of this exchange are refused, extractivist projects are still forcibly imposed. More than half of all activists killed in 2021 were land defenders, with Colombia and Mexico accounting for the highest death tolls (Global Witness). Of those killed, over a third were Indigenous. Sánchez’s poem signals that debates about extractivism are ultimately about worth. Within the extractivist paradigm, a territory’s worth is reduced to its monetary value. A second key characteristic of extractivism is global unevenness, which can also be understood as an extension of this instrumentalist logic. As illustrated by the brazilwood trees from Tupinambá lands that fill the coffers of the French, or mining by Canadian transnationals on Zoque lands, extractivism is an economic model in which raw materials from some nations are appropriated by others to process and turn a profit.

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Extractivism and Empire During the colonial period, even less steps were required. Extractivism equaled the literal creation of capital through colonial plunder. In the sixteenth century, the Americas was the largest site of pearl and bullion production in the world. These precious materials directly funded European powers to further expand their empires, trade routes, wars, and the building of cathedrals and colonial settlements (Bentancor 2017: 41; Warsh 2018: 6). Molly Warsh’s fascinating study of colonial pearl extractivism in the Caribbean details how the scale and scope of pearl harvesting under the Spanish was dramatically distinct from Amerindian pearl fishing, to devastating effect. Pearls were used both as currency and adornment in Europe, and topped the list of items sought after in Columbus’s Capitulaciones de Santa Fe. They became Spain’s primary import and source of wealth from the Americas until the development of colonial gold mines in the sixteenth century. Warsh estimates a whopping annual harvest of 1.2 billion oysters (Warsh 2018: 346). To reach such heights, early pearl fisheries in Venezuela were brutally efficient: rapidly destroying maritime ecosystems and displacing local peoples to force them to labor as divers. As a result, entire islands were depopulated, like the Lucayan inhabitants of the Bahamas, a labor force that quickly thinned because of horrific labor conditions and was subsequently replaced by enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples abducted from the Caribbean coast up the Yucatán (Warsh 2018: 36–38; 47). In one of the earliest critiques of extractivist labor conditions, Bartolomé de las Casas decried the “infernal death” endured by enslaved divers, whose repeated exposure to salt water and asphyxiation disfigured them into “sea wolves” (Warsh 2018: 43). Yet the hundreds of thousands of pearls that circulated in Europe as currency or adornment “bore no traces of the lives altered and lost through enslavement or the submarine pillaging of the reefs that brought them to light” (Warsh 2018: 48). Pearls are therefore an early example of what Marx describes as the social hieroglyphic, in which the global commodity trade obscures its conditions of production. Extractivism and empire are historically inextricable, mutually giving rise to the “White Supremacy Scene” that Nicholas Mirzoeff proposes as a more accurate alternative to the term Anthropocene, which vaguely gestures at a universal humanity as responsible for planetary ecological crisis (Mirzoeff 2018: 123). The wealth promised by extractivist enterprise justified the expansion of empire, and it also funded it. Orlando Bentancor has demonstrated that the two were also discursively collapsed. Both were grounded in a metaphysical framework that posited that the natural world, as well as the peoples and places that Europeans encountered in the Americas, were “composed of a raw and defective material that had to be dominated from above and directed to a higher end,” that is, extracted, processed, refined, and exported, or enslaved, dispossessed, converted, and enlightened (Bentancor 2017: 1). Along similar lines, Christine Okoth has suggested that extractivism “engendered a general understanding of value which subsequently shaped the particular form that racial subjection took during the advent of modernity,” since it both generated the need for and the justification for mass enslavement (Okoth 2021: 380).

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Elaborating on the symbiotic relationship between the appropriation of nature and labor to fuel the accumulation of wealth, Jason Moore demonstrates how the colonial development of cheap nature and cheap labor went hand-in-hand, shaping capitalism as we now know it. Despite technological advances in mining technologies and techniques in the sixteenth century that quadrupled output, mining endeavors in Europe and then Potosí, Bolivia repeatedly faced exhaustion. This exhaustion was not just the result of the limits of nature (such as ore deposits or the effects of deforestation) but of how environmental factors intersected with and impacted labor productivity. Deeper mining pits and rising timber costs prompted demands by miners for higher wages and better labor conditions. This stumbling block, Moore explains, was resolved by a restructuring of colonial relations in Potosí in 1571 by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo via the implementation of a labor draft or mita to “ensure a steady supply of cheap labor-power for mines” (Moore 2015: 122). Following Moore, we can see how extractivist capitalism developed “the law of value as a law of Cheap Nature: a law that prioritized rising labor productivity in commodity production and exchange” (Moore 2015: 119). In addition to finding new ways of devaluing nature and labor, Moore proposes that capitalism has operated spatially through endless movement outward in search of new extractive frontiers.2 Echoing Bentancor’s diagnosis of the metaphysical framework that rendered extractivism and empire analogous processes that were justified by their elevation of raw nature into the stuff of civilization, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s study of British imperialism in the nineteenth century reaches similar conclusions. After the dissolution of Spanish rule, England rushed to gain control of raw materials in Latin America, rapidly becoming the dominant investor in abandoned Spanish mines. Miller writes that “the earth’s unequal distribution of precious resources [was interpreted as] evidence of a divine plan for British imperialism” (Miller 2021: 107). An 1868 mining tract written by French geologist Louis Simonin is illustrative. Simonin observed that “gold and silver were, by the design of the Creator, placed along a sort of metalliferous equator, as if to attract irresistibly civilized man to the colonization of those countries, which otherwise he would not attempt” (Miller 2021: 108). This justification dissimulates the agency of Europeans in the advancement of extractivist empire onto minerals themselves, which, endowed by God with an “irresistible” allure, compel colonization so that they might be unearthed and circulate in the light of day as civilized commodities. The seductive

 While it is crucial to foreground the role of empire in shaping extractivism, scholars like Allison Bigelow have argued this shouldn’t occlude the fact that the Indigenous and Afro-descendant laborers who performed the work of extraction brought their own ideas and expertise to the industry, shaping it in countless ways, “from mining calendars that aligned the cycles of gold refining in La Española with Taíno cosmologies to silver amalgamation technology transfers between Mexico and the Andes, both enabled by Indigenous expertise in metalworking” (2020: 7). Bigelow details the contributions of Indigenous and African miners to the technologies and cultures of colonial metalworking by reading documents produced by the Spanish and Portuguese against the grain.

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draw of precious minerals that Simonin describes found its literary analog in the adventure genre, with texts like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) encouraging the continued expansion of empire in the pursuit of hidden treasure. Miller explains that these adventure narratives are centrifugal, reinforcing through their plots the “frontier movement” that Moore describes as capitalism’s response to sitespecific exhaustion of resources and labor (Miller 2021: 85).

The Geographies of Extractivism The geographic distance between the center and the extractive periphery also helps explain the cognitive dissonance between the simultaneous aesthetic celebration of untouched nature and the ideological embrace of extractivist praxis. Chilean avantgarde writer and surgeon Juan Marín noted as much in his novel Paralelo 53 Sur (1936), where he wrote of how the Englishmen who had come to Patagonia to engage in logging and peat mining, “remember with alcoholic melancholy the soft autumn that gilds the hills and meadows of ‘Devonshire,’ while far in the distance, resembling ants, the woodcutters chop down the virgin forest growing on slopes of inaccessible mountains, with stiff cold faces dripping rain” (Marín 2021: 152). Marín astutely diagnoses how the idyllic memories of the pristine Devonshire meadows feel closer, emotionally and aesthetically, to the British loggers than the Patagonian forest whose deforestation they directly oversee. Nostalgia buttressed by the ideology of empire thus serves the reactionary purpose of blunting a full reckoning with the environmental and human consequences of extractivism in the here-and-now. Marín suggests that it is the very wasting of the periphery that is the condition of possibility for Devonshire’s preservation, which itself becomes a valued commodity for its unaltered lushness, that is, for its ability to maintain the illusion of separation from the extractivist zone. Analogously, Jill Casid theorizes the transformation of the New World into the logging camp and the plantation as a process of “colonial relandscaping,” carried out through practices like clearing, grafting, and transplantation that “staked a claim to possession through transformative cultivation” (Casid 2005: 32), evident, for instance, in the British felling of the Patagonian forest observed by Marín. Just as extractivism drove colonial expansion, so too did it drive politics after independence. In César Uribe Piedrahita’s Mancha de aceite (1935), the protagonist Dr. Gustavo Echegorri overlays political and geological maps of Colombia to note with surprise how “the line of oil towers leaving the town of Zulia coincide with the region in dispute,” concluding that the forces behind these conflicts “are fighting to control prospective zones and areas of exploitation” (Uribe Piedrahita 2021: 147). Gustavo goes on to posit that the North American and British oil executives funding these fights dissimulate the conflict over oil into regional skirmishes, essentially outsourcing the violence and suffering onto impoverished locals. Such observations continue

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to ring true today, as resource-driven conflicts are regularly characterized by the state or the media as nonsensical regional disputes.3 Marín’s and Uribe Piedrahita’s novels exemplify what Sharae Deckard calls literature’s “cartographic potential,” the ability to “map the space of the world-ecology and . . . [reveal] the hierarchies and inequalities structuring the relation of cores and peripheries” (Deckard 2015: 4).4 This multi-scalar work that links the commodity frontier with the larger workings of modernity is a way that literary and aesthetic forms can give a sense of the totality of extractivism, offering “one solution to the inaccessibility of the means of production [through] the power to imagine that which is not apparent in one’s immediate reality” (Deckard 2015: 4). Even within nation states, physical, psychological, and emotional distance from the “sacrifice zone,” frequently situated in rural and Indigenous territories, facilitates its invisibility and therefore its normalization as the cost that must be paid for national development. The purposeful erasure of the extractive zone by capital thus necessitates narrative and aesthetic forms that counter the avoidant gaze and make extractivism as a global, ecocidal, and necropolitical system thinkable, as in the case of The Absolute Restoration of All Things, and also in literary works such as Baldomero Lillo’s Sub Terra and José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine, which I discuss in more detail below.

From “Export Reverie” to Critique Before highlighting other critiques of extractivism emergent from Latin American literature, it is crucial to note that numerous Latin American thinkers welcomed extractivist industries as the best path for integrating their newly independent nations into the global economy. The counterpart of British adventure narratives that encouraged settler treasure-seeking was the “export reverie” of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Latin American texts that Ericka Beckman explains similarly whipped up aesthetic and narrative frenzies around the economic promise of untapped autochthonous nature. Authors like Rubén Darío, José Asunción Silva, and Julián del Casal posited that embracing the region’s role as global resource provider would advance the quest for modernity by providing necessary funds. Their literary works reinforced cosmopolitan consumerist desires that drove the acceleration of extractivism and glossed over the dirty matter of

 In other cases, the violence perpetuated by private security, paramilitary, or police forces that serve extractivist interests against their opponents is obfuscated in places like Mexico, Colombia, and Guatemala into a nebulous account of “drug war” violence. Dawn Paley explains that the militarization of these regions under the guise of the drug war is motivated by “the acquisition of territory and resources, including increased control over social worlds and labor power” (Paley 2014: 19).  Amanda Smith has furthered that literature has often fulfilled a function of providing information that cannot be found on maps: “filling cartographic voids with harrowing stories [of human and ecological abuses] as well as other ways of seeing the forest” (Smith 2021: 4).

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production and its localized impact. Cuban poet Julián del Casal’s poem “Mis amores” illustratively opens with an unrestrained declaration of love to luxury objects: “Amo el bronce, el cristal, las porcelanas, / las vidrieras de multiples colores, / los tapices pintados de oro y flores / y las brillantes lunas venecianas.” Thus while there has been a long tradition of critique of extractivist modes of production that can be traced back to Bartolomé de las Casas, the embrace of the extractivist model in the wake of independence was also homegrown.5 Even when this embrace of extractivism as an economic model was not explicit, the ideology of extractivism—of petrofuelled modernity, unrestrained consumption, and what Imre Szeman calls “the fiction of surplus” (Szeman 2011: 324)— implicitly underlies countless examples of cultural production, from the earliest silent films that celebrated the dynamism of trains and automobiles as totems of modernity, to glossy contemporary rom-coms whose aspirational aesthetics promote carbon-intensive jet-setting lifestyles (Fornoff 2021: 384). Nonetheless, the export reverie that characterized modernista literature coexisted with critiques by authors troubled by the labor conditions of extractivist industries, their structural neo-colonial dependencies, and to a lesser extent, their enduring environmental impact. Baldomero Lillo, who grew up in the mining community of Lota, Chile, was the first to starkly portray the realities of Chilean coal mines in his book of short stories Sub terra: cuentos mineros (1904). Influenced by the French naturalist Émile Zola, Lillo depicts the mine as a monstrous engine of capital that not only produces coal, but corpses. It breaks down the bodies of those that enter it, transforming them into “walking ruins that, like broken machines, the mine coughed up every so often from its deep bowels” (Lillo 2021: 135). Lillo thus makes palpable how extractivism operates as a “nonreproductive form of exploitation, which treats the workforce just as it does mineral veins, oil fields, or soils: as a finite resource the remains of which can (indeed must be) discarded once surplus value has been squeezed out of them” (Andermann 2022: 101). Through its relentless critique of labor abuses in the mining industry, Lillo’s work did not advocate for the industry’s eradication, but rather inscribed the hope that better work conditions could be obtained through collective action. Along these lines, an old miner in the short story “Los inválidos” urges his comrades to see a dying horse as “the image of our lives! Like him we are silent, stoically enduring our fate! And yet our strength and power are so immense that nothing under the sun could resist it” (Lillo 2021: 135). But the man’s pleas go unheeded; the short story ends in the failure of these politicized collectives to materialize, reflecting the realities of labor organizing at the time (Fraser 2012: 265). Although dreams of organizing fail in Sub terra, the widespread popularity of Lillo’s work was effective in raising awareness among urban readers about industry abuses. Mining regulation laws were passed in Chile just decades later in  Ericka Beckman discusses del Casal’s “Mis amores” (2013: 42), as well as José Martí’s pamphlet Guatemala (1878) as examples of export commodity fetishism. Even though Martí is now remembered as a critic of capitalism, Guatemala, written in his early twenties, celebrates the export of coffee, displaying “a faith that ‘free’ markets and commodity specialization will foment equality” (Beckman 2013: 24).

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the 1920s, and Lillo’s work has been credited with helping make this happen (Fraser 2012: 266). Whereas Lillo’s naturalist style used third person omniscient to narrate how the extractivist industry is experienced at an individual scale, another classic of Latin American (anti)extractivist narrative, La vorágine by José Eustasio Rivera recurred to a gripping and claustrophobic first person to accomplish something similar. Published in 1924, Rivera’s account of the rubber boom was also informed by firsthand knowledge. Rivera accompanied a government exhibition tasked with investigating whether foreign latex tappers were operating illegally on Colombian lands deep in the Amazon. Rivera’s complex novel dramatizes these geographic disputes, but it also is deeply invested in the interiority of rubber tappers and the phenomenological experience of the Amazon. A moment in La vorágine vividly illustrates how extractivism’s ideological reduction of life to its economic valorization is absorbed and internalized by the individual. “What are hands good for, if they don’t produce,” the rubber tapper laments (Rivera 2021: 143). The rhetorical question of the value of the laborer’s own body comes after a sequence in which he imagines cutting off his own hands with the same swift blow with which he hacks away at the forest, as punishment for his inability to hold onto the money he has earned. La vorágine thus diagnoses the “vortex” of the extractivist economy, in which the laborer reduces forests to commodities in the pursuit of financial gain, a promised prosperity that is endlessly deferred by design as the rubber tapper is sucked into cycles of indebted work, such that self-mutilation seems to be the only way out. The “gap that yawns between our aspirations and reality” (Rivera 2021: 144) described by the rubber tapper in La vorágine is a prime example of the critical interrogation of the myth of El Dorado that took place in Latin American literature of the midtwentieth century after a bust in commodity prices. Charlotte Rogers explains that during the colonial period, the myth of El Dorado held that the New World was a place of limitless natural wealth that could be effectively mobilized to meet the economic demands of the growing empire. This promissory form offered future happiness to the treasure seeker, if only he could effectively leverage the underlying natural bounty. The myth of El Dorado was the ideological bedrock of Latin American development policies in the twentieth century, which aimed to exploit natural resources in order to “catch up” to Western modernity (an impossible task, since as we have seen, modernity was based on the appropriation of nature and labor from the periphery). Yet turbulent commodity prices, combined with the myriad social and environmental ills of extractivism, led to disillusionment with this economic model that intensified throughout the twentieth century, registered in texts like Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder (1963), Mario Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde (1966), and Alvaro Mutis’s La Nieve del Almirante (1986). In her study of these novels, Rogers argues that this disillusionment was often mired in melancholy and nostalgia for a time when the promise of El Dorado still glimmered, reflecting an ideological impasse: the acknowledgement of extractivism’s failures but the inability to imagine beyond it (Rogers 2019: 13).

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The Advent of Neoextractivism This impasse continues today. At the turn of the twenty-first century, rising commodity prices prompted by growing demand from China has prompted renewed commitment to the large-scale export of raw materials as the primary path to economic growth. This “commodities consensus,” as Maristella Svampa puts it, has taken place across the ideological spectrum (Svampa 2015: 65). The implementation of neoextractivist policies by left-leaning and progressive governments in Latin America diverges from its classic implementation primarily because more mechanisms are in place to allow the state to capture rent from extractive activities carried out by transnational corporations. This money is often redirected to infrastructure or educational projects at the state or regional level, “correcting” in a narrow sense the dynamic of negative reciprocity that has long characterized extractivism. Yet, as Svampa and others have pointed out, neoextractivism nonetheless perpetuates the most problematic aspects of extractivism: processes of appropriation and dispossession, the enclosure of the commons, disproportionately harming Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities who live on, and have long cared for, biodiverse lands. In his analysis of Bolivia’s neoextractivist attempts under Evo Morales to obtain sovereignty through state control of natural gas, Bret Gustafson concludes that in spite of the government’s intentions to revamp the system, “dependence on gas exports reaffirmed the country’s global position as a provider of cheap labor and cheap nature, a relationship of coloniality and dependency,” that generally ended up “distorting political incentives, intensifying inequality, and weakening democratic processes” (Gustafson 2020: 3). The same could be said for lithium, a key element in green energy storage necessary for global decarbonization, whose exploitation currently is a key pillar of Bolivia’s development agenda. In her 2022 photographic series, Land II Litio, Argentine visual artist Marcela Magno registers neoextractivism’s cartographic gaze of South America’s lithium triangle (Figure 2). Magno assiduously assembles maps of salt flats in southern Bolivia, northern Chile, and northeastern Argentina using satellite and topographical images captured through Google Earth. These digital images are also printed as high resolution, large format, black and white prints, a sort of extractivist atlas. Magno’s aerial portrait of Salar de Uyuni emulates the abstracting view of capital, underscored through the title’s use of geographic coordinates, which reduce territory to a series of numbers. The stripped-down image registers an expansive salt flat intervened on by industry, broken up into geometric blocks; the salt flat’s muted colors facilitate the photograph’s association with a sketch or an abstract modernist painting. The result is simultaneously aesthetically entrancing and eerie: “a registry of the Anthropocene” and “the dystopias of the present,” as Magno put it in an interview (Gómez Carrasco 2021). It materializes the tension between the current “extractivist buzz” around a coming boom in resource rents from lithium, and realistic fears raised by activists and surrounding communities who caution that lithium mining is being carried out in

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the same inequitable and destructive manner as other extractivist industries, which is made “all the more cruel [because] it takes place under the banner of sustainability and in response to a deepening climate crisis the peoples and places of the so-called lithium triangle did nothing to produce” (Kingsbury 2022: 5).

Figure 2: Marcela Magno, “Bolivia, Salar de Uyuni, 20°32’54.95”S 67°22’36.33”O, 30 Abr 2019,” from the series Land II Litio (2022). Image courtesy of the artist.

Today, the justification of extractivism’s global unevenness has shifted from the explicitly racialized discourse of empire to one dressed up in the guise of specialization and efficiency. That is, one that contends that it is more efficient for some nations to specialize in providing raw materials and for others to dedicate themselves to their manufacture or use. In reality, such a system consolidates global inequity, with the global north

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able to continually expand its economy based on materials imported from the south (Hoyos 2018: 89). It inevitably situates the resource providing country “on the losing end of an unequal exchange of raw goods for refined or manufactured imports” (Riofrancos 2020: 4). This dynamic is further reinforced by the elevated cost of the machineries necessary for industry production, which has meant that neoextractivist states must partner with transnational corporations that have little interest or incentive to conduct business in a way that is socially or ecologically sound. Bolívar Echeverría has described this as a “re-feudalization of economic life,” in which actors with access to the technologies capable of extracting raw materials have greater power than those that own the land itself (Echeverría 2019: 25). Nonetheless, continued faith in the everdeferred promise of modernity on the basis of limitless nature is so strong that even in the face of evidence to the contrary—climate change, exhausted or fragile ecosystems, widespread community opposition—the commodities consensus persists. Yet dissent continues to grow apace. Thea Riofrancos offers insight to the dominant forms of dissent in her analysis of Ecuadoran politics. She traces a bifurcation between those who want to transform extractivism through nationalization, such that it works more for the people (“expropriation, nationalization, and the collective ownership of the means and products of extraction”), which she calls “radical resource nationalism,” and those who want to move away from extractivism altogether (“the militant opposition to all forms of resource extraction”), which she describes as “antiextractivism” (Riofrancos 2020: 6). As experiments in resource nationalism have faltered, by for instance focusing on capturing rents from transnational companies rather than directly expropriating resources, Riofrancos notes that many who previously advocated for state management of raw materials have subsequently pivoted to anti-extractivist postures (Riofrancos 2020: 14–15). In contemporary cultural production, it is easier to find examples that imagine anti-extractivist futures than those that sketch out possibilities for radical resource nationalism. This might be because of the repeated failures of state-run extractive enterprise, like Mexico’s oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), which operates in ways that critics see as short-sighted. In the “Energía” episode of Gael García Bernal’s 2021 YouTube series El Tema cohosted with Mixe intellectual Yasnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, the two take PEMEX to task for its contributions to climate change, labor abuses, destruction of mangroves, oil spills, and the many environmental and social ills that accompany fracking, which is seen as PEMEX’s next horizon. Yet perhaps the expropriation of potential sources of green energy like wind, solar, or even lithium, if conducted in ethical ways that serve the communities where these industries are located, might be a renewed site of imaginative energy for proponents of radical resource nationalism. The Oaxacan visual artist Edgardo Aragón in his piece Mesoamérica: el efecto huracán (2015) is one potential example of radical resource nationalism aesthetics. In the short, Aragón films himself driving a battery charged in Oaxaca back to the community of Cachimbo on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a region whose high winds have made it a hotbed of private-public wind

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farms, primarily run by Spanish corporations. Aragón’s road trip captures his car passing numerous PEMEX gas stations, and a landscape dotted with wind turbines. Cachimbo, his destination, is a community surrounded by wind farms that lacks electricity. The artist’s intervention is to return the energy back to its source, a pointed message about the need to equitably redistribute energy and to see nonhuman nature as something that should be communally owned and governed, rather than destined for export. In terms of post-extractivist thought, Indigenous groups and thinkers are at the forefront of this imaginative and political work, as we have seen from the Tupinambá perspective that manages to penetrate de Léry’s Eurocentric gaze such that he perceives the “shame” in extractivist appropriation, to Mikeas Sánchez’s blunt assessment of extractivism’s ludicrous logic (40). Indigenous interventions signal the genocidal and ecocidal effects of extractivism, as in Quechua poet Dida Aguirre’s poem “Tonqorillaña kichasqa / Garganta tajo abierto,” which describes open pit mining in Cerro de Pasco as “un holocausto de la vida” while also urging readers to organize politically and invoking alternative histories of Indigenous extraction in the region that have been carried out with care and respect for the mountain and its spirit (Zevallos-Aguilar 2019: 5). Another example is Davi Kopenawa’s The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (2013), coauthored with French anthropologist Bruce Albert. The Yanomami shaman and activist similarly details the apocalyptic implications of gold and iron mining and cattle breeding on Yanomami lands in the Amazon, and proffers a “targeted and pragmatic ethical corrective to Euro-American humanism’s blanket fetishization of nature, commodities, and Indigenous peoples” through Yanomami cosmopolitics, epistemologies, and ontologies (Anderson 2023). The threat that post-extractivist worldviews pose to capital cannot be understated. It is so great that land defenders, from Chico Mendes to Berta Cáceres to the members of Ejido El Bajío, who oppose the implementation of extractivist projects on their lands, risk their lives to speak out.

Epistemic and Literary Extractivism In this chapter I have sketched out an abridged overview of extractivism as a history and concept in Latin America. Throughout, I have interwoven examples from literature and visual cultural to signal how discourse and aesthetics consolidate perceptions of nonhuman nature: whether as limitless resource or world-sustaining fabric. Emergent from a hegemonic colonial-capitalist worldview, literature and art in Western colonialcapitalist modernity have often served to reinforce the ideology of extractivism. The ideology of extractivism manifests itself in various ways: as the justification for colonial looting, or, as the developmentalist aspiration for future national prosperity via the harnessing of natural wealth. In either case, extractivism is buttressed by what Jennifer Wenzel terms “resource logics,” or “habits of mind that understand nature as other

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than human, disposed as a resource for human use, and subject to human control” (Wenzel 2020: 42). It is also premised on a narrative of resource abundance, the notion that nature is a limitless font that can be effectively put to work in the pursuit of endless growth, expansion, and accumulation. The fantasy of nature’s limitlessness has of course been repeatedly disproven; evident from the earliest exhaustion of oyster beds by colonial pearl fishing, which pushed Spanish expansion to other resource frontiers in Baja California and Costa Rica. Yet in spite of repeated proof of nature’s finitude, the ideology of extractivism retains its potency, leading Eduardo Gudynas to affirm that extractivism is more an act of faith than an economic science (Gudynas 2018: 74). While extractivism can be boiled down to an ideology and material practice that is fundamental to the historical evolution of empire, capitalism, and modernity, Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel caution against “conceptual creep” (Szeman and Wenzel 2021: 510). Rather than conflate extractivism with capitalism or instrumentalism, they insist that extractivism is a specific part of capitalism “that stands in dynamic relation to other parts” (510). The conceptual specificity of extractivism is located in its focus on nonhuman matter, the materiality and stuff of nature that fuels accumulation, as well as its spatial flows and accompanying racialized reorganization of human life. Attending to the historical and material particularities of extractivism, Szeman and Wenzel contend, also means thinking with particular historical cases. They propose studying extractivisms rather than extractivism, to reckon with the distinct iterations of the extraction and production of, say, petroleum, palm oil, and rubber. Yet numerous scholars have signaled the generative potential of conceptual creep, borrowing the term extractivism to discuss similarly uneven, and similarly racialized and spatialized processes of cultural appropriation. Ramón Grosfoguel has used the term “epistemic extractivism” to describe Aymara philosopher Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s critique of how Indigenous thought has been appropriated by Western, white, and mestizo scholars (Grosfoguel 2015: 38). For Rivera Cusicanqui, this appropriation constitutes a form of extractivism because Indigenous knowledge is taken and transformed into cultural capital by subjects who do not deeply engage with Indigenous communities, nor do they support the concrete political struggles that have nourished the development of Indigenous thought. As scholars who are not Indigenous, it is imperative to remain vigilant against scholarly practices that “mine” Indigenous thought or literature for concepts that can be “put to use” in rethinking the Anthropocene, and instead stand in solidarity with ongoing land defense efforts. Amanda Smith has similarly pointed to processes of literary extractivism, or the “selective removal of content from often unacknowledged Amazonian sources to use as raw material for cultural products created and consumed beyond the region itself” (Smith 2021: 203). Smith discusses instances of literary extractivism by mestizo writers Mario Vargas Llosa and César Calvo Soriano, who both, albeit differently, crafted novels about the harmful effects of commodified biodiversity in the Peruvian Amazon that drew from the expertise and knowledges of Indigenous peoples. The resulting works, Smith argues, encouraged future extractivism in the region, whether by

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presenting it as a space of exportable resources, as in Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde, or a site of spiritual retreat for outsiders, as in Calvo’s Las tres mitadas de Ino Moxo y otros brujos de la Amazonia. The conceptual use of extractivism to describe analogous processes of extraction and abstraction of Indigenous knowledges into global commodities is illuminating in its identification of the racialized and spatialized dynamics that characterize both the world economy as well as cultural production. Studying such dynamics can shed light on “how the accumulation of capital and carbon is entangled with the accumulation of cultural capital” (Wenzel 2020: 7).

Postextractivist Aesthetics Thinking about cultural production in tandem with extractivism helps illuminate the role of representation and narrative in subtending or subverting extractivist ideologies. Rob Nixon has famously explained that the environmental consequences of extractivism are a representational challenge (Nixon 2011: 3). Not only are these processes either invisible (as in the toxicity of mining, or the exhaustion of oyster beds) or purposefully kept out of sight, they also unfold at scales and tempos that confound anthropocentric ways of seeing. A key role of literature and other forms of cultural production then has been to make extractivism more thinkable through multi-scalar narration, firsthand testimony, or different techniques of visualization. It is a task of creating new ways of speaking, as Mexican poet Maricela Guerrero describes it, that are distanced from the “language of empire,” and that follow the paths of nature itself. Guerrero uses the cell as inspiration for this new postextractivist language, following the “dream of every cell” to become more cells as a philosophy of endless becoming and multiplication that departs from the extractivist logic of subtraction. Rendering the extractive zone more visible is not always a straightforward task of documentation. The iconic aerial views that contrast deforested lands with adjacent forests, Óscar Pérez has explained, can also perpetuate myths, like the notion that the boundaries between cultivated and uncultivated areas are static, rather than porous and ever changing. T.J. Demos’s analysis of photographs of extractivist infrastructure similarly argues that such visualizations often slip into the sublime, producing perverse visual pleasure for those that gaze down at these sites, while also abstracting extractivist industry and destruction from the people that live there and from the larger socioeconomic environment that gave rise to it (Demos 2017: 69). Marcela Magno’s aforementioned Land series takes such a risk in its formulation of an extractivist atlas, a project that reclaims satellite imagery as a way of understanding the abstracting operations of capital. Both Demos and Pérez contrast the bird’s eye view of extractivist sites, which impart a sense of human mastery through the pictorial image, with on-the-ground images that foreground those who are affected by extractivist industry, and projects that

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connect extractivist sites with the global circuits that give rise to them. By means of example, Pérez mentions Fernando Solanas’s Viaje a los pueblos fumigados (2018) as illustrating a more nuanced approach through its juxtaposition of “aerial shots and representations at ground level” (Pérez 2021: 80). For his part, Demos points to Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares’s Forest Law (2014), a mixed-media installation about oil extraction in the Amazon as “reinventing the conditions of visuality in relation to Capitalocene violence” through its interrogation of the colonial structures and ideologies that give rise to extractivism (Demos 2017: 102). So what does postextractivist aesthetics offer? Literature, visual art, and film have been potent sites of critique of extractivism in Latin America, calling attention to its varied political and material consequences. These works often operate in tandem with activist efforts to trouble the normalization of extractivism as a path for economic development, a tradition that runs from Baldomero Lillo’s efforts to regulate the labor conditions endured by miners at the turn of the twentieth century, to Miguel Fernández de Castro and Natalia Mendoza’s more recent efforts to bring Ejido El Bajío’s fight against Penmont to new publics with The Absolute Restoration of All Things. Cultural production is also a space for world-building, of trying out ideas that can then percolate into the broader imaginary. The narrative and aesthetic toolkit for making extractivist systems more thinkable is wide-ranging: reenactment offers one path to making the exact amount of gold illegally extracted by a mining company more immediately legible, narrative vorticity another to emulate how a rubber tapper internalizes the extractivist worldview such that he perceives his own body as fungible. Perhaps most importantly, postextractivist aesthetics look outward, beyond critique to the subjunctive task of imagining forms of community formulated around territory and life. Like Mikeas Sánchez’s mockery of the ludicrous terms put forth by the “masters of barbarity,” postextractivist aesthetics offer renewed ways of thinking as a collective about the commons. It asks: what might the absolute restoration of all things after extractivism look like?

Works Cited Acosta, Alberto. “Aporte al debate: el extractivismo como categoría de saqueo y devastación.” Forum for Interamerican Research 9.2 (2016): 24–33. Aguilar Gil, Yásnaya Elena. “La gran pirámide de guiza del capitalismo.” Revista de la Universidad de México 896 (2023): 40–45. Andermann, Jens. “Reading Extractivism.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 75.1 (2022): 95–105. Anderson, Mark. “False Gifts and Epidemic Fumes: Extractivism’s Traces and Cosmopolitical Resistances in Davi Kopenawa Yanomami’s The Falling Sky.” Literature Beyond the Human: Post-Anthropocentric Brazil. Eds. Luca Bacchini and Victoria Saramago. London: Routledge, 2023, 214–232. Aragón, Edgardo. Mesoamérica: el efecto huracán. 2015. Beckman, Ericka. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

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Bentancor, Orlando. The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Biemann, Ursula and Paulo Tavares. Forest Law. 2014. Bigelow, Allison Margaret. Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2020. Casid, Jill H. Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Deckard, Sharae. “Mapping the World-Ecology: Conjectures on World-Ecological Literature.” Unpublished manuscript, 2015. https://www.academia.edu/2083255/Mapping_the_World_Ecology_Conjectures_ on_World_Ecological_Literature (30 March 2023). Del Casal Julián, “Mis amores. Soneto Pompadour.” Hojas al viento (1890). https://www.cervantesvirtual. com/obra-visor/mis-amores-soneto-pompadour/html/1b657350-7a45-11e1-b1fb-00163ebf5e63_1.html (30 March 2023). Demos, T.J. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. London: Sternberg Press, 2017. Dunlap, Alexander. “The ‘solution’ is now the ‘problem:’ wind energy, colonization, and the ‘genocideecocide nexus’ in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca.” The International Journal of Human Rights 22.4 (2018): 550–573. Echeverría, Bolívar. Modernity and “Whiteness.” Trans. Rodrigo Ferreira. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. “Energía.” El Tema, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V50anej7W8o (30 March 2023). Fernández de Castro, Miguel, and Natalia Mendoza. “The Absolute Restoration of All Things.” Storefront for Art and Architecture. April 8–July 30, 2022. Fornoff, Carolyn. “Mexican Cinema as Petrocinema.” Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas 18.3 (2021): 377–387. Fraser, Benjamin. “Into the Chilean Mines: The Dialectics of Land and Work in Baldomero Lillo’s Sub terra.” A Contra corriente 9.2 (2012): 248–281. Global Witness. “Last Line of Defense.” September 13, 2021. https://www.globalwitness.org/en/cam paigns/environmental-activists/last-line-defence/ (30 March 2023). Gómez Carrasco, Margarita. “Incidencias de Google Earth en la creación de arte contemporáneo. Entrevista a Marcela Magno.” El Gran Otro 13 (December 18, 2021). http://elgranotro.com/marcelamagno/ (30 March 2023). Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017. Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Del extractivismo económico al extractivismo epistémico y ontológico.” Revista Internacional de Comunicación y Desarrollo 4 (2015): 33–45. Gudynas, Eduardo. “Desarrollo y límites al crecimiento económico: una polémica persistente.” Desarrollo, Sociedad, Alternativas. Eds. Pascual García, Jessica Ordoñez, and Ronaldo Munck. Dublin: Glasnevin, 2019. ——. Extractivismos: Ecología, economía y política de un modo de entender el desarrollo y la Naturaleza. Cochabamba: CEDIB, 2015. ——. “Extractivisms: Tendencies and Consequences.” Reframing Latin American Development. Eds. Ronaldo Munck and Raúl Delgado Wise. London: Routledge, 2018. Guerrero, Maricela. El sueño de toda célula. Mexico City: Antílope, 2018. Gustafson, Bret. Bolivia in the Age of Gas. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. Harris, Wilson. The Secret Ladder. London: Faber and Faber, 1963. Hoyos, Héctor. “Global Supply Chain Literature vs Extractivism.” Re-Mapping World Literature. Eds. Gesine Müller, Jorge J. Locane, and Benjamin Loy. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. 33–44. Léry, Jean de. “Of the Tress, Herbs, Roots, and Exquisite Fruits Produced by the Land of Brazil.” Trans. Janet Whatley. The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Eds. Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. 38–40.

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Lillo, Baldomero. “The Invalids.” Trans. Steven Doph and Jennifer French. The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Eds. Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. 133–137. Kingsbury, Donald V. “Lithium’s Buzz: Extractivism Between Booms in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile.” Cultural Studies (2022): 1–26. DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2034909. Kopenawa, Davi and Bruce Albert. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2013. Machado Aráoz, Horacio. Minar: colonialidad y genealogía del extractivismo. Chiapas: Ediciones OnA, 2018. Marín, Juan. “From 53rd South (1936).” Trans. Patricia González. The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Eds. Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. 150–153. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “It’s Not the Anthropocene, It’s the White Supremacy Scene, Or, the Geological Color Line.” After Extinction. Ed. Richard Grusin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 123–149. Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso, 2015. Mutis, Álvaro. La Nieve del Almirante. Madrid: Alianza, 1986. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Okoth, Christine. “The Extractive Form of Contemporary Writing: Dionne Brand and Yea Gysasi.” Textual Practice 35.3 (2021): 379–394. Paley, Dawn. Drug War Capitalism. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2014. Pearl, Max. “Art at the Border of Power and Ecology.” The Nation, Oct 19, 2021. https://www.thenation. com/article/society/miguel-fernandez-de-castro-art/ (30 March 2023). Pérez, Oscar A. “Escaping the Visual Trap of the Agricultural Frontier: Fernando Solanas’s Viaje a los pueblos fumigados.” Latin American Literary Review 48.96 (2021): 79–85. Riofrancos, Thea. Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. Rivera, José Eustasio. “From The Vortex.” Trans. John Charles Chasteen. The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Eds. Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. 143–144. Rogers, Charlotte. Mourning El Dorado: Literature and Extractivism in the Contemporary American Tropics. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Sánchez, Mikeas. “What is it Worth?” Trans. Wendy Call. Modern Poetry in Translation 3 (2019). https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/poem/what-is-it-worth/ (30 March 2023). Siddique, Haroon. “Mexican Farmers Demand Redress for Illegal Mining and Violence on their Land.” The Guardian, May 17, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/17/mexican-farmersdemand-redress-for-mining-and-violence-on-their-land (30 March 2023). Solanas, Fernando. Viaje a los pueblos fumigados. Cinesur, 2018. Smith, Amanda M. Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography After the Rubber Boom. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883. Svampa, Maristella. “Commodities Consensus: Neoextractivism and Enclosure of the Commons in Latin America.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114.1 (2015): 65–82. Szeman, Imre. “Literature and Energy Futures.” PMLA 126.2 (2011): 323–325. Szeman, Imre, and Jennifer Wenzel. “What do we talk about when we talk about extractivism?” Textual Practice 35.3 (2021): 505–523. Tolvanera, dir. Ángel R. Melgoza, 2021. Uribe Piedrahita, César. “Mun Hospital.” Trans. Patricia González. The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Eds. Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. 145–149.

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Vargas Llosa, Mario. La casa verde. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1966. Warsh, Molly A. American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2018. Wenzel, Jennifer. The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Zevallos-Aguilar, Ulíses Juan. “Poesía quechua peruana y antiextractivismo entre 2009–2012.” Diálogo 22.1 (2019): 73–86.

Mark Anderson

Multinaturalism/Nonhuman Representation 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.1 As Gugino captures succinctly, “the power of mimesis is the possibility of exchange without reciprocity, an exchange which is instead unilateral, appropriative, and ruling” (qtd. Moreiras 1993: 126). This occurs because, as Luiz Costa Lima argues, the role of mimesis in literature has historically been to testify to the truth of the representational system as worldview (Costa Lima 1985: 448). In Lacanian terms, any artistic representation would necessarily consist in the symbolic overwriting of the Real; that is, of reducing the unmediated, complex singularity of what is represented to a specific set of meanings or coordinates within the symbolic ordering of reality. This is clearly the case with the overt rewriting of diverse environments as homogeneous loci amoeni (idyllic, natural spaces of repose) in aesthetic regimes such as classical and Renaissance pastoralism, as exemplified by the eclogue genre pioneered by Virgil and revitalized in Spanish during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Garcilaso de la Vega and Lope de Vega, among others. Likewise, in the nineteenthcentury Romantic depictions of nature by Latin American writers like Jorge Isaacs and José María Heredia, nature’s “grandeur” serves primarily as a catalyst for the sublimation/abstraction of the human spirit and nationalistic territoriality, while any of the actual species inhabiting these environments recede into the diffused chiaroscuro of the landscape painting of the period. Despite its more or less empiricist pretensions, even realistic representation is entangled in this problematic, since the complexity of bodies and assemblages of any kind (human, nonhuman, political, and

 As Derrida underscores regarding the Aristotelian thesis that only humans can produce art, “what can be glimpsed in this inexhaustible reiteration of the humanist theme, of the ontology bound up with it as well, in this obscurantist buzzing that always treats animality in general, under the purview of one or two scholastic examples, as if there were only a single ‘animal’ structure that could be opposed to the human (inalienably endowed with reason, freedom, sociality, laughter, language, law, the symbolic, with consciousness, or an unconscious, etc.), is that the concept of art is also constructed with just such a guarantee in view. It is there to raise man up [ériger l’homme], that is, always, to erect a man-god, to avoid contamination from ‘below,’ and to mark an incontrovertible limit of anthropological domesticity” (Derrida 1981: 5). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-004

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social) and their interrelations are strategically reduced to a few “essential” characteristics or categorical properties that appear to bear a metonymic and therefore “truthful” relation to the totality of both the bodies themselves and of the social relations in which they are embedded. Thus, in the famous “regionalist” or “telluric” novels of the 1920s such as Rómulo Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara (1929), Ricardo Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra (1926), and even José Eustasio Rivera’s somewhat more complex La vorágine (1924), biodiverse environments are reduced to distinctive settings under the aegis of national geographic and cultural idiosyncrasy and the protagonists’ modernizing projects, most of which involve terraforming and the modernization/standardization of labor regimes and infrastructure in the implementation of large-scale cattle ranching, monoculture plantations, and/or mineral and oil extraction. As Jennifer L. French perceptively argues, “rather than the ‘escape’ from the realities of industrial capitalism that romanticism offered European writers, Spanish American nature writing much more directly represents the continent’s predominant economic forms and, as a result, its gradual incorporation into the international capitalist system” (French 2005: 13). Even in much more empiricist works such as Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões (1902), the metanarrative of nature as barbarous and hostile undermines the representation of the ecological complexity of unique environments and local ways of life, thereby subordinating them to the ostensible “truths” of modern development and justifying the use of state violence to enforce modernization. As Chilean avant-garde poet Vicente Huidobro famously proclaimed in “Non Serviam” (1914) and “Arte poética” (1916), abstract representation looks to disrupt this essentialism, emancipating form from content and thereby giving rise to paradoxically (given abstract art’s emphasis on the liberation of individual creativity) more objective or autonomous modes of representation, in which relations take precedence over the subjective overwriting of objects through symbolic description. Indeed, it is in this sense in which Theodor Adorno described modern art as the “social antithesis of society” (Adorno 1997: 8). Despite Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis regarding “the increasing fragility of the mimetic faculty” in modernity, this ostensible decoupling of form from content presupposes a radical intensification of the same processes of “ritualistic” reduction at work in traditional mimetic representation; the relations between bodies (whether representational bodies or those of artistic media themselves—a further reduction) are essentialized to a degree that the bodies involved in the relation become tangential to the representational system itself, often present only in absentia, as traces.2 Ironically, abstract art and scientific empiricism meet not as antagonists, but as twin manifestations of the modern human/nature divide in their quest for the

 See Walter Benjamin (1978: 334). Indeed, as Derrida (1981: 15) argues, “the in-significant nonlanguage of forms which have no purpose or end and make no sense, this silence is a language between nature and man”. This language depends on the constitutive analogy within mimesis between natural production and the “natural” human production of art through the imitation of nature’s productive modes.

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representation of relations without relata, as the absoluteness of form on the one hand and of abstracted “natural laws” (which would ostensibly order all material forms, including those of artistic media) on the other.3 Nonetheless, unlike abstract art, the scientific method requires that objects verify their own scientific representations through experimental corroboration, effectively acting as “judges” of human hypotheses regarding their properties and relations despite this corroboration always passing through the mediation of human “witnesses” (Latour 2004: 9–10). As Latour summarizes, in the scientific paradigm, in themselves, facts are mute; natural forces are brute mechanisms. Yet the scientists declare that they themselves are not speaking; rather, facts speak for themselves. These mute entities are thus capable of speaking, writing, signifying within the artificial chamber of the laboratory or inside the even more rarefied chamber of the vacuum pump. Little groups of gentlemen take testimony from natural forces, and they testify to each other that they are not betraying but translating the silent behaviour of objects (Latour 1993: 28).

This is one reason why scientific tropes have taken on great weight within the environmental humanities, imbuing humanistic representations with a greater degree of realistic objectivism and thereby opening a space for nonhuman difference within representation. Nonhuman “objects” of inquiry thus acquire a certain authority or agency in demanding representational fidelity. Clearly, nonhumans may never speak for themselves directly in scientific discourse, but data-based modes of representation nevertheless assume a greater degree of proximity to what they might say if they could, since data garnered through methodologically rigorous, repeatable experimentation is assumed to be the least subjective mode of representation. In this kind of empiricist realism, the weight of meaning shifts from identification, that is, the subjective overwriting of the other’s singularity through equivalence to human interests and qualities, towards difference in translation—that is, the seemingly direct translation of the properties an object of study displays to scientific instruments into terms legible for human scientists. Rather than a difference established between oppositional terms or concepts within one or more discursive registers, in scientific research difference emerges between materiality and discourse.

 I draw here on the extensive argumentation made by Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern and Reassembling the Social regarding the complementary abstraction of objects from relations in scientific empiricism and the constitution of the social as a political abstraction, as well as Karen Barad’s brilliant materialist rethinking of “objects” as intra-active, co-constituting phenomena in relation in Meeting the Universe Halfway. As Barad argues, “phenomena do not merely mark the inseparability of observer and observed, or the results of measurements; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability/entanglement of intra-acting ‘agencies.’ That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations” (Barad 2007: 139; italics in the original). For Barad, there are no abstract “natural laws” external to phenomena, only emergent patterns within intra-actions.

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Nonetheless, scientific discourse is still fully imbricated within the contours of human exceptionalism established by the modern, Cartesian form of the human/nature divide; natural entities may be seen as embodying their own meanings through their properties and relations with other bodies, but those meanings are only fully legible to humans, and only humans are believed to be capable of transcending the immediacy of the material to translate diverse relations into universal paradigms or natural laws. While biologists, chemists, and physicists frequently allude to cells “speaking” to each other or ions “wanting” to bind with their opposites, for example, these usages are nearly always assumed a priori to be a form of personification, of poetic license, not as indications of nonhuman voluntaristic or discursive agency.4 At the organismic level, plants and animals are usually said to respond to internal and external stimuli, but not to “think” in the sense of processing that information into a cognitive system that would allow them to make conscious decisions projected towards their own future intra-actions within their environments. It is in this sense of animals ostensibly lacking a symbolically-mediated orientation toward the future comparable to that of humans in which Heidegger famously referred to the specifically animal form of being as “poor-inworld” (1995: 177).5

The Human/Nature Divide in Representation As Latour argues throughout We Have Never Been Modern and Reassembling the Social, this mode of conceiving of humans as subjects and nonhumans as objects became entrenched in modern thought from the 1600s onward through the implementation of a seemingly insurmountable disciplinary division between the physical sciences and the social sphere, with the first considered the tangible (measurable) realm of Nature and the second the purview of the political, in which representations must necessarily always be abstract, as society can never be apprehended in its totality as a measurable object, only as the nebulous serialization of abstracted relations between demographic categories. Nature (including human bodies) came to be perceived as determinate, the realm of concrete properties and clearly discernible chains of causality, while society (the realm of human relations) was viewed as indeterminate; even when certain historical trends seemed to repeat themselves across contexts, chains of causality could never be unequivocally isolated but only approximated through symbolization. The social sciences attempt to bridge this aporia through the juxtaposition of demographic data and case study

 Notable exceptions to this mode of thinking would include Karen Barad’s agential realism and the biosemiotic perspective of authors such as Jesper Hoffmeyer and Kalevi Kull, who view agency in materialist terms as the capacity for identifying and interacting with other bodies.  Derrida, among many others, rigorously rejects this affirmation as well as all other definitions of animality on the basis of lack in The Animal that Therefore I Am.

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narratives in the elaboration of social theory; nonetheless, no one could credibly claim that data, exemplary case studies, or theory ever embody fully the totality of people’s lives at any scale. Furthermore, no “social” group can ever be described or apprehended in its totality as a discrete object, since their composition, bounds, and complex modes of association are constantly changing or “becoming.” This is why Latour contends that the social sciences are “objectless”; what they represent are certain, essentialized forms of association as defined by social scientists rather than actual bodies or interactions. This mode of conceiving of society leads in turn to forms of governance that are highly reliant on the construction of demographic categories; the “citizen” is never a concrete person, but simply a juridical category from which nonhumans (as well as a variety of humans in different historical contexts) are necessarily excluded as constitutive others in the elaboration of rights discourse. In short, the physical sciences traditionally allow nonhumans a degree of representational agency in demanding fidelity to how their own properties and relations are portrayed, but their relegation to the Nature category means that they are fully excised from any conceptualization of society or politics, and therefore ethical standing except in cases in which harm done to them affects humans in some way. Furthermore, this specifically modern iteration of the human/nature divide potentialized the proliferation of new forms of objectification (new disciplines and disciplinary technologies) that extrude into every aspect of what is classified as Nature, up to and including depersonalized human body parts (as in the cases of gene patents, organ transplants, tissue cultures, and so on). Clearly, this movement is also inseparable from the concomitant rise of modern economic systems, in which what social ecologists such as Eduardo Gudynas and Maristella Svampa call extractivism becomes the primary mode of valuation. In a strict sense, extractivism refers to the commodification of both nonhuman bodies and local labor in the process of intensive natural resource extraction oriented towards national or international exportation, which also connotes the neocolonial appropriation of wealth from “underdeveloped” regions and nations (Gudynas 2013: 2–4). In a broader sense, however, it refers to the worldview underpinning human-nature relations by which diverse bodies and lived environments (that is, local social ecologies) are rearticulated into reserves of labor and natural resources—and subsequently, extractive sites—for the global economic system. As Enrique Leff summarizes, “the unification of the world is produced not as an ontological unity between the natural and the social, but as the effect of the articulation of natural processes with the process of producing value and surplus value, which generates in turn increasing cultural uniformity through the disintegration of ethnic and ecological diversity of different regions, an effect of generalized market exchange and global capital accumulation” (Leff 1995: 9). In this sense, any system of representation that presupposes the distinction between nature and society will necessarily become complicit to at least some degree with extractivism; even in the case of conservation discourse, nature always emerges as a future reserve of partitionable natural resources, particularly when one includes aesthetic pleasure as a capitalizable resource (as in national parks, ecotourism, and

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even nature writing and documentaries). Indeed, as Adorno’s thesis regarding modern art makes clear, representation can never be truly autonomous or detachable from either the social or the political. Representations of nature thus must always uphold the system of valuation in which natural “objects” form the basis for and opposite term of society, making it nearly impossible to conceive of forms of relation between humans and nonhumans that are not predicated on some form of anthropocentric instrumentalism. This is why Latour proposes abolishing altogether the disciplinary categories of nature and the social in favor of “actor-network theory,” in which the concept of society is replaced by that of the collective or relational assemblage and practitioners (no longer divided into physical or social scientists) examine how objects, now reframed as “actants,” and humans interact relationally to make the world. Furthermore, when the scientific knowledge of nature is considered absolute, any competing ontological framework is necessarily relegated to the social, to the indeterminate and therefore relativistic. As Latour argues, “cultural relativism is made possible only by the solid absolutism of the natural sciences. Such is the default position of the endless debates going on, for instance, between physical and human geography, physical and cultural anthropology, biological psychiatry and psychoanalysis, material and social archaeology, and so on. There is unity and objectivity on one side, multiplicity and symbolic reality on the other. This is just the solution that ANT wishes to render untenable” (Latour 2005: 117). Relativism thus becomes untenable when associations and concepts themselves are taken as inherently material phenomena, that is, as concrete effects of relational intra-actions within multiscalar assemblages that are never static, but always in process, in becoming. Rather than the multicultural perspective of difference arising culturally, as the product of divergent culturally determined worldviews regarding the same immutable facts, difference arises from within these assemblages, in which different human worldviews influence the assemblages in question in different ways, effectively producing distinct phenomena that themselves form the basis for “facts” that themselves can never fully transcend the phenomena in question. It is in this sense in which Latour engages William James’s notion of the pluriverse, as each assemblage effectively forms and projects its own worlding machinery (qtd in Latour 2005: 116). The modern science/society complex would thus consist in only one particular set of mechanisms for producing phenomena intraactively, among many possibilities. From within this framework, governance and therefore political representation would have to be rethought entirely, since they could no longer rely on the abstraction of the social as the transcendence of nature. In We Have Never Been Modern and in greater depth in The Politics of Nature, Latour envisions a “parliament of things,” in which human experts in a variety of disciplines would be tasked with evaluating how nonhuman actants co-produce with humans collective phenomena that we usually

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view as the social, that is, the exclusive purview of humans.6 Latour looks to bring into political practice the scientific disciplines’ imperative of multiple layers of scientific review and systematic coherence, attempting to address the problem of nonhuman representation by deferring to the scientific procedure of peer review. Nonetheless, the twin problems of language and law weigh heavily on Latour’s proposal for a parliament of things. Clearly, the nature/society divide can only be reinforced when human experts serve as the political representatives of all nonhumans, inscribing them with collective meaning and a hierarchy of values as well as formulating policy or propositions for governance. This is one reason he frequently references “nonmodern” ontological frameworks as examples of worldviews that eschew the nature/social divide, without ever exploring their representational systems in any detail or incorporating them into his cosmopolitical proposal in a concrete way. One might surmise that he intends to include shamans and other nonmodern practitioners within his panels of experts, although this is never stated explicitly. As the case may be, the problem of nonhuman representation will always run up against the seemingly inescapable aporia that humans can never eschew the symbolic order in matters of representation and that nonhumans can never become full practitioners of symbolic representation. Even when some species are able to engage to a least a degree with human symbols (whether verbal or visual), the ethological evidence suggests that they are, in the words of Terrence Deacon, “pre-maladapted” for symbolic representation, depending primarily on iconic and indexical signs for communication.7

Rethinking Representation through Material Semiotics However, a more nuanced interpretation of semiosis becomes possible when representation is reframed as something more than symbolic projection. Such is the case in Karen Barad’s theorization of “agential realism,” for example, in which semiosis becomes a question of performative intra-actions between diverse, sign-bearing actants that coproduce relational, rather than discrete phenomena. For Barad, all “matter” is produced as intra-active, constantly becoming phenomena through semiotic intraactions whose ‘’causality’’ or meaning is determined not by either essential properties or external, abstract natural laws, but rather through emergent, differential patterns, which is how she defines discourse:

 This is why Latour insists that in actor network theory, “from now on, the word ‘collective’ will take the place of ‘society’” (Latour 2005: 75).  See Hoffmeyer’s discussion of Deacon’s The Symbolic Species in dialogue with Charles S. Pierce’s theory of signs (Hoffmeyer 2008: 280–285).

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Discourse is not a synonym for language. Discourse does not refer to linguistic or signifying systems, grammars, speech acts, or conversations. [. . .] Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements. Statements are not the mere utterances of the originating consciousness of a unified subject; rather, statements and subjects emerge from a field of possibilities. This field of possibilities is not static or singular but rather is a dynamic and contingent multiplicity (Barad 2007: 146–147).

From this perspective, language constitutes only one kind of performative intraactivity or set of “boundary-drawing practices” among many others, most of which do not implicate humans directly. Meaning would thus emerge as the mutual intelligibility and unintelligibility of bodies in relational becoming, that is, as the emergence of boundaries that determine specific forms of agency (how emergent bodies may affect other bodies) and therefore “properties” as the set of potential intra-actions displayed by the relational bodies involved in the intra-action at any given moment (Barad 2007: 140; 149). From this perspective, the distinction between nature as the realm of facts or determinable properties and society as the systematic abstraction of human relations governed by language or the symbol becomes meaningless. The entire basis of representation must be rethought when language is taken as only one form of discourse, one that is specific to humans but that nevertheless exists on a continuum with what semiotician Charles S. Pierce called iconic and indexical signs by which nonhuman intra-actants make themselves legible to the world.8 Rather than the mimetic overwriting of the referent or the Real, symbolic representation becomes a terciary act of translation that works within the emergence of phenomena themselves; the symbol never stands apart from material reality within an abstract system of signs (which, as Derrida long pointed out, can never exist meaningfully outside of the human brain, in the becoming of the subject), but rather always invokes the relations between bodies that refer to each other using iconic and indexical signs. In biological terms, what Derrida refers to as the “trace” would be predicated upon the image or memory of these iconic and indexical signs, the memory itself indicating an absent presence that is apprehended by the subject through the perception of signs. He makes this clear in his deconstruction of the distinction between indication (what is perceived) and the abstraction of the concept in Husserl’s phenomenology of perception: Thus everything that constitutes the effectiveness of what is uttered, the physical incarnation of the meaning, the body of speech, which in its ideality belongs to an empirically determined

 I refer here to the tertiary theory of signs as theorized by Charles S. Pierce and summarized by Hoffmeyer in Biosemiotics, “the icon represents the most basic and immediate type of reference (in effect, brute sensation); the indices (physical associations) and symbols (higher-order relations between associations) appear through the formation of more logically complex interpretants—with each stage in the process furnishing the necessary relata of the next” (Hoffmeyer 2008: 281).

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language, is, if not outside discourse, at least foreign to the nature of expression as such, foreign to that pure intention without which there could be no speech. The whole stratum of empirical effectiveness, that is, the factual totality of speech, thus belongs to indication, which is still more extensive than we had realized. The effectiveness, the totality of the events of discourse, is indicative, not only because it is in the world, but also because it retains in itself something of the nature of an involuntary association (Derrida 1973: 34).

The trace, the image of an absent materiality that necessarily presents itself to the subject in the indicative, the internalization of a set of iconic and/or indexical signs, would thus make the abstraction of the symbol possible, as what mediates between presence (indication) and absence. In Euro-American thought from Plato onward, the human has been predicated on the presumed disjunction between indicative presentation and abstract re-presentation. In Plato’s thought, the ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness hold the position of the absolute (divine virtue), which is then manifested first in the material (as God’s creation and subsequently the human crafter’s imitation) and then re-presented in art, poetry, and philosophy.9 In symbolic representation, humans return ideality to itself as truth, if only imperfectly or, in the case of poetry, in opposition, as divine madness, while all other material signs are merely presentational.10 However, when this relation is understood as a continuum (or what Deleuze would call a differential) rather than an opposition, and the divine (pure abstraction) is viewed as concept or organizing principle rather than the essence of the Real, it becomes clear that any theory of representation—and therefore difference—based on semiosis must be able to account for the relations between all kinds of signs, including extralinguistic ones.11 The abstraction of the symbol cannot be viewed as the transcendence of the material, since it simultaneously refers back to indication and takes material form itself, whether as voiced sound or written text. From within this framework, symbolic representation can no longer be conceived of as either essence or projected ideal, but rather as a specific form of intra-activity that co-produces material phenomena. Rather than simply erasing nonhuman others’ iconic or indexical signs, reducing their difference to equivalences within the human symbolic order, the symbol becomes a form of translation that always evokes the indicative, that is, the differential that infuses the symbol with its meaning as a descriptor of relations.12 Language becomes meaningful not despite materiality, but because of its effects within

 See Plato’s Republic (1998), book X.  Although for Plato, these presentational signs (which he calls “appearance”) would themselves indicate a present-absence, the traces of divine truths that must nevertheless pass through human representation to be apprehended in their ideality.  In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that difference emerges not through identification and disidentification in representation, but rather through iteration, in the repetition of forms in a series, in a way akin to mathematical differentials.  Of course, the symbol itself is also always produced within a differential, that is, within series of material relations.

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intra-actions with human and nonhuman others in the co-production of material phenomena. Furthermore, the “other” as such can only become other (always fully other, tout autre, as Derrida would say) because of its semiotic agency, that is, its ability to affect the subject-in-becoming within the intra-action, demanding a response, while the subject itself can only become such from within the intra-action, never existing as timeless, abstract essence from beyond.13 Indeed, this is why Derrida famously stated that in Of Grammatology that “il n’y a pas des hors-texte” (there is no beyond-text) (Derrida 1997: 163), which in Barad’s terms should really be translated as “no phenomenon exists outside semiotic intra-action.”

Perspectival Ontologies and Multispecies Sociality Latour’s intuitive deferral to nonmodern ontologies was perhaps more apt than he was able to express, given the Cartesian divide between the ideality of human thought/language and the static mechanicity of Nature that underpins both modern science and philosophies of being. While in Latour’s thought nonmodern ontologies primarily serve as a foil to the ostensible universality of the human/society divide, anthropologists such as Marisol de la Cadena, Philippe Descola, Marilyn Strathern, Aparecida Vilaça, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, to cite the authors of only a few influential studies in recent decades, have explored in greater depth the implications of indigenous systems of thought in which representation and sociality are conceived of in quite different terms. Indeed, understanding symbolic representation as simply one form of semiosis among many is common to most nonmodern ontologies. When there is no conceptual social/nature divide to sequester humans from their environmental intra-actions and linguistic subjectivity is not conceived of as the sole basis for agency, it becomes common sense that humans intra-act semiotically with the world and that these intra-actions comprise a collectivity, a communicative network that coproduces material phenomena. It is in this sense of affective subjectivities that Viveiros de Castro initially formulated his appraisal of indigenous thought in terms of “perspectivism” and “multinaturalism” in his seminal paper “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Basing himself on his own ethnographic fieldwork on Native Amazonian cultures as well as a wide range of prior anthropological studies, Viveiros de Castro defines perspectivism as, “the conception, common to many peoples of the continent, according to which the world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view” (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 469). Within this ontology, underpinned by mythological stories of primordial humans becoming today’s animals, humans shifting into animal form following death, animals and primordial

 “Tout autre est tout autre” (every other is altogether other) is the topic of chapter four of Derrida’s Gift of Death.

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beings taking human form to interact with humans, and the shamanistic practice of “becoming other” or taking nonhuman primordial forms to communicate with nonhumans, species identities are considered to be mutable, while the basal form of being of all species is that of the person, or “human” as Viveiros de Castro frames it to blur the EuroAmerican society-nature divide. Descola famously noted in his study of Achuar cosmology that, “in mythical times, nature’s beings had a human appearance too, and only their name contained the idea of what they would later become. If these human-looking animals were already potentially possessed of their future animal destiny in their name, this is because their common predicate as nature’s beings is not man as species, but humankind as condition” (Descola 1994: 93). As Viveiros de Castro summarizes, due to this “original state of undifferentiation between humans and animals,” persons are “formally identical” but perspectivally and performatively different (Viveiros de Castro 2000: 471). In turn, this fundamental parallelism extends to culture. Each species possesses its own culture that is formally identical to human culture: “animals impose the same categories and values on reality as humans do: their worlds, like ours, revolve around hunting and fishing, cooking and fermented drinks, cross-cousins and war, initiation rituals, shamans, chiefs, spirits” (Viveiros de Castro 2000: 477). However, the elements that populate these categories differ according to each species’ unique perspective, which is determined not specifically by physiological differences (as in biologist Jacob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt), but rather from their way of being, their affective agency within relations with other bodies. As Viveiros de Castro expands, animals see in the same way as we do different things because their bodies are different from ours. I am not referring to physiological differences—as far as that is concerned, Amerindians recognize a basic uniformity of bodies—but rather to affects, dispositions or capacities which render the body of every species unique: what it eats, how it communicates, where it lives, whether it is gregarious or solitary, and so forth. The visible shape of the body is a powerful sign of these differences in affect, although it can be deceptive since a human appearance could, for example, be concealing a jaguar-affect. Thus, what I call “body” is not a synonym for distinctive substance or fixed shape; it is an assemblage of affects or ways of being that constitute a habitus (Viveiros de Castro 2000: 478).

Since each species experiences its habitus as the human one, difference arises not as either physiological or cultural differences, but through the way in which reality is perceived in relation to universal culture. Thus what appears to a human as blood is perceived by a jaguar as maize beer and what humans see as manioc is viewed by spirits as a rotting corpse, while humans themselves are viewed as prey, as tapirs or white-lipped peccaries, by predators, and as predatory spirits by game animals. In this ontology, social forms are universal, but each species lives in its own perceptual world in which they are the true humans to the exclusion of other species. This is why any form of rapprochement between species requires being recognized as one of them, that is, as a person from their perspective, a transformation of bodily affects usually carried out by shamans through rituals involving hallucinogens, ritual adornments, and imitative performance.

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This shared personhood does not imply the erasure of species differences before universal personhood; rather, difference is viewed as emerging from the perspective rather than bodies themselves. Viveiros summarizes this fundamental discrepancy with the Euro-American nature/society divide in the following terms: whilst our constructionist epistemology can be summed up in the Saussurean formula: the point of view creates the object—the subject being the original, fixed condition whence the point of view emanates—Amerindian ontological perspectivism proceeds along the lines that the point of view creates the subject; whatever is activated or “agented” by the point of view will be a subject. This is why terms such as “wari” (Vilaça 1992), “dene” (McDonnell 1984) or “masa” (Arhem 1993) mean “people,” but they can be used for—and therefore used by—very different classes of beings: used by humans they denote human beings; but used by peccaries, howler monkeys or beavers they self-refer to peccaries, howler monkeys, or beavers (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 476–477).

This reading turns on its head the multicultural framing of indigenous perspectivism as a “primitive” belief system that anthropomorphizes or extends humanity to animals through myth, transforming them into symbolic representations of human qualities. Unlike Euro-American multicultural relativism, which “supposes a diversity of subjective and partial representations, each striving to grasp an external and unified nature,” in indigenous perspectivism, the representational system is unified across species (the same name for different things), while objects themselves are “diverse,” affecting different kinds of bodies in different ways, and therefore are categorized differently according to the perspective proper to each species, which again are not viewed in terms of phenotype, but rather as a habitus or way of being, that is, a specific set of affective potentials or material-discursive practices (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 478). Underscoring this distinction, Viveiros de Castro insists that “a perspective is not a representation because representations are a property of the mind or spirit, whereas the point of view is located in the body” (1998: 478).14 This in turn forms the basis for Viveiros de Castro’s framing of Amerindian perspectivism as “multinaturalist”: that is, comprising “one single ‘culture,’ multiple ‘natures’” (1998: 478). As Eduardo Kohn argues in How Forests Think, this fundamental cultural unity across species implies that environments effectively function as a society or “ecology of selves” (Kohn 2013: 16). If communicative networks form the basis for sociality and all  Viveiros de Castro cites as evidence the way in which this distinction played out in cultural debates in the initial years following the European colonization of the Americas: “for the Europeans, the ontological diacritic is the soul (are Indians humans or animals?). For the Indians, it is the body (are Europeans humans or spirits?). The Europeans never doubted that the Indians had bodies. After all, animals have them too. In turn, the Indians never doubted that the Europeans had souls. Animals and spirits have them too. In sum, European ethnocentrism consisted in doubting whether other bodies have the same souls as they themselves (today we would call the soul ‘the mind,’ and the sixteenthcentury theological problem would now be the philosophical ‘problem of other minds’). Amerindian ethnocentrism, on the contrary, consisted in doubting whether other souls had the same bodies” (Viveiros de Castro 2004: 9).

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material intra-actions are semiotic, environments emerge through the intra-actions between networks of nested signs that include but are not limited to symbols. However, unlike in the humanistic conceptualization of language as the basis for social bonds, forms of sociality in an ecology of selves cannot be determined by equivalences—that is, shared identities and common interests. On the contrary, the social bond must necessarily arise across species and other forms of individual and collective differences; as Viveiros de Castro underscores repeatedly, an other perspective can never be translated unproblematically as a commonality. Any intra-action, that is, any act of interpretation, thus must necessarily base itself on equivocation, that is, the acknowledgment of untranslatable difference, the recognition that all translations will necessarily be approximations that are inevitably equivocal and contingent on the intra-action rather than being invested with meaning from an external symbolic order. As he argues in “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation”: the problem for indigenous perspectivism is not therefore one of discovering the common referent (say, the planet Venus) to two different representations (say, “Morning Star” and “Evening Star”). On the contrary, it is one of making explicit the equivocation implied in imagining that when the jaguar says “manioc beer” he is referring to the same thing as us (i.e., a tasty, nutritious and heady brew). In other words, perspectivism supposes a constant epistemology and variable ontologies, the same representations and other objects, a single meaning and multiple referents. Therefore, the aim of perspectivist translation—translation being one of shamanism’s principal tasks, as we know (Carneiro da Cunha 1998)—is not that of finding a “synonym” (a co-referential representation) in our human conceptual language for the representations that other species of subject use to speak about one and the same thing. Rather, the aim is to avoid losing sight of the difference concealed within equivocal “homonyms” between our language and that of other species, since we and they are never talking about the same things (Viveiros de Castro 2004: 6–7).

Rather than dialectical oppositions that may be resolved through synthesis, multiplicity or what Deleuze calls “disjunctive synthesis” or “inclusive disjunction” becomes the operative mode of conceiving of relations.15 When there are infinite possible perspectives that can never be reduced to a common essential or transcendental identity, relations must always be predicated on translation across difference, that is, diplomacy. In the Euro-American political tradition, diplomacy is usually conceived of in terms of equivalences, of finding common ground through the negotiation of shared meaning. In other words, diplomats establish common interests by finding the synonym in the other’s discourse, which then renders an issue not a matter of irreducible

 As Viveiros de Castro summarizes in Cannibal Metaphysics, “multiplicity is a system defined by a modality of relational synthesis different from a connection or conjunction of terms. Deleuze calls it disjunctive synthesis or inclusive disjunction, a relational mode that does not have similarity or identity as its (formal or final) cause, but divergence or distance: another name for this relational mode is ‘becoming’” (Viveiros de Castro 2017: 112). Throughout this book as well as his earlier work, Viveiros de Castro relies heavily on Deleuze’s theorization of differentiation and multiplicity (initially proposed by Deleuze in his doctoral thesis Difference and Repetition and further developed with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus).

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difference, but rather of shared governance. However, this clearly cannot be the case in multispecies diplomacy, which Viveiros de Castro posits as the primary duty of shamans. As Descola pointed out regarding the primordial humans who transformed into animals in native Amazonian mythology: “when they lost their human form, they also, ipso facto, lost their speech organs and therefore the capacity to express themselves in spoken language; they did retain several features of their former state, however, to wit, consciousness—of which dreams are the most direct manifestation—and, for certain species, a social life organized according to the rules of the world of ‘complete persons’” (Descola 1994: 93). Descola’s wording regarding animals’ “loss of speech organs” is more important than it may initially seem; it does not indicate a cursed inability to communicate, but rather that animal speech organs are no longer adept at reproducing the sounds of human languages. Instead, as Yanomami shaman and activist Davi Kopenawa and anthropologist Ellen Basso discuss respectively in The Falling Sky and A Musical View of the Universe, nonhumans communicate primarily through song, a form of speech that is considered “truer” or “more real” than human language because it is incapable of deception (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 59; Basso 1985: 70). Furthermore, when human shamans wish to communicate with nonhumans directly, their own speech organs must be reconfigured in order to be able to reproduce this primordial song-speech (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 95). This normally occurs under the affects of hallucinogens or in dreams; the shaman “becomes other” (në aipëɨ; assuming the value of other) by taking on the perspective of the being with which they want to communicate, which in turn reconfigures their affective corpus in such a way that the other recognizes them as one of their own. In contrast, Viveiros de Castro notes that “under normal conditions” each species views only itself as human, and others as either prey or predators. It is thus this process of “becoming other” through incorporating the other’s perspective and enacting their traces to produce their affective forms that allows for one to apprehend their difference as subjectivity and therefore engage in diplomacy across species. Otherness is the space of universal diplomacy, but no one can dwell in otherness permanently; the knowledge and affiliations gained through shamanistic diplomacy must then return to subjectivity in everyday practice through the law of language, that is, through the re-ordering of the symbolic. In this sense, song stands in for the principle of universal semiosis, that is, the basis for multispecies sociality. Clearly, this process involves a fundamental reconceptualization of mimesis, as the human body must lose its perspective and become “other” to itself in order to be capable of “imitating” non-human speech, which rather than straightforward imitation, is viewed as enacting the traces and thereby activating the powers (affective agency or habitus) of the other. Unlike the Euro-American concept of the soul, in the indigenous conceptualization of subjectivity, there is no point of view outside the body except for that of the other. This is why Viveiros de Castro insists that in native Amazonian thought, concepts that are often translated as “soul” refer not to an immaterial essence but rather to reflexivity as embodied form

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—one might say, a differential of relational perspectives, only one of which can be actualized at any given moment, rather than any specific, immutable, and sovereign subject position. Translation—the basis for diplomacy—thus becomes a question of imitating the other’s body not in a symbolic sense, but in one of performative enactment of the other’s affectivity. A practitioner of the Euro-American society/nature divide would undoubtedly argue that this way of conceiving of mimesis is culturally relativistic, a feature not of “nature” but of native Amazonian societies or even a primordial drive towards sensorial identification that serves as mere precursor for the emergence of “nonsensuous similarity” in language, as Walter Benjamin (1978: 72) viewed it. Benjamin’s argument finds some support in Charles S. Pierce’s theorization of self-organizing, hierarchical primary, secondary, and tertiary relations among iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs.16 However, whether or not symbols emerge in tertiary relation to other signs has little bearing on the fact that environments are not simply the summa of discrete entities or energetic flows, but rather intra-active networks of individuals whose interrelations depend on semiotic exchange. In an objective sense, environments are formed of what Yuri Lotman calls “semiospheres” and, as Latour argued, those relational networks can be approximated not only through nonmodern ontologies but also modern science.17 If all relations, even exploitative or instrumentalist ones, rely on signs, clearly any possibility of ethical relations with nonhuman others cannot pretend to deny them the affective power of signs and at least a modicum of interpretative agency. In that sense, mimesis becomes a universal interpretative act, one that emerges in every act of representation, that is, of approximation to the other.

Perspectivism and Equivocal Translation in Literature Somewhat ironically, this form of mimesis also lies at the heart of literature. Despite fictive literature’s ostensible double removal from reality as the representation of a representation (symbolic order or worldview), mimesis in literature exposes the

 See Kohn’s discussion of Pierce’s categories of “firstness,” “secondness,” and “thirdness,” with iconic signs falling into the first category, indices into the second (as they are removed by a degree of abstraction), and symbols emerging from the complex interactions among indices (Kohn 2013: 51–60). However, it must be stated that there is no clear empirical evidence relating to this hierarchy of signs; it relies primarily on the argument of human exceptionalism. Kohn somewhat unconvincingly attempts to disassociate the two by portraying symbols as self-organizing, emerging from the semiotic socius in general; it would be in this sense that forests “think.” This is why he insists that “our thoughts are like the world because we are of the world” (Kohn 2013: 60).  Regarding the term semiosphere, see note 4 in the first chapter of Hoffmeyer’s Biosemiotics (2008).

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“secret” of symbolic representation as equivocal translation. Ensnared between the imperatives of representation as such (that is, its analogical relation to the real world, without which it could have no meaning) and aesthetic freedom, literature becomes objective in the purest sense of the word, returning language to its status as object rather than vehicle of truth. If, as Luiz Costa Lima argues, mimesis has traditionally been viewed as what endows representations with their truth value, as the textual evidence validating the worldview hiding within the representation, aesthetic freedom would necessarily devalue the “mimetic product” (the reference) and by extension the legitimacy of both the representation and its worldview.18 Literature would thus become “nonserious,” an “empty” discourse, a matter of play (even in serious play, such as catharsis) or entertainment rather than representation of the real world (Costa Lima 1985: 459). Nonetheless, as Derrida has long argued, this same contention comes to the fore regarding language in general when it is recognized that other, supposedly more objective forms of discourse rely to even a greater degree on mimesis or the re/deferral to the trace to validate their representations. As he notes in Literature in Secret, “every text that is consigned to public space, that is relatively legible or intelligible, but whose content, sense, referent, signatory, and addressee are not fully determinable realities—realities that are at the same time non-fictive or immune from all fiction, realities that are delivered as such, by some intuition, to a determinate judgment —can become a literary object” (Derrida 2008: 131). And, as we know, for Derrida there are no “fully determinable realities” (thus the italics); difference is always indeterminate, untranslatable, intuited but never fully apprehended. The secret of literature is thus that mimesis is always fictive, equivocal, always simultaneously claiming and betraying representation, even in scientific discourse. This is why Moreiras contends that, “mimesis returns, at the end of modernity, as the unthought in modernity. Mimesis is unthought because its catastrophic stance will not let itself be thought” (Moreiras 1993: 139). Its “stance” is precisely that of binding and ordering the nature/ social divide that underpins modernity as worldview; rethinking mimesis would thus truly become “catastrophic” for the modern worldview. In this context, Adorno’s affirmation in Aesthetic Theory that art is the “social antithesis of society” becomes truly poignant. If one ascribes to the humanistic nature/ society divide, the antithesis of society would logically be nature. Literature would thus come to occupy a parallel or supplemental position with respect to nature; there is no room in a dialectical opposition for thirds, nothing that can be beyond both

 As Costa Lima contends, the traditional view of mimesis as the abstract imitation of the Real implies that “for a mimetic product to have a value, it must represent some Weltbild; that is to say, it can be valued only if it serves as an illustration of a certain world view. [. . .] In fact, it is the very nature of the traditional connection between representation and mimesis to turn the latter into an illustrative example of a system of thought that assigns a proper place to it, while mimesis ‘testifies’ to the system’s ‘truth’” (Costa Lima 1985: 448).

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society and nature other than the system ordering that opposition. Furthermore, that shared if differentiated position with respect to the social would itself necessarily be a social one, the product of a socially constructed categorical distinction, thereby becoming what Adorno calls the “negation of negation” in Negative Dialectics. Literature and natural history would thus play simultaneous if inverted roles in revealing the fictionality of human history and its telos of full human separation/domination over nature. On the one hand, “the objectivity of historical life is that of natural history” in that it draws out the indivisibility of the material and the social: “the natural growth of capitalist society is real, and at the same time it is that [social] semblance” (Adorno 1966: 354–355). On the reverse, literature, in its fictional, supplementary relation to material reality draws out the discursivity of the nature category as an ideological construct, as fiction. Thus, citing Lúkacs’s theory of the novel, Adorno frames literature as “the negation of any nature that might be conceived of as the first [nature]”— that is, natural laws as human telos, as the causality underpinning human history, thereby implying that it progresses naturally, outside or beyond human agency (Adorno 1966: 357). From this point of view, mimesis can no longer refer back to “nature” (the determinate) as the truth of society (always an indeterminate representation). Nonetheless, as an indicative act, it must always point back to nature, that is, the Real that is “immune from all fiction,” even if in opposition, as fiction. This is why Derrida, deconstructing Kant’s theory of mimesis, argues in “Economimesis” that the mimetic relation is not the straightforward symbolic appropriation of natural objects, but rather an economy of exchange between two agencies. The human artist reproduces not objects within nature itself, but rather nature’s creative freedom: “mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another, the relation of resemblance or of identification between two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions. And of two freedoms. The artist does not imitate things in nature, or, if you will, in natura naturata, but the acts of natura naturans, the operations of the physis” (1981: 9). The liberation of human creativity is thus a reenactment of nature’s capacity for producing texts in which the author as enunciator/ordering principle—God or Mother Nature—is always already absent, just as the work of art stands alone from its maker (the death of the author). This is the movement that frees the artist from the classificatory statutes of the symbolic order and allows art to become the social antithesis of society and its everyday commerce in utilitarian goods. In that sense, “‘true’ mimesis is between two producing subjects and not between two produced things” (Derrida 1981: 9). This explains why Walter Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” refers to the shadow cast by a tree branch as the “aura of nature” in the same terms as the “aura” of a work of art; the affects produced by the tree’s shadow and the traces of brush strokes in a painting both refer the experiencing subject back to the other’s productive work within a universal affective economy (Benjamin 2007: 222–223). It is only with the modern desacralization of art through mechanical reproduction that

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its ritual enactment of the universal affective economy can be effaced, giving rise to the “increasing fragility of the mimetic faculty” and instituting the nature/social divide to emancipate the representational system from the sacred interface with environments and thereby potentializing the massification of human collectives in the democratic or fascistic construction of society. Extracted from the universal affective economy that does not distinguish between society and nature, representation thus becomes a matter of politics, of demographically targeted symbolism oriented toward the production of mechanisms of social inclusion/exclusion (Benjamin 2007: 224–225). As I hope has become apparent, both Benjamin’s discussion of “auras” (bundled affects that bind humanistic semiotic freedom to the universal semiosphere) and Derrida’s theorization of mimesis as a relation between two producing subjects run very close to Viveiros de Castro’s formulation of multinaturalism. When mimetic agency is redefined as the freedom to coproduce meanings that exceed full appropriation by the symbolic order, subjectivity itself becomes something other than the sovereign act of naming an object: it is the capacity to affect others intra-actively in the co-production of phenomena—bodies in becoming—within a universal “culture,” that is, economy of signs. Within this economy, every “actant” capable of intra-acting with any other may be said to have perspectival subjectivity inasmuch as it responds (whether physically, chemically, or linguistically) selectively to the signs displayed by others. And the set of possible responses (always semiotic), what Viveiros de Castro called its affective habitus, is what defines it to its others as body or, in Barad’s terms, matter in the double sense in which Judith Butler conceptualized the word in Bodies that Matter, that is, as meaningful materiality. Mimesis would thus consist in the act of responding to the other’s signs and enacting them as traces in the production of one’s own signs, always in economic and ecological relation, in ex-change. Literature is multinaturalist because it produces fictional bodies through the distribution of perspectives, always in intra-active relation within a universal economy of signs that precedes and exceeds the bounds of both the text and authorial control. Literature makes no distinction between person and personification because subjectivity can never exist as essence beyond the text, only as a distinct perspective within a universal, semiotic assemblage. Anything that has explicit or potential narrative perspective, whether human, cadaver, animal, plant, or animated object becomes a person through its semiotic affectivity, that is, the agency or influence it brings to bear upon other textual presences. If, as Luiz Costa Lima argues, “mimetic products” function as keys that activate “primary and habitual frames” within the text, those keys are not simply references to external reality, but rather simultaneously referrals to a position within discourse, always a potential narrative perspective, and deferrals to the outside or beyond of the representational system, an outside that can only be intuited through the traces of a multiplicity of human and nonhuman others (Costa Lima 1985: 456). Indeed, Costa Lima’s statement becomes particularly poignant if we read those “habitual frames” not solely in terms of the symbolic order, but rather

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through Viveiros de Castro’s conceptualization of “habitus” as a specific set of affective capacities. It is the enactment of those traces, the activation of the other’s habitus or bundled affectivity, within the text that brings the literary world into being as something more than a straightforward representation of the real world. As Costa Lima makes clear, “concerning what takes place both in prose and poetry we can say that mimesis presupposes in action a pragmatic estrangement from itself and an identification with the otherness grasped through this estrangement. Identification and estrangement—identification through estrangement—these constitute the basic and contradictory terms of the phenomenon of mimesis” (Costa Lima 1985: 461). Both writing and reading thus function through mechanisms similar to shamanistic diplomacy as described by Viveiros de Castro. In characterization, the writer must “become other,” enacting the other’s traces to activate their affective powers. Likewise, readers must become estranged from themselves and take on characters’ perspectives, at least partially, for those characters to “come alive” within the text. As Costa Lima drives home, “through the practice of mimesis, language loses its usual identity—something is said that has no immediate implications for the world—just as the producer divests himself of it—he speaks or writes to enliven ghosts which are not reducible to mere projections of his empirical self” (Costa Lima 1985: 461). It is in this sense in which Marília Librandi Rocha argues in favor of an “Amerindian theory of literature” in which “the ontology of the fictional” is understood as a “world of latent presences” (Librandi Rocha 2013: 173). Literary characters, whether human or nonhuman, come “alive,” having their own perspectives, which may or may not coincide with the author’s or reader’s perspectives and their respective worldviews. In that sense, the work of literature is always already a multinatural pluriverse formed of a multiplicity of perspectives, in which not only characters (whether human or nonhuman), but also writers and readers participate as intraactive members or “natives,” to use Librandi Rocha’s terminology. What then are the implications for the ecocritic of this Amerindian theory of literary representation, in which mimesis is understood not as mere symbolic projection of the author’s worldview but as the enactment of the traces of the other and the activation of their affective, semiotic powers? In other words, how can we, as critics, put multinatural perspectivism into practice in literary analysis? I follow Costa Lima and Librandi Rocha in advocating for a new historiography of literature akin to that undertaken by feminism, ethnic studies, and subaltern studies over the last several decades. If what has traditionally been viewed as “nature writing” ultimately reinforces the extractive imagination in instituting an unbreachable divide between nature and the social, it is clear that alternative approaches must be developed (and, in fact, several have been emerging over recent decades) in which reading and writing are understood as ritual enactments of the universal semiotic socius through equivocal translation. If Benjamin’s thesis regarding the massification of social relations through the mechanization of representational systems (particularly through mass media) holds true, literature, irrespective of its own mass production, renews the ritual power of art as intimate communion, that is,

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as affective intra-action. Literature’s social construction of community is always ecological in the sense in which Isabelle Stengers theorizes it, as symbiosis: “it doesn’t understand consensus but, at most, symbiosis, in which every protagonist is interested in the success of the other for its own reasons. The ‘symbiotic agreement’ is an event, the production of new, immanent modes of existence, and not the recognition of a more powerful interest before which divergent particular interests would have to bow down. Nor is it the consequence of harmonization that would transcend the egoism of those interests” (Stengers 2010: 35). It is precisely in this sense in which literature functions as an ecology of selves or “latent presences.” On this basis, I would like to suggest the following strategies for engaging in an ecological, multinaturalist critique of literature: 1) Approaching difference not through identity or commonality, but rather in terms of multiplicities, of becoming-in-relation or what Barad calls intra-activity. 2) Understanding representation as an act of equivocal translation—a matter of common differences—rather than the symbolic overwriting of difference. Reading thus becomes a matter of reading for diplomatic relations rather than interpreting symbols in order to extract the author’s worldview. 3) Disavowing the multicultural framework and discourse of relativism in favor of reading representations of human and nonhuman others through the understanding of mimesis as the invocation and activation of the traces—that is the affective singularity—of the other. Representation thus becomes performative and intra-active rather than essentialist or allegorical. 4) Reading literature “against the grain” not purely for deconstructive purposes, but rather to draw out semiotic intra-actions that exceed the bounds of the symbolic representation of worldviews. In this sense, the ecocritic would search out cases of discordance between intra-active mimesis and symbolic representation. 5) Eschewing the hyperhumanistic reading of anthropomorphism as the projection of human traits onto nonhumans and instead drawing out the ways in which nonhumans engage with humans semiotically to co-produce worlds. 6) Understanding polities not as socially constructed demographic categories, but as aggregative articulations of affective, multispecies communities.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. R. Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ——. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1966. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Knowing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Basso, Ellen. A Musical View of the Universe: Kalapalo Myth and Ritual Performances. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

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Benjamin, Walter. “On the Mimetic Faculty.” Reflections. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. 333–336. ——. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Henry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 2007. Costa Lima, Luiz. “Social Representation and Mimesis.” New Literary History 16.3 (1985): 447–466. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Bloomsbury, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. “Economimesis.” Diacritics 11.2 (1981): 2–25. ——. The Gift of Death & Literature in Secret. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. ——. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. ——. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David Allison. Evanstone, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Descola, Philippe. In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia. Trans. Nora Scott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. French, Jennifer L. Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2005. Gudynas, Eduardo. “Extracciones, extractivismos y extrahecciones: Un marco conceptual sobre la apropiación de recursos naturales.” Observatorio del Desarrollo 18 (2013): 1–17. Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Biosemtiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs. Trans. Jesper Hoffmeyer and Donald Favareau. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2008. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Kopenawa, Davi, and Bruce Albert. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Trans. Nicholas Elliot and Alison Dundy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. ——. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ——. “Scientific Objects and Legal Objectivity.” Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things. Ed. Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 73–114. ——. We have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Leff, Enrique. Green Production: Toward an Environmental Rationality. New York: Guildford, 1995. Librandi Rocha, Marília. “Becoming Natives of Literature: Towards an Ontology of the Mimetic Game (Lévi-Strauss, Costa Lima, Viveiros de Castro, and the Nambikwara Art Lesson).” Culture, Theory, and Critique 54.2 (2013): 166–182. Moreiras, Alberto. “Mimetic Faces: On Luiz Costa Lima’s The Control of Imaginary.” Studies in TwentiethCentury Literature 17.1 (1993): 131–141. Plato. The Republic. Trans. B. Jowett. Project Gutenberg, 1998. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Uexküll, Jacob von. A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, with A Theory of Meaning. Trans. Joseph D. O’Neil. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2010. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology. Trans. Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. ——. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4.3 (1998): 469–488. ——. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Methodology of Controlled Equivocation.” Tipiti 2.1 (2004): 1–20.

Keywords

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Animal The present chapter discusses the concept of “animal”—in scare quotes to distinguish it from actual nonhuman creatures—in Latin American literary studies. I take exception from more traditional approaches: charismatic, allegorical, mythological or prosopopeic, advocating instead a multispecies, co-constitutive approach. For a quick illustration, consider the passage in Peruvian author José María Arguedas’s The Fox from Above and the Fox from Below (1971) to which I shall return, where one fox tells another: “¿Entiendes bien lo que digo y cuento?” (Do you fully understand what I say and tell you?) (Arguedas 1971: 60). The animals converse as they eavesdrop on different life forms located between the spatial markers indicated by their names: above, in the Andean highlands, and, below, in the Pacific coast. A charismatic approach would singularize these animals over others. An allegorical, might rightly identify one as representing the coast versus the other representing the mountains; a mythological might evoke the Quechua traditions alluded to in the novel; a prosopopeic approach would see these creatures as humans in animal form. While none of these are wrong, they are less relevant for environmental aesthetics than an understanding of the species in question within a continuum of interdependent species, always in multiple entanglements in the web of life. I take the notion of multispecies worlds from coconstitutive theories in anthropology and history of science by Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and others, into literary analysis of Latin American texts.1 Co-constitutive theories allow us to understand humans and non-humans co-existing historically and ecologically, with radical consequences for our appreciation of species intimacies and symbiotic formations. Three sections follow. The first provides further explanation of the framework. The second returns to Arguedas for an in-depth case study, and the third extrapolates and presents general conclusions. Animal studies, in general, focuses on how the concept of “animal” operates and what stories it may tell. This reflects a shift in Latin American, Anglo and European academia during the last forty years towards the nonhuman animal as the focus of investigation. Behind this “animal turn,” there are, on the one hand, activists and organizations that defend animal rights with a liberal progressive agenda, and, on the other, political and cultural theories about non-human nature and its role as a foil to the constitution of the human subject in the humanist tradition that stems from the Enlightenment.2 As an interdisciplinary debate among

 For an environmental humanities approach to multispecies studies based on the ethics of attentiveness, see Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey and Ursula Münster (2016).  We may consider different theoretical frameworks for the “animal turn,” among which there are various forms of biopolitical thought from Michel Foucault, to Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito; deconstructions of animality with Jacques Derrida, as its most important example; or the rhizomatic https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-005

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scholars in the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences, animal studies at large challenges taxonomic distinctions between animal and human. In other words, animal studies strives to critically interrupt speciesist frameworks of knowledge, which favor one species over others. A Latin Americanist angle to animal studies necessarily seeks to situate geopolitically theories of “animal,” revealing how speciesism is, in effect, a mode of production that marks historical forms of relating to living beings that are considered “nature.” This is where we must consider how Latin American animal studies may stand in tension with the Latin American archive.

(Un)Framing “Animal” in Latin America Imperial histories have shaped how we understand “animal.” Violent evangelization campaigns carried out against native worldviews and their theories about life and being are testament of how “animal,” as a Western concept tracing back to the preSocratics, arrives at the territories of what would become imperial colonies of Spain and Portugal. The term is essential to a critical hegemonic triad without which, as Zeb Tortorici (2018) aptly puts it, humanity and the divine cannot derive meaning.3 Around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, along with the installation of Cartesian dualism as the foundation to Western modernity, animality becomes essential to the ontological division between Nature and Culture. “Animal” becomes separated from the human based on what it supposedly lacked: soul, language, reason, and so on. “Animal” thus inserts a separation among living beings, positioning animality as part of what Jason Moore has called “Cheap Nature”: environments designed through legal, scientific, and economic forces to generate global capital. In this regard, Latin American studies is equipped to critique biopolitics from within as a critique of humanism that ends up being humanistic in itself, showing how cosmopolitan critical theories about life as the object of politics tend to understand global modernity largely as European, without consideration of the historical and material condition of coloniality on which such regimes of “administration of life” have been predicated.4 Moreover, different theories and declensions of “animal” currently allow us to track what, in the face of the

thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s, especially in the essay “Becoming animal” of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.  Often cited as models are Bartolomé de las Casas’s use of the pastoral trope of the ovejas as well as Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda comparison of natives and monkeys.  Cary Wolfe’s Before the Law. Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (2012) argues against the identification of bios with human in biopolitical thought. Wolfe critiques speciesism within biopolitical thought in contemporary capitalism but does not investigate the longer history of capitalism and colonialism in this regard.

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climate crisis, we have come to understand as an overlapping, rather than a separation, between human and natural history.5 Thus, it becomes evident how the separation of nature and culture, where “animal” lingers conceptually, is central to what we have come to understand as Latin American cultural production. The Nation-State and its sovereignty rests historically on the idea of a “culture” that governs over its territory, its “nature,” and its natural elements. In rethinking the epistemological organization that separates human history from natural history, animal studies afford us a different understanding of the history of the archive and of the archive itself. This reflects on the politics of the institutional archives of literature, but also on how the archontic power of literature and the “animal” operate in culture. Narratives of animality (human and non-human) direct our attention towards acculturation and subsumption in capitalism. The basic notion of subsumption, understood as the inclusion of a subordinate element within a larger category, carries with it a hierarchical logic and taxonomic impulse that we find in narratives of domestication. Such narratives (of the non-human and human alike) are simultaneously narratives of acculturation that connect to the notion of domus where, as Jacques Derrida has shown through the implications of dominion and Law in domesticity and the domestic, we find a centrifugal origin for humanism and anthropocentrism (L’animal que donc je suis; The Beast and the Sovereign, volumes I and II). The material semiotics of “culture” as “cultivation” in Western modernity makes animal and plant life a moving frontier for the origins of human “culture,” where any “other” form of life not marked as human necessarily becomes the negated “matter” that makes human “spirit” possible. All ecologies are, thereby, subsumed into human history. In Derrida’s eloquent formulation of human teleopoesis, animal is that which is “before but after” human. Put differently, human agency narratively erases the “multispecies crowd” that, pace Haraway, makes human species possible. By comparison, when we follow Karl Marx’s notion of formal and real subsumption in capitalism, we appreciate how life forms (human and non-human) are, again, subsumed into capital. Subsumption is a form of “naturalization” of capital. It plays a central role in the Marxist humanist narrative of the creation of material conditions of a culture based on class difference. Narratives of what is to come, as for instance those of emancipation and justice, in humanist terms, from the right and from the left, converge in humanization-cum-cultivation. If cultivation is the process by which an individual acquires or develops qualities or skills, such a process is central to the ways in which the human-animal binary plays out in theories of developmentalism but also in theories

 For the genealogies of Latin American environmental culture, see the Latin American Ecocultural Reader by Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes (2021).

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of emancipation.6 Moreover, these narratives tend to undervalue any agency beyond human or humanistic. Such is the moving frontier within classes that maps the language of animality as representation of animal-like human life. In this juncture, a language of animal rights and liberation à la Peter Singer denounces speciesism as a form of discrimination based on the position of a being within a certain species to advance privilege. This entails, paradoxically, the language and tools of a humanist critique of humanism. While the notion of animal rights has established that all sentient animals have moral worth independent from their utility to humans, the interrelatedness of human animals with non-human animals is still part of a complex epistemological debate. Decentering the Anthropos in the analysis of the formations of “working classes,” in which the human animal is the only animal at work, allows one to see transspecies agentic forces in coevolution through history. The philosophical, and, we should add, aesthetic question, that Elizabeth Grosz poses to the Darwinian tradition: “At what point and in what form does matter convert itself, through whatever chemical/informational reactions, into life, however simple?” (Grosz 2004: 23) invites us to consider, especially from a Latin American environmental aesthetic lens, the poetics of transspecies histories.7 Methodologically, animal critique in the archive has worked towards “centering” the animal, with the accompanying gesture of “de-centering” the human or the Anthropos. For example, in their introduction to Centering Animals in Latin American History (2013), Zeb Tortorici and Marta Few explain how in making animals—human and non-human—central actors in the historical narrative, the authors in their book sought to denaturalize the human/animal binary, as well as to demonstrate how exploitative practices of humans decimated specific environments or species. The volume’s critique of biopower illustrates how the slippery separation of human and animal sets in motion an economy of expendable life that sustains the project of Euromodernity. These operations of centering the animal and de-centering the human, commonly understood as working in sync or even interchangeably, involve a problem of scale that is among the most salient challenges of both animal and environmental studies.8 This is best illustrated through the critique to the universalizing rhetoric of “Anthropos” in “Anthropo-cene” for occluding the ways in which the effects of climate change corroborate persistent inequalities that a postcolonial biopolitical lens had

 For a rendering of the relationship of human and the animal that challenges emancipation of blackened bodies as accessing denied humanity, by proposing instead that black(ened) humanity is to be appropriated through abject animality, see Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human (2020).  For an extended version of this argument, see Briceño (2017).  Recently Rosi Braidotti (2019) has described posthuman knowledge as the convergence of “a critique on the Humanist ideal of Man as the measure of all things” or posthumanism and “the critique of anthropocentric exceptionalism” or post-anthropocentrism. In animal studies specifically the different critical and methodological approaches that fit between the poles of animality and animal studies

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historicized.9 Rob Nixon’s notion of slow violence is eloquent in this regard. According to Nixon, “slow violence” is a form of attritional violence not immediately visible that expands through time and space; occurring “gradually, and out of sight, a violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2011: 2). He argues that slow violence accumulates along the lines of colonial histories forming “long emergencies” (Nixon 2011: 3). In Nixon’s view, social and ecocidal violence act together jeopardizing different life forms. This heterogeneity challenges scholarly analysis as it surpasses narrative frameworks, as well as critical narrative tools. In training to “see” this violence, a multispecies lens may help to consider multiple historical layers and multiple actors to emphasize difference in scale between human and non-human actors, as well as the form of the narratives they tell. How the scale of the Anthropocene converses with the scale of biopolitics has been a common thread of Latin American animal studies in the last ten years, as one can trace from Gabriel Giorgi’s Formas comunes. Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica (2014) to the present. In the Foucauldian formulation of biopolitics, power installed to either “make live” or “let die” human populations is always concerned with life beyond the individual subject. Giorgi contrasts the rhetoric of “animal” and the politics of “lo viviente,” where life or the living expands into the impersonal and the collective, transforming this combination into a category of cultural analysis for the Latin American archive of the second half of the twentieth century. Constellating notions such as “person” or the interplay of bios (qualified live, mainly human) and zoe (unqualified life), through the works of thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti, Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler or Jacques Derrida, Giorgi tracks how “lo animal” and animals in literature and culture interrogate grammars of power that seek to rule over what bodies can do, how do they may interact and how they can produce or share value. Thus, Formas comunes, through the concept of “lo viviente,” composes an animal archive in the works of Latin American authors such as João Guimarães Rosa, Manuel Puig, Clarice Lispector, Marosa di Giorgio, Osvaldo Lamborghini, Copi, Roberto Bolaño, Martín Kohan and Nuno Ramos, among others. In the span that goes between the dossier Giorgi co-edited with Fermín Rodríguez and Álvaro Fernández Bravo in 2013, eloquently entitled “Bio/Zoo,” and the more recent dossier “Animalidades: Pistas para un mapa alternativo de las gramáticas éticas, políticas y estéticas en las culturas latinoamericanas,” co-edited by Adriana LópezLabourdette and Magdalena López in 2020, we appreciate the force with which academic and artistic production in Latin America has invested on the geopolitics and the language of animality and biopolitics, as well as in practice and theories of animal rights and the investigations into transspecies assemblages and coevolution.

have paradoxically ended up generating complex taxonomies as we can see in Lundbland’s argument for the end of animal studies in “The End of the Animal—Literary and Cultural Animalities” (2017).  Hence Moore’s Capital-ocene or Armiero’s Waste-ocene and Haraway’s Chthulu-cene, to name a few.

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Among the many affordances of Latin American animal studies, there is the reframing of important paradigms, such as the classic trope of “civilización y barbarie” tracing back to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and his conflation of wilderness, violence, and indigeneity. Equally important is the inclusion of non-anthropocentric Amerindian knowledge, essential to political and intellectual life in contemporary Latin America and beyond. This knowledge has entered the critical repertoire of Latin American animal studies mediated by anthropologists’ renditions, among others: Viveiros de Castro’s conceptualization of Ameridian perspectivism, where “person” is a position occupied equally by human or non-human animal in relationships of war, kinship or hunting; Marisol de la Cadena’s theory of “tirakuna,” a Quechua term translated as “earth-beings,” that names sentient beings in mutual relationships of care with “runakuna,” human Quechuas; or Eduardo Kohn’s notion of “ecologies of selves,” where non-humans individuals are understood in semiotic relations with each other. All of which surpass distinctions supported by the culture-nature division and stand, therefore, in friction with Euromodern epistemology. To illustrate the approach presented thus far, I now turn to The Fox from Above and the Fox from Below José María Arguedas.

The Foxes and Transspecies Literary Agency The posthumously published work The Fox from Above and the Fox from Below, or The Foxes for short, combines the author’s diary and an unfinished novel. Arguedas speaks of a deep anguish that would eventually lead to his suicide in 1969, while he fictionalizes Chimbote, the port town, heart of the industrialized fishery that turned Peru into the largest world exporter of anchoveta during the 1960s fishmeal boom. The novel proliferates into various stories, all converging on the eco-social crisis that the industrial fishing makes palpable, but whose deep temporal scales exceed the 1960s industrialization of the Humboldt current, where anchovetas thrive. While there is no plot as such, the different fictional sections recreate the eco-social experiment of the fishmeal boom and its modernizing infrastructure, where thousands of Andean migrants entered the harrowing conditions of the fishery working force. Attracted by the phenomenon, Arguedas, whose literary oeuvre and anthropological research were deeply engaged with the conflictive subsumption of Andean culture into national culture and history, interviewed migrant workers for the novel bringing these interviews into his fiction, where fishermen, union leaders, sex workers, fishery mafias, and Peace corps volunteers on the shores, together with anchoveta schools and guano birds at sea, make part of an economy of protein-feed ingredients that extends globally. The dialogue between the foxes alluded above works as a connective narrative tissue between the first and second parts of the novel, as well as between the diaries and

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fictional sections. The foxes’ ability to communicate verbally, as character-narrators, contra the notion that animals do not speak, invite us to imagine the stakes of a literary transspecies language. Arguedas’s non-human narrative positioning challenges from the get-go an anthropocentric impulse in literary studies, whereby animals in literature would exist only as stand-in for human experience, never appearing to be there for themselves. Even from within a liberal cultural framework that allows us to consider human and animals coexisting in the same planetary ecologies human agency dominates over other species. This is so because such liberal frameworks, stemming all the way from Charles Darwin’s theories of evolutionary biology, have not escaped the logic of colonialism and capitalism that shapes cosmopolitan species imaginaries. The Foxes is a generative text to investigate multispecies stories and histories. This is in part because of Arguedas’s style, but also because the novel originates in the presence of other multispecies writing. The Peruvian author conceived of his novel as he was translating the Huarochirí Manuscripts (1608), henceforth HM, into Spanish.10 Penned wholly in Quechua by anonymous indigenous authors and collected by father Francisco de Ávila in the context of the Spanish “extirpación de idolatrías,” the colonial evangelization campaign in the Andes, the manuscript has been qualified as “untranslatable” given on the one hand, its complex paleographic quality and, on the other, the linguistic regional linguistic variations it includes.11 With an appreciation we could call environmental for their focus on the document’s ecological breadth, Luis Millones and Renata Mayer have compared the HM to the Popol Vuh as a book of sacred fauna (2012). To them, like its Mayan counterpart, the Quechua manuscript can be read both figuratively for a human-centered understanding of a more than human world and also materially as a book where textual operations speak of species beings and becomings in a particular time and place: the Lurin basin, running all the way from the Western cordillera into the Pacific ocean, considered through dramatic transformations that unfold with the Europeans and the Incas before them.12 For Millones and Mayer, while other manuscripts of the period offer a careful collection of rituals, the Huarochirí document stands out as “[. . .] el único que está íntegramente escrito en Quechua y que se ha dedicado a presentar las deidades de una región y sus relaciones con los seres vivientes y su entorno geográfico” (Millones and Mayer 2012: 15). Arguedas was the first Spanish translator of the HM as a whole, which he published under the title Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí in 1966. Questioned by literary

 Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 3169 (fol. 64r-114r).  Most recently Laura León Llerena’s Reading the illegible (2023) investigates the “illegibility” of the HM to recuperate “the multiplicity of ways in which one medium, such as writing, could be used to communicate (in the act of writing) and differentiate it from the social role that, symbolically and materially, its users assign to it” (Llerena 2023: 6).  For example, Millones and Mayer (2012) speak of “cargas religiosas del mar y las montañas,” to describe El Niño Southern Oscillation, which elevated water temperatures causing marine fauna displacements, high tides and heavy rains in the cordillera, with the consequence of overflowing rivers, etc.

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critics, historians, linguists, and anthropologists, the Arguedian translation participates in the intense critical history of this document.13 Be the shortcomings of his translations as they may, the connection between the HM and the novel interests me as part of what I understand to be the latter’s archival work on the “animal” and the ways in which it constellates human and more than human. Like the HM, The Foxes focuses on the speedy transformation of many environments and their different temporalities. Until recently, canonical interpretations of The Foxes considered contamination in Chimbote, as well as the different bodies and surroundings where it unfolded, as a mere backdrop for a cultural clash between criollo developmentalism and Andean culture. Such readings were premised on the ontological separation between nature and culture and particularly, for the purposes of this essay, between animal and human. A separation this novel negates and, at the same time, cannot do without. Studies on the relationship between the HM and The Foxes such as those of Martin Lienhard and Sara Castro-Klarén, have pushed for revisions of our understanding of human-animal relations by using oppositions between myth/literature or myth/history in relation to Andean mythic structures. Complementarily, I see The Foxes as a text whose archival work pays attention to co-constitution, where the role of the language of species (and with it the idea of becomings and change, but also of adaptation and specialization of life forms) and Arguedas’s investment in it cannot be overlooked.14 This is evident when we read The Foxes alongside Kristin Wintersteen’s The Fishmeal Revolution (2021), where she explains how the “second industrialization” in world fisheries, roughly between 1950 and 1977, made the oceans “legible” through the expansion of a maritime techno-frontier, which also in turn, made their resources available in a planetary scale through the fishmeal boom (Wintersteen 2021: 5). The port-town of Chimbote, which is the center of The Foxes, had been planned to become the “Peruvian Pittsburgh” (Wintersteen 2021: 61), but the infrastructure of the city could not hold the transformation that industrialized fishery entailed and it ultimately collapsed, a symbol the downfall of the Peruvian fishmeal boom in the 1970s. It is in Chimbote where Arguedas situates his ecology of contamination. It is worth remembering that the rhetoric of contamination tends to work through opposites (purity and toxicity), following linear metanarratives of civilization or developmentalism that align those poles with modern topographies (center and periphery, urban and

 The manuscript’s critical history is a good example of the interdisciplinary problem pertaining to the study of colonial documents. For a study of Arguedas’s translation of the HM in this context, see León Llerena (2012).  Even though Sara Castro-Klarén’s pioneering and beautiful reading of the shamanic energy in “Como chancho cuando piensa” is important for Latin American animal studies and formative to my own reading of The Foxes, especially for her attention to shamanic becomings and the connections to HM, the understanding of transspecies agentic forces in this chapter however departs from the exceptionality of camac in Castro-Klarén’s work.

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rural, and so forth), while indicating processes of decay or degradation. As Gisela Heffes rightly shows from an eco-critical lens, toxicity and contamination in Latin America spark a conflictual relationality between culture and nature, with either side in need to be defended (2013). While there is space for the notion of an uncontaminated nature or uncontaminated culture in The Foxes, the novel renders a much more nuanced narrative. Castro-Klarén offers the following description: “Chimbote aparece como el lugar de agonía de especies completas—anchovetas, pelícanos, serranos [. . .] El hedor de la Muerte está en todas partes” (Castro-Klarén 2001: 27). While her italics are meant to denounce the animalization of the racialized working bodies of Andean migrants, the rhetorical use of the endangered species list points to the stench of Chimbote as symptomatic of a toxic biopolitics that understands human/animal continuity as a “natural resource” of fishery. And, also, from anthropo-decentric perspective, the list condenses the novel’s engagement with interdependency and multiplicity. Anchovetas and pelícanos, “natural” symbiotic marine species, disappear along with serranos because they have become a “new” companion species in the new symbiosis of the fishing industry. While it is true The Foxes paints Chimbote as the result of what Julio Ortega has called a seemingly “compulsive modernization,” (xi) that produces enormous urban growth without planning or order, the novel investigates this through material and symbolic “animal” continuity within this particular socio-technical context. In commenting on Arguedas’s ecology of contamination, Jorge Marcone (2019) points out that this writing does not necessarily stand against the “contamination” of capitalism or extraction; rather it takes it as the place of life, human and nonhuman. Furthermore, Marcone’s notion of an “escritura ecológica provinciana,” with a soft spot for garbage and abject animals or insects, a matter that speaks to the “long emergencies” Rob Nixon studies as indexes of slow violence, is central to my revision.15 I take this “provinciano” affect as an orientation from which Arguedas explores the radical consequences of the double internality between human history and that which we used to call nature in capitalism.16 I cannot elaborate on the whole novel here, so I will focus on the opening sequence to find in it a dramatization of animal agentic forces and show some examples of transspecies literary agentiality. The Foxes’s fictional section inaugurates with a staging of social Darwinism at the deck of the Sampson I, the fishing skipper property of captain Chaucato. Tied to racialization and sexualization, social Darwinism is a concept often associated with the human species only, but Arguedas drives it into the non-human, complicating the

 Marcone’s reading is based on the Arguedian notion of a “provinciano” affect, an association between human and nonhuman, that places the novel’s project closer to Bruno Latour’s nondualist understanding of modernity (1991) or Jane Bennett’s proposal of vibrant matter (2009).  “Human organizations are environment-making processes and projects. In turn the web of life shapes human organization. This is the double internality of historical change—humanity inside nature, nature inside humanity” (Moore 2016: 79).

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continuities between the human and non-human. In the captain’s rendering, this is a particular kind of transspecies affair; a fish fuck where fishermen are the middlemen “nosotros, putamadre”—we the fishermen—“les llevamos el material” (And damnit, we’re the ones bringin’ the stuff in to ‘em) (Arguedas 1971: 37, my emphasis), provide the material to the factory owners. Without fish, there would be no money, but it is bosses who, nonetheless, who hold the power. In his speech, Chaucato equates “straightening” el Mudo’s sexuality to fishing, while fighting the alcatraces, as proof of the fishermen’s manhood.17 A pyrrhic victory, as they themselves are, in Chaucatos’s words also fucked over by Braschi, the owner of the Nautilish Fishing Company, “el culemacho,” (34) and major disruptor, who is able to “hace[r] parir billetes a cada anchovetita” (How the hell do these factory owners make every little anchovy spawn banknotes) (Arguedas 1971: 37). In this scheme, fish and birds seem like an endless and passive material resource for capitalist fuckery, locked outside of history albeit necessary for its unfolding. Yet Arguedas allows for a sense of species solidarity to emerge from symbiotic relationships in the scene, transforming the “straight” patriarchal hunt into fluid gender and sexual positionalities and untimely human/animal temporalities.18 To be sure, the sexualized dynamics and language of extraction in the novel easily aligns with what Michael Lundblad calls the “epistemology of the jungle”: an intertwined history of sexuality and animality that creates a Darwinian-Freudian animal who naturalizes capitalism through heterosexual reproduction and aggressive competition. Chaucato’s speech resembles biological discourses of difference: “El hombre se diferencia por el pincho, ¿no? Tú has nacido con pincho, oye, Mudo, aunque sea pa’tú joder” (Havin’ a dick’s what makes a man different, isn’t it? You were born with a dick, ya hear me, Mudo, even if it’s for screwing yourself) (Arguedas 1971: 33). The Darwinian-Freudian animal of Social Darwinism projects culture into nature and viceversa through the interplay of repression and desire: the language of battle of the fittest explains culture as emerging from nature and the cultural model explains how nature works.19 But because of the ways in which the scene is framed, there is space in it for a convergence of post-humanist and post-anthropocentric interpretations. If in Civilization

 I use alcatraces or pelícanos after Arguedas’s use of the names of these guano birds in the original. The translation of Frances Horning Barraclough does not follow the author’s specie-fication.  My understanding of species solidarity in Chaucato’s speech is in conversation with Jens Andermann’s rendering of the “animal alliance” in what he calls Quiroga’s “tales of environmental insurgency,” which he sees as forging an opposition to biopolitics outside the human. While in those “animal alliance,” human and non-human interactions rebel against the projection of anthropogenic immunitarian regimes into the ‘natural’ world. The interspecies solidarity I read in Arguedas, complementarily, understands that there is always already a semiotic and material intimacy in the multispecies crowd.  Lundblad argues that the sexualization of social Darwinism originates in the Freudian translation of “animal instincts” into “human animality.” Indeed, Freud’s notion of “Man is wolf to man” in Civilization and its Discontents comes from Hobbes’s De Cive, as an invitation to think about modernity’s unresolved animal temporalities.

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and its Discontents, Freud’s human animality indicates the potential of “Man” to use “his” human neighbor as a sexual object, in The Foxes we find that through capitalism all animality is, indeed, neighborly and sexualized. With hetero-sexualization running across species, capitalism seems to prove its capacity to reproduce, as in David Harvey’s formulation, because of boundaries and not despite them. While this follows Arguedas’ political premise for the fiction in The Foxes—that capitalism has brought contamination and bred monsters—we must also consider how the language of species, not as a standin for human representation, but as animal literary agency proper, is also particularly bounded to production and reproduction of the biotic and its symbolic value. From this perspective, Chaucato’s fish fuckery speech is a dramatization of the agentic literary forces of “animal.” The captain’s discourse establishes a boundary— through the speaking and the non-speaking (not gratuitously, the scene opens with him harassing a character called “El mudo”) mirroring in the positionalities of the hunter and the prey—necessary for theoretical considerations of animality and its relationship to epistemological plots for the origins of “human” culture.20 The positioning of such a boundary on the skipper in the ocean, but also of the draft of a novel that will never be finished, asks us to pay special attention to a swinging atmosphere where contamination makes biotic language dwell in the contiguous temporalities of symbiotic relations, making species simultaneously singular and multiple. The paragraphs following Chaucato’s discourse shift between perspectives, positions, and temporalities, as if making room for the narrative excess of transspecies agency. It is through the exploration of positionalities and their contiguity in the symbiotic that the text creates a possibility for resisting the Freudian-Darwinian animal, which, as Marcone’s reading suggests, will not necessarily align with a critique of acculturation, human or non-human.21 At the end of his speech, Chaucato spots the fish school, “darkening” (Arguedas 2000: 31) in the water. Here, the text expands into the material-semiotic of species entanglements juxtaposing technology and geological formations through the narrative and literal “bird’s eye.” The use of machines in the novel deserves their own reading in their role as aesthetic environmental devices.22

 Freudian psychoanalysis in this regard reads as an anthropomorphic narrative of cultural evolution premised in an absent origin, ciphered in the sexuation of bodies, upon which humans are able to differentiate themselves from animals.  In this regard Marcone’s approach can be read along with Neel Ahuja’s critique of idealized visions of transspecies intimacies: “Posthumanist discourses that celebrate the alterity of animal bodies as a signpost for an affirmative biopolitics have too often idealized transspecies connectivities without sustained attention to the emergent posthumanism of capitalism and the state” (Ahuja 2011: 129).  Critical attention has focused on technology as alienating and contaminant. Particularly interesting, however, is the episode of Don Diego, a more-than-human character that resembles one of the vulpine narrators, who in the guise of a friend of Braschi, gets to tour the factory. Alexandra Hibbett has read this as a dialectical moment, where on the one hand, Don Diego, a stand-in for Andean cultures, and, on the other, the machines, as stand in for technology and modernization, exchange their respective past-oriented and future-oriented forces to produce a syncretic utopia (2013).

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Here, Chaucato’s insulting the echosounder brings our attention to the synesthetic labor of this technology, which translates sound into image allowing the men to track and “see” the fish underwater: “Ahí está la mancha, sombreando. ¡Me cago en la ecosonda! ¡Abajo la chalana, concha’esu madres!” (Yonder’s the spot, darknenin’ the water! I shit on the radar screen! Lower the boats, ya motherfuckers!) (Arguedas 1971: 37) The paratactical structure follows the fishing method that combines observing birds in order to find the fish with the use of echosounder to measure the size and speed of the fish school before releasing a smaller boat to encircle the animals. By mentioning the echosounder, the narrative signals to technology and progress as a seemingly proleptic and augmentative devise, only to move next to the cerro El Dorado as a materialization of recursive agentiality and deep history.23 Competing with the echosounder-men assemblage, the alcatraces eye the same fish, but here, before breaking into a feeding scene, the narrative expands again. Behind the lines of alcatraces, as if from the bird’s view, cerro El Dorado appears in between the cordillera and the ocean. These more-than-human positionalities within the capitalist pecking order form part of the boundary-crossings notion of companion species in Haraway’s thinking, “a permanently undecidable category, a category-in-question that insists on the relation of the smallest unit of being and of analysis” (Haraway 2008: 165). Giving the Deleuze-Guattarian notion of assemblage an anthropo-decentric twist, Haraway has called for a revision of biology’s metaphors and language, making transspecies assemblages a network onto which the narratives of co-constitution can be narrated. In Arguedas, the biotic that is contained within species taxons soon becomes an undecidable category as it extends into the geological, by way, however, of the biotic: when a group of alcatraces flying over the skipper bring about an unexpected connection with guano mounds over cerro El Dorado. Atop El Dorado, the narrator shifts temporalities with the introduction of Tutaykire. Tutaykire is deity-character in whose absence guano appears over a mountain in front of the ocean in the HM.24 We are told that Tutaykire is “durante dos mil quinientos años” (Arguedas 1971: 37, my emphasis) looping a gold and silver net along with pre-Inca sanctuaries. The durative act of braiding animates the geological formation as Tutaykire’s head is described both as shining and as giving shade, while he watches

 With an emphasis on the connections between conservationist aesthetics in response extraction, Victoria Saramago’s revision of the fictional works of João Guimaraes Rosa and Alejo Carpentier demonstrates how rather evoking an absolute outside of modern history, forest in these author’s novels may evoke deep time, emphasizing a continuity between human and non-human. The Foxes emphasizes that continuity and temporality in the extractive zone itself.  More critical attention has gone to Huaytiacuri through intertextual analysis than to Tutaykire. In the HM, Huaytiacuri, son of Pariacaca, is able to solve the mysterious illness of Tamtañamca (and marry his daughter!) by eavesdropping on a conversation between two foxes. In the transition between the Primer diario and the novel’s Primera parte, the voice of “Arguedas” recognizes Huaytiacuri’s spying on these foxes and the foxes’ conversation as the narrative models for his text.

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the fishermen enigmatically “ahora más que nunca” (Arguedas 1971: 37).25 After feeling Tutaykire/El dorado’s gaze on his shoulder, Chaucato turns to the birds: “Vagos, despatriados, muertos di’hambre, grandazos” (Great big starvin’ bums that’s been kicked outa their country) (Arguedas 1971: 37). If birds are fishing at sea, their ‘natural’ habitat, how are we to interpret Chaucato’s observations? While there is admiration (they are grandazos), there is also a sense of defeat. Projecting social Darwinism back onto ‘nature,’ Chaucato points to the ecological damage caused by industrial fishing and to the premise of the novel. Similarly, a few lines below, the narrator compares the birds to flies. The birds have become fly-like because, like insects, they hover over food. Other passages that describe them at the Chimbote markets as buzzards suggest they have become scavenging birds, stealing to eat. Let me quote at length what follows Chaucato’s speech: The alcatraces descended and went flying along lazily at sea level; they took violent bites out of the teeming netload and swam to the edge of the cork net floaters; they bumped into the extremely hard nylon edging and distended their flaccid pouches and long bills, flapping their wings. Performing like acrobats, they caught mouthfuls of anchovies, scooping them into their bills, and then threw back their heads to let dozens of them slide down out of the flaccid pouches, which seemed to be made of cold silken cloth, into their bellies. Not even the flies of the dirtiest chicha-bars in the barrios of the Andean cities did such a swirling black dance. Some huge pelicans got snagged by the edging and the mesh. The dory man would grab them by the bill, lift them up, and fling them into the sea. They would then return to the attack (Arguedas 2000: 32).26

Because the novel is written with a symbiotic understanding of life systems, if capitalism actualizes nature as a resource, there is no outside. The different focalizations I have been tracing, however, imply that different framings are needed to capture the repetitions and the narrative excess (or anti-narrative excess even) of immanence. In describing the fishing scene in this way, Arguedas recreates marine ecosystems where different species such as, for instance, whales, krill, birds, and seals often fish

 “Up there Tutaykire has been weaving a net of silver and gold for two thousand five hundred years. His head glows faintly [. . .] keeps watch over the fishermen, now more than ever” (Arguedas 2000: 31). The enigmatic quality of Tutaykire is derived from his active presence as a geological, morethan-human being, which after Marisol de la Cadena we could understand as an “earth-being,” in a relationship of care with the fishermen. Part of Tutaykire’s enigmatic presence here is not only that his actions traverse time, but that he is tied sexually to the location, as he was trapped by a “zorra”: “Tutaykire quedó atrapado por una “zorra” dulce y contrarta, entre los yungas (Arguedas 1971: 37). When Barraclough translates “zorra,” which appears many times in the novel, for “pussy” speciefication is lost. Again, this is problematic for a novel where sexual desire and positionalities are essential to works of multiplication and multiplicity. Moreover, the word is used in quotations in the original, making “zorra,” to appear strange, disruptive, uncanny, calling attention to itself and its power.  I use “alcatraces” here following the original, instead of “pelicans” offered in the English translation. Also, I have replaced “dragon-bites” used in the translation with “violent bites,” as “dragons” not only does not figure in the Spanish original but is a metaphor out of context for the scene. “Tarascazos” or “tarascadas” translates literally as “violent bites.”

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symbiotically. In this case, however, the alcatraces are feeding on anchovetas caught in tight nylon nets brought to sea by the Sampson I, which is fishing and racing against the Braschi ships and the birds in a new symbiosis. In continuity with this silk-like synthetic polymer, the birds’ pouches, first full and then flaccid, turn into silk-like cloth. Playing with continuity, contagion, and symbiosis, Arguedas evokes extraction of natural resources (silkworms and silk), as well as their industrial avatar (nylon), that materially transformed the world-order, as much as guano and fishmeal. Flies cannot produce their own space. They are a form of life that does not make a home or nest. In that respect, they stand as a total opposite of the alcatraces, the Peruvian Booby and the Guanays, famous guano birds that in nesting on the islands of the Peruvian Pacific coast, produced mounds of manure, mined during the guano boom of the nineteenth century, an extractive precedent to that of anchoveta. The guano birds for Arguedas homeless. Without the fish, they are like flies. Moreover, the flies evoked in the narrator’s memory are hovering, as in a dark dance, over the dirtiest Andean chicha-bars. Contra the notion of the Andes as pre-modern and eminently rural, the chicherías—important spaces for popular resistance in Arguedas’ oeuvre—are testament of urban settings where bars are teeming with people and flies brought by the stench of chicha.

Conclusions As we have seen, transspecies assemblages point to shifting scales, making the case for the “animal” archive as a multidisciplinary object of study. Latin Americanism and Latin American studies, in particular, have much to contribute to the study and description of the entangled histories of multispecies communities. Even though the multispecies studies approach endorses a much broader taxonomic scope than that of animal studies, the semiotic and material work of “animal” is essential to the patterns that emerge when we trace histories of colonialism and capitalism into the web of life. If multispecies living leaves room to speculate about non-humans as social agents and about co-constitutive agency, we may as well foray into the notion of transspecies literary agency, which I derive from Susan McHugh (2009). I have used the prefix trans- here to mark fluidity or transitivity as part of the taxonomic problem that comes with the species language.27 McHugh rightly notes that animal studies is one of the many locations for renegotiation of the representation of animals. She understands that the study of animal literary agency may offer a way to intervene into

 “Referring both to the relentlessly ‘specific’ or particular and to a class of individuals within the same characteristics, species contains its own opposite in the most promising—or special—way. Debates about whether species are earthly organic entities or taxonomic conveniences are coextensive with the discourse we call ‘biology’” (Hawaray 2008: 17).

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genetic modification and cloning as practices that redefine life. Deriving from this insight and thinking with the language of species as an agentic force that mobilizes the sphere of “animal” in Latin Americanism, I have looked at how transspecies literary agency can accompany and go beyond the figurative work of “animal” in biopolitics. In a similar way to the vibrant matter in Jane Bennet, the language of species moves or animates the literary text, generating connections that, in conversation with biopolitical figurations, afford us a better grasp of environmental aesthetics. If planetarity necessarily is a new scale of politics, transspecies literary agency offers a tool to expand our understanding of national or regional literatures. Transpecies literary agentiality is complementary to the notion that animal studies, given its linguistic inadequacies, can only aspire to be an aporetic inscription of animals’ experience of violence (Weil 2012). The comparison between flies and alcatraces relates not only metaphorically to the Andes/Coast opposition that, in principle, organizes what appears to be human geography in the cultural archive of Peruvian literature and cultural production. Rather, it indexes the intermingling of two already-symbiotic companion species relations (flies & chicherías; alcatraces & fishmeal economy) emerging in the “new” and “long” symbiotic violence of Chimbote. Arguedas’s novel engages with a particular moment in Peruvian history and cultural production but paying attention to the histories of transspecies assemblages that animate the text we see that moment at work within a larger history of extractivism in Latin America and the Pacific. Given that species is a term that takes part in economy, as well as in biology and linguistics, all systematic models that seek to explain difference and variation in time, interspecies literary agency may help us understand the aesthetics of long emergencies within Latin American literature at a planetary scale.

Works Cited Ahuja, Neel. “Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar.” Social Text 29.1 (2011): 127–149. Arguedas, José María. El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1971. ——. The Fox from Above and the Fox from Below. Trans. Frances Barraclough. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Andermann, Jens. “A aliança animal: sobre a história natural do antropoceno.” Bioescritas / Biopoéticas: Corpo, memória e arquivos. Eds. Ana Chiara, André Masseno, Daniele Ribeiro Fortuna, and Marcelo dos Santos. Porto Alegre: Editora Sulina, 2017. 12–28. Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity, 2019. Briceño, Ximena. “Vidas secas or Canine Melancholia: Reflections on Living Capital.” Journal of Latin American Studies 26.2 (2017): 299–319. Castro-Klarén, Sara. ““Como chancho, cuando piensa”: El afecto cognitivo en Arguedas y el con-verter animal.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 26.1–2 (2001–2002): 25–39. De la Cadena, Marisol. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I am Following. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

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——. The Beast and The Sovereign (Volumes I and II). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Few, Martha and Zeb Tortorici. “Writing Animal Histories.” Centering Animals in Latin American History. Eds. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 1–27. French, Jennifer, and Gisela Heffes, eds. The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Hibbett, Alexandra. “Bailar la máquina: historia e imagen dialéctica en El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo.” Arguedas: La dinámica de los encuentros culturales. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2013. 393–403. Giorgi, Gabriel, Álvaro Fernández Bravo, and Fermín Rodriguez. “Bio/zoo”. e-misférica 10.1 (2013). http://archive.hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-101 (3 January 2023). Giorgi, Gabriel. Formas comunes. Animalidad, Cultura, Biopolítica. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2014. Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Heffes, Gisela. Políticas de la destrucción, poéticas de la preservación. Apuntes para una lectura (eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo, 2013. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press, 2020. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. León Llerena, Reading the Illegible. Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2023. ——. “José María Arguedas, traductor del Manuscrito de Huarochirí.” Cuadernos del CILHA 17 (2012): 74–89. López-Labourdette, Adriana, and Magdalena López, eds. “Animalidades: Pistas para un mapa alternativo de las gramáticas éticas, políticas y estéticas en las culturas latinoamericanas.” Iberoamericana 20.73 (2020): 7–11. Lundblad, Michael. The Birth of A Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ——. “The End of the Animal—Literary and Cultural Animalities.” Animalities. Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human. Ed. Michael Lundblad. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017: 1–21. Marcone, Jorge. “Recuperar Chimbote, o la ecología menospreciada de Los zorros de José María Arguedas.” Visiones de los Andes: Ensayos críticos sobre el concepto de paisaje y región. Eds. Ximena Briceño and Jorge Marcone. La Paz: Plural, 2019. 183–202. McHugh, Susan. “Literary Animal Agents.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 487–495. Millones, Luis, and Renata Mayer. La fauna sagrada de Huarochirí. Lima: Institut français d’études andines, 2012. books.openedition.org/ifea/6527. Moore, Jason W. “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” Sociology Faculty Scholarship 2 (2016): 78–115. orb. binghamton.edu/sociology_fac/2. Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Saramago, Victoria. Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals. New York: Random House, 1975. Tortorici, Zeb. Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Tsing, Anna. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Van Dooren, Thom, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities 8.1 (2016): 1–23.

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Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Metafísicas caníbales: Líneas de antropología postestructural. Trans. Stella Mastrangelo. Madrid: Katz, 2010. Weil, Kari. “A Report on the Animal Turn.” Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New York: Columbia University Press, 2012: 3–24. Wintersteen, Kristin. The Fishmeal Revolution: The Industrialization of the Humboldt Current Ecosystem. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. Wolfe, Carry. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Dana Khromov

Climate The centerpiece of the Chilean pavilion at the 1992 World’s Fair in Seville was a giant Antarctic iceberg—an image reminiscent of the opening line of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Year of Solitude: “Many years later, before the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to see ice.” Like the appearance of ice in the tropical Macondo, the Chilean spectacle appealed to the association of cold with civilization and order to represent Chile as a nation marked by progress and modernity through its contrast with the rest of Latin America (Schneuer 2014). By foregrounding the frigid climate of the country’s South, the Chilean exhibition designers invoked to the centuries-old dichotomy that opposes “civilization”, located in temperate and cold climates and associated with discipline, law and order, to the “barbarism” of the tropical areas, characterized as primitive, undisciplined and chaotic. This chapter traces the development and consolidation of this dichotomy in Latin America since its inauguration as a colonial strategy by Europeans to distinguish themselves in the New World and to justify the subjugation of the Indigenous and African populations through the centuries of exploitation of people, land and resources that followed in what were once tagged “third world”, then “developing” and now part of the Global South. This same dichotomy carries renewed relevance in the face of the current climate crisis, experienced in vastly different ways between the Global North and the Global South. Indeed, appealing to Rosa Luxemburg’s forecast of the future as a choice of “socialism or barbarism,” Isabelle Stengers (2015) inverts the terms of the dichotomy in applying the term barbarism to continuing unchecked consumption by the Global North as populations in the Global South deal with climate change’s most destructive consequences. In the final section of this chapter, by contrast, I pivot to showing how, in his poem La isla en peso (1943), the Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera challenges such deterministic notions of the tropics, offering instead a postanthropocentric view of Cuba in which the tropical climate, inhabitants, and various histories mutually constitute one another. More than climate, then, we find in La isla an amorphous atmosphere in which the subject is enmeshed in a relationship of immersion, in Emanuele Coccia’s use of the term as “an action of mutual compenetration between subject and environment, body and space, life and medium . . . Subject and environment act on each other and define themselves starting from this reciprocal action [. . .] But this state of immersion is above all the metaphysical site of a more radical identity of being and doing” (Coccia 2019: 37). Atmosphere and subject, in other words, are one another’s conditions of possibility, mutually producing one another in a process of constant creation.

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The Construction of the Tropics Since early in the colonial period, climate has been deployed in discourses about the “New World” as the basis for distinguishing a white, European, and, subsequently, criollo identity more proximate to the European predecessors than to Native American, mestizo and Afrodescendent ones. The European encounter with the Americas in the fifteenth century precipitated a “discovery” of the tropics, the hot, humid equatorial region that became coded first as the site of sublime and indomitable nature and, later, as vacation grounds for the wealthy, each vision posed in opposition to regions with temperate climates. The discovery and exploration of the “New World” thus effected a realignment of Europe’s idea of itself in relation to the outside: the tropics were taken as a metonymic stand-in for the New World, and the Global South more broadly, to the point of taking the place of the Orient as the other against which Europe identified itself.1 This reorientation centered climate as a primary locus of differentiation between cultures and peoples and lead the way toward future realignments of First/Third World to Developed/Un(der)developed and, more recently, Global North/Global South—all of which increasingly take productivity and biodiversity as their measures. Functioning as a stand-in for nature in the Americas, seen as indomitable and inhospitable to culture, David Arnold points out, “Europeans strove to incorporate and subjugate the tropics: by controlling natural resources (especially vegetable products), by mobilizing non-white labour and by gaining mastery over ‘tropical disease” (Arnold 1996: 162–163). The transfer of plants, animals and diseases from the Old World to the New likewise effectuated changes in the environment that made it more hospitable for the adoption of a European lifestyle. Paired with Enlightenment ideas of warm climates as having adverse moral effects on their populations, the tropics, with their unfamiliar climate, vegetation, people, and diseases, emerged as the embodiment of alienation, danger, and repugnance in the European imagination (Arnold 1996: 153–155). Tropical heat and humidity were thought to induce somnolence as well as physical and moral laxity, the overwhelming power of nature making the regions inhospitable to the development of culture. The supposed physical and moral hazards the tropics presented were racialized in the European mind because of the mass importation of slaves, arousing fears of racial decay and miscegenation. Europeans’, and later Criollos’, fears of the tropics were exacerbated by 18th century discourses fueled by fears of mass migration to the Americas. Perhaps most widely read was Georges-Louise LeClerc’s (better known as Count Buffon) theory of New World degeneracy, published in his Natural History: General and Particular, which held that the region’s climate particularities caused a decrease in size (of

 In the words of Giselle Román Medina, “Quizás pueda afirmarse que en el siglo XX la dicotomía trópico/templado termina por desplazar al contraste entre Oriente y Occidente” (2016: 33).

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humans and animals), diminished sexual drive, and weaker social ties. Where Buffon’s theory was limited to Native Americans (and animals), Abbé Cornelius de Pauw extended this theory to claim that Europeans and their offspring, too, would degenerate morally and physically if they migrated. This theory became a scientific justification for the anti-migration stance held by European monarchs. Even after these theories were debunked, they remained widely believed, fed by and feeding preexisting fears of the New World. Perhaps no one was as instrumental in adding nuance to such reductive stereotypes of the tropics as the geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who, in Mary Louise Pratt’s (1992) terms, “reinvented America” in European eyes as a primal, sublime, and harmonious nature. Humboldt travelled through Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico from 1799–1804, recording his observations in writings and illustrations that were later published as Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of America. The breadth of his studies along with his multidisciplinary approach made for a more nuanced—though still Eurocentric—approach than earlier, more deterministic discourses of the tropics. Emblematic of this is his Tableau Physique des Andes et Pays Voisins (Physical Table of the Andes and Neighboring Countries), an illustration of the Chimborazo and Cotopaxi volcanoes—the former a cross-section labelled with different species of animals and vegetation at different altitudes—flanked on either side by tables listing environmental and geological conditions at each corresponding altitude. Depicting the impact of climate conditions on life forms at different altitudes, this graphic representation illustrated the region’s diverse ecosystems from a multi-disciplinary perspective, acknowledging that plant, animal, and human life must be understood within the context of its particular ecosystem and thus undermining earlier essentializing views of the tropics. Still, Latin American elites in the nineteenth century perpetuated prevailing European discourses on the New World for the purpose of justifying the regional, ethnic, and social hierarchies of the emergent independent nation-states. In Colombia, as Felipe Martínez Pinzón has shown, criollos settled predominantly in the cooler Andes, which were “imagined as a continuation of Europe in the tropics” in opposition to the uncivilized and racialized tropics, whose indomitable nature presented the threat of disease at the same time as it offered an abundance of natural resources (Martìnez Pinzón 2016: 16).2 Where the Andes were thus coded as the seat of civilization, the tropics, with their indomitable climate and nonwhite inhabitants were seen as lacking in history and culture, to be domesticated and exploited. To illustrate the threat the Colombian tropics supposedly posed to the nation, Martínez Pinzón offers a quote from “On the Influence of Climate over Organized Beings,” an 1808 essay by the criollo intellectual Francisco José de Caldas:

 Translations mine unless stated otherwise.

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Si las montañas son necesarias para la existencia del hombre sobre la tierra, en ninguna parte son más necesarias que en nuestra Patria. Suprimamos por un momento nuestra soberbia cordillera: una llanura melancólica y eterna, un calor sofocante en todos los puntos, unas aguas estancadas y corrompidas, una vegetación moribunda, la multiplicación de los reptiles, de los insectos, la muerte y la extinción de muchas especies, serían la consecuencia (qtd in Martínez Pinzón 2016: 25). [If the mountains are necessary for the existence of man on the earth, nowhere are they more necessary than in our Nation. Let’s suppress for a moment our own proud mountain range: melancholy and eternal plains, suffocating heat at all points, stagnant and polluted waters, dying vegetation, the multiplication of reptiles, of insects, the death and extinction of many species, would be the consequence.]

The longevity of this discourse can be seen in the following quote from Colombian President Laureano Gomez (1930–46): Dondequiera que la naturaleza tropical obtiene pleno dominio por las condiciones de humedad y de temperatura, impone su grandeza con tales caracteres de fuerza descomunal y arrebatadora que el espíritu humano se desconcierta y se deprime (qtd in Martínez Pinzón 2016: 119). [Wherever tropical nature establishes full domain over the conditions of humidity and temperature, it imposes its grandness with such uncommon and overwhelming force that the human spirit becomes unsettled and depressed.]

Martínez Pinzón describes this view of the tropics as a “greenhouse gaze”—a gaze on nature as if from behind a window (of an airplane, a ship, a greenhouse, etc.), separating the eye from the body and thus forgetting the inextricable bind between nature and culture. The exclusion of the tropics from the Europeanized national identity—its construction as an outside that cannot be incorporated and so must be exploited for its resources, according to Martínez Pinzón, has led not only to the destruction of the place itself through deforestation and agroindustry but also to a broader climate crisis. Considering the tropics as an enemy of civilization and progress—a place lacking in history and inhospitable to culture that must be developed to be incorporated into the nation—in other words, guarrantees its destruction. The exclusion of the tropics from national identity was not universal, however. Instead of positioning nature as separate from and at odds with culture, the nineteenth century Brazilian literary critic Araripe Jr. identifies the tropical environment as the source and inspiration for a distinct Brazilian culture. His 1888 essay, Estilo tropical: a formula do naturalismo Brasileiro (Tropical Style: the Formula of Brazilian Naturalism), finds in Brazilian culture and literature the indelible and determining influence of the tropical climate, whose disorder, vitality and sensuality effectuates a style of ‘incorrectness’ at odds with European order, frigidity and rationality: Há horas do dia em que o brasileiro, ou o habitante de cidades como o Rio de Janeiro, é um homem envenenado pelo ambiente. A falta de tensão do oxigênio tortura-o desmesuradamente; a sua respiração ofega, e a imaginação delira numa deliciosa insensatez equatorial . . . aqui,

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aonde o homem sensualiza-se até com o contato do ar . . . compreende-se que fora de todas as coisas a mais irrisória pôr peias à expressão nativa e regular o ritmo da palavra pelo diapasão estreito da retórica civilizada, mas muito menos expansiva (Araripe Júnior 2013). [There are hours of the day when the Brazilian, or the inhabitant of cities like Rio de Janeiro, is a man intoxicated by the environment. The lack of oxygen tension tortures him immeasurably; he becomes short of breath, and the delirious fantasy of a delicious equatorial insanity . . . here, where man becomes aroused with mere contact with the air . . . understand that it was the most derisory of all things to put a brake on native expression and regulate the rhythm of the word by the narrow pitch of civilized, but much less expansive, rhetoric.]

Despite his self-exoticizing rhetoric, Araripe Jr.’s, attribution of the vitality and originality of Brazilian literature to the lush tropical climate stands as a unique counterpoint to dominant anti-tropicalist discourses of his time. This embrace of tropicality reverberated in the work of early 20th century Modernist writers, who increasingly rejected the subjugation of their culture to the European, finding in both the physical environment and the presence of Afrodescendent and Indigenous cultures a source for original expression. Inaugurated by Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (Anthropophagic Manifesto, 1928), the idea of digesting of foreign forms to create something new and uniquely Brazilian became the catalyst for modernist writers such as Mário de Andrade and artists such as Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti to foreground tropical climate and racial and cultural syncretism as constitutive of Brazilian culture and identity. In a similar vein, the renowned Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre based his claims of Brazilian exceptionalism in Novo mundo nos trópicos (New World in the Tropics) on the enrichment of European culture by the tropical climate (Freyre deployed this discourse, we should note, and that of mestiçagem, to promote a Portuguese-centered national identity that celebrated the nation for its exceptional success as colonizers): “More than any other people,” he wrote, “they are developing, in the tropics, new forms of civilization whose fundamental traits are European, but whose perspectives [. . .] are extra-European. More-than-European” (Freyre 2015: 164). The construct of the tropics as devoid of history and culture is also challenged by their conceptualization as exceeding binary terms, both in representation and in reality. For Giselle Román Medina, for example, “The tropical signifies as much excess of nature (‘the sun’) as excess of artifice (‘gestures’, ‘flowery discourse’ or performance.) It is the raw, the primitive, the original outside of culture, but when it becomes culture, it remains too close to primary, crude matter. In order to overcome this condition, then, it exaggerates, exceeds the model—French or English—that it imitates and emphasizes its condition of artifice” (Román Medina 2016: 6). Román Medina identifies in the Argentine poets Enrique Molina, Néstor Perlongher, and Washington Cucurto a “poetics of tropicality” that at once unmoors the tropics from geographical determinism and undermines the Argentinian national project to distinguish itself as more temperate, and thus, more European, than the tropical Brazil. This conception

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of a tropicality dislocated from the binary has been captured in other aesthetic representations of the tropics as a slippery signifier that resists stereotype, offering instead an alternative to the limitations of humanist discourse that separates the human subject from nature.

La isla en peso: A Dissident Tropicality Virgilio Piñera’s 1943 poem, La isla en peso (The Whole Island), exemplifies the recuperation of the idea of the tropics from the stereotypes described above to signify instead an open question of how to articulate a national and regional identity that accounts for criollo, indigenous, and Afro-descendant cultural influences while also arising from and enmeshed in the island’s physical reality and atmospheric milieu as subject to the impact of the tropical climate. The poem engages with prevalent notions of a touristified, sexualized tropicality, only to twist and recover their meanings for the construction of a dissident—and eminently tropical—Cubanidad. This appropriation of tropicality forecasts to similar strategies in Brazil’s neoavantagardist culture of the 1950s and 60s, appropriately named Tropicália. La isla and its reception embody the conflict between the desire of the cultural elite to establish a Europeanized criollo identity and the aesthetic articulation of the Cuban identity that recognizes the real but not necessarily essential influence of the tropical climate on culture. The poem offers a response to the dichotomy that opposes the tropical to the temperate—European to Caribbean—through a poetic articulation of the island in all the human and nonhuman diversity that arises from its lush and abundant physical reality, while still evading stereotype. Instead, Piñera offers an image of Cuba as an island where life is driven by the tropical elements from day to day but that is also saturated with various histories that bely any singular narrative. Rather than lacking in culture, in Piñera’s rendering, the tropics embody an ineffable excess, both natural and cultural, thus registering the island’s syncretic cultural constitution but also the underlying agency of the physical environment and climatic milieu in its history and culture. Rather than functioning as an essentialist trope against which Europe (and, by association, civilization, culture, whiteness, etc.) is identified, Piñera’s tropics instead serve as a challenge to not only eurocentrism but anthropocentrism more broadly. La isla thus offers an alternative perspective to the “greenhouse gaze”, renewing the poem’s relevance in the contemporary moment when climate change forces a rethinking of how we understand nature and ourselves in relation to it. Prompting its rejection (and Piñera’s ostracization) by the literary establishment at the time, La isla identifies Cuba more with the Caribbean than with a Hispanic Catholic lineage, recognizing Taíno and African cultural presence and, more importantly for the topic at hand, attributing constitutive—though not deterministic—

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agency to the tropical climate. The reactions of Piñera’s contemporaries to the tropical inscription are exemplified by the poet Gastón Baquero, who charged that the island Piñera describes is more reminiscent of other Caribbean islands than of Cuba: La isla que sale de ese afán de ‘hacerme una historia’ a contrapelo de la historia evidente—y de la geografía, la botánica y la zoología evidentes—es una isla de plástica extra-cubana, ajena por completo a la realidad cubana. Isla de Trinidad, Martinica, Barbados . . . llena de una vitalidad primitiva que no poseemos, de un colorido que no poseemos, de una voluntad de acción y una reacción que no poseemos, es precisamente la isla contraria a la que nuestra condición de sitio ávido de problema, de historia, de conflicto, nos hace vivir más ‘civilmente,’ más en espíritu de civilización, de nostalgia, de Persona (qtd. in de Alba 2017: 179). [The island that arises from this eagerness to “make a history for myself” against the obvious history—and of the obvious geography, botany and zoology—it is a plastic, extra-cuban island, completely alien to the Cuban reality. The islands of Trinidad, Martinique, Barbados . . . full of a primitive vitality we do not possess, of color we do not possess, of a will to action and reaction we do not possess, are precisely in opposition to our condition as a place rife with problems, history, conflict that makes us live more ‘civilly,’ more in the spirit of civilization, of nostalgia, of Personhood.]

Baquero’s critique of Piñera’s (in his view) excessively tropical representation of the island exemplifies not only the eurocentrism of institutionalized art in early 20th century Cuba but also its obstinate refusal of the island’s belonging to the Caribbean and its stern delineation of the nature/culture binary that opposes the tropics to Europe and underlies the Latin American nation-building ethos. Baquero attributes “primitive vitality” and “color”—racist tropes akin to the moral laxity discussed above—to the Antilles, which he sees as alien to the sophisticated, “civilized”, implicitly white character of Hispanic Catholic culture. Not only does he reduce Afro-Caribbean culture to an exoticized tropics lacking in intellectual, historical, and cultural depth, but Baquero also obviates the real presence of Antillean cultures that precede the arrival of the Spanish and the active influence of the tropical sun, water, flora and fauna—all of which draw the island of Cuba into the archipelago. His critique of Piñera’s supposedly artificial representation of Cuba as a “plastic island” is belied by his own imposition of an artificially Europeanized narrative. More problematic, however, is his assertion of the binary that opposes the civilized Hispanic culture with historical substance to the Caribbean as a timeless, cultureless tropics. This dichotomy is at the foundation of the postcolonial conflict and a central concern in Piñera’s poem, which takes an oblique position in relation to the nation-building project in situating the island within the Caribbean genealogy thus also more broadly contesting the imperative for national circumscription. Piñera challenges Baquero’s opposition between the civilizational depth of Hispanic culture and the tropical vacuity of the Caribbean not by denying the presence of the former or subordinating it to the Afro-Caribbean but by presenting both as inextricably intertwined in the island’s history as well as embedded in a vaster

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planetary history. La isla thus suggests a postcolonial approximation of the island that takes into account not only the various cultures that constitute its history but also the island’s physical environment and natural forces–the omnipresence of water, the overwhelming power of the sun, and the verdant and sometimes ominous flora and fauna that frustrate any anthropocentric reduction. The poem accomplishes this through a gradual transformation of the poetic voice from one that speaks in the first person as a subject alienated from his physical surroundings to a collective one that speaks as one sensual body among many aroused by the tropical climate. With its famous opening lines—“The curse of being completely surrounded by water condemns me to this café table. / If I didn’t think that water encircled me like a cancer I’d sleep in peace”—La isla announces the nation’s ontological crisis from a position of alienation emphasized by the first-person voice. It then shifts to the third person to describe island life as an overwhelming excess of cultures and histories and powerfully sensual nature, before finally settling into the first person collective, immersing the poetic voice as one body amongst many that make up the island’s web of life, a mass of bodies and forces that form part of a planetary ensemble that neither centers nor depends on human life. We see the shift from first person to third exemplified in the following verse, which foregrounds the overwhelming—even violent— agency of the humid climate and brilliant sun on island life: Los cuerpos en la misteriosa llovizna tropical, en la llovizna diurnal, en la llovizna noctural, siempre en la llovizna, los cuerpos abriendo sus millones de ojos, los cuerpos, dominados por la luz, se repliegan ante el asesinato de la piel, los cuerpos, devorando oleadas de luz, revientan como girasoles de fuego encima de las aguas estáticas, los cuerpos, en las aguas, como carbones apagados derivan hacia el mar (Piñera 2011, 33) [Bodies in the mysterious tropical drizzle in the diurnal drizzle, in the nocturnal drizzle, always in the drizzle, bodies opening their millions of eyes, bodies, donimated by the light, retract before the assassination of the skin, bodies, devouring waves of light, burst like fiery sunflowers atop the static waters bodies, in the waters, like extinguished coal, drift toward the water (translations by Mark Weiss 2010)]

As illustrated in this verse in the third person, human bodies in the poem become parts of the ensemble entangled in the tropical climate, which garners a (sometimes violent) protagonism that challenges the domination, categorization, and logical apprehension of the natural world as well as the human. Instead of being driven by human activity, this ensemble of bodies’ synchronized movements are driven by the

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tropical mist and the sun, indeed, dominated by it. The poem thus engages with climate determinism only to subvert it, using it to break down the humans/nature binary that underwrites European colonial landscaping (Casid 2005), imagining instead a “web of life”, in which bodies are subject to the affections (or transfections, in Donna Haraway’s expression) of light, heat, rain, “atmosphere”. The shift in perspective from first to third person is accompanied by a shift in temporal scale from the historical, which takes for granted the human as subject at whose disposition the natural world awaits, to the planetary,3 which foregrounds the protagonism of tropical nature. The poem first opposes these two different temporalities, with the planetary gradually eclipsing the historical suggesting an apprehension of the island that neither centers on the human subject nor constructs a chronology that sees the arrival of the Europeans as the original cause of alienation of the subject. The poem derides the construct of teleological history, as made most evident in this verse, which eclipses all different historical narratives in the face of the planet’s deep cyclical time: Las historias eternas frente a la historia de una vez del sol, las eternas historias de estas tierras paridoras de bufones y cotorras, las eternas historias de los negros que fueron, y de los blancos que no fueron, o al revés o como os parezca mejor, las eternas historias blancas, negras, amarillas, rojas, azules, —toda la gama cromática reventando encima de mi cabeza en llamas—, la eterna historia de la cínica sonrisa del europeo llegado para apretar las tetas de mi madre (Piñera 2011: 35). [Eternal histories or the history of a day beneath the sun, eternal histories of these lands that bring forth buffoons and blowhards, eternal histories of blacks who were and whites who weren’t, or the other way around or any way at all, endless white, black, yellow, red, blue histories, —the whole chromatic spectrum bursting into flames above me— the endless history of the cynical smile of the European who had come to squeeze my mother’s teats.]

Mocking the narrative not only of the triumph of colonization that imposes a Europeanized identity on the island but one that foregrounds any particular race or people,

 Mary Louise Pratt traces the inauguration of the concept of planetarity to Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline as a way to “delink from capitalist-humanist globality and ‘render our home uncanny” (Pratt 2022: 9). The term has more recently “shifted the focus toward ecological standpoints that conjugated the human with the nonhuman, the living with the living,” as the growing climate crisis forces us to consider not just the past and present but the possibility of a future (Pratt 2022: 11).

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the poem undermines the discursive reduction of the island. Instead, it shifts here from historical time—“eternal histories”—to planetary—“the history of a day beneath the sun”—tracing the eternally recurring cycle of four moments of the day: “dawn, noon, dusk and nighttime” and their impacts on the island and its inhabitants. In this temporality, it is the bodies that are foregrounded rather than culture or the nation, subject to the alternating stupor and lust impelled by the island’s ecology. In this temporality the vital protagonism of the tropical humidity and flora and fauna surfacing throughout the poem comes into full relief, marked by a deep sensuality that gives the lie to cartesian narratives that separate and subordinate the physical to the intellectual. Beneath the misty veil of dawn, the plants and animals traverse the swamps, languid and lustful (“[. . .] the avalanche of luxuriant greens drowns out the wet sounds”), orchestrating an intensely sensual medley as the people drink their coffee unawares: El rastro luminoso de un sueño mal parido, un carnaval que empieza con el canto del gallo, la neblina cubriendo con su helado disfráz el escándalo de la sabana, cada palma derramándose insolente en un verde juego de aguas . . . Es la hora terrible. como un bólido la espantosa gallina cae, y todo el mundo toma su café (Piñera 2011: 37). [The luminous face of a badly born dream, a carnival that begins with the song of a rooster, mist covering the scandal of the savannah with its icy disguise, each palm proudly cascading in a green jet of water . . . It’s the terrible hour. Like a meteor the horrific hen falls and everyone drinks his coffee.]

This lush early-morning scene—“terrible” in its overwhelming saturation of activity— forms an erotic understory that passes unnoticed as the people begin their day, revealing the drama of the natural world. The scene that early morning unveils is of an eroticized community—not of the (sex-) touristic kind but, rather, of nonhuman bodies that engage with one another, registering but ultimately indifferent to the human presence. Doubling down on the agency of climate on human sociability, the midday sun blankets the island’s people with a collective paralysis, their attempts to articulate through action or language stymied by the stifling tropical heat and blinding light. It is this blinding tropical sunlight that exposes the fruitlessness of efforts to articulate the nation through a cartesian or any historical lens, and indeed, to define the island by the “civilization” imposed upon it. Finally, in what could be considered the poem’s resolution, at nighttime, “the world comes into profile” and “On this island, the first thing the night does is awaken the sense of smell” (Piñera 2011: 41). The sense of smell the night awakens removes

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the mask of history and civilization that domesticates the island’s rich physical and affective reality. It is an intangible force that impels a collective arousal, bringing the bodies together in sensual embrace. The precedence of the climatological temporality in opposition to historical telos becomes clear in the following lines near the end of the poem, by which point night has brought into profile the material world whose forms belie even poetry: La noche es un mango, es una piña, es un jazmín, la noche es un árbol frente a otro árbol sin mover sus ramas, la noche es un insulto perfumado en la mejilla de la bestia; una noche esterilizada, una noche sin almas en pena, sin memoria, sin historia, una noche antillana; una noche interrumpida por el europeo, el inevitable personaje de paso que deja su cagada ilustre, a lo sumo, quinientos años, un suspiro en el rodar de la noche antillana, una excrecencia vencida por el olor de la noche antillana (Piñera 2011: 43). [Night is a mango, a pineapple, a jasmine, night is a tree facing another tree without moving its limbs, night is a perfumed insult to the cheek of the beast; a sterilized night, a night without souls in pain, or memory, or history, an Antillean night; a night interrupted by the European, the inevitable eminent visitor who leaves a load of his illustrious shit behind him, here a mere 500 years, the faintest sigh in the grand procession of Antillean night, excrescence overcome by the scent of Antillean night.]

Again, climatological time—“the Antillean night,” tied to the cycles of the sun, moon, and tides—eclipses the historical, marked by the (ruinous) arrival of Europeans. Piñera does not dismiss the historical narrative but rather, points out the hubris of the humanist reduction of the life and rhythms of nature to the perspective and perception of the cartesian subject. He does not present the island as lacking in history as his detractors claimed but rather as not reducible to it—the historical entangled with the planetary. In this way, the poem does not reduce or essentialize Cuba or the Caribbean but instead draws the lens outside of the narrative of colonization, which it describes as “the faintest sigh in the grand procession of Antillean night.” Nor does the image of the European as the “visitor”, suggest that Indigenous people are somehow longer lasting but rather, it cuts down to size the Western vision of the human as the singular agent of history. Teleology is thus replaced by a cartography of aroma, as the night brings out a scent that overtakes the visual, arousing the bodies: La noche invade con su olor y todos quieren copular. El olor sabe arrancar las máscaras de la civilización,

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sabe que el hombre y la mujer se encontrarán sin falta en el platanal. ¡Musa paradisíaca, ampara a los amantes! (Piñera 2011: 42) [Night invades with its scent and everyone wants to copulate. That scent can tear away the masks of civilization, it knows that man and woman will surely meet beneath the plantains. Protect these lovers, Muse of Paradise!]

This scene of collective sensual coming together makes way for the poem’s final image, which situates the island’s people within its physical reality, one marked by various and entangled histories but not reducible to them: Bajo la lluvia, bajo el olor, bajo todo lo que es una realidad, un pueblo se hace y se deshace dejando los testimonios [. . .] un pueblo amanece junto a su bestia en la hora de partir, aullando en el mar, devorando frutas, sacrificando animales, siempre más abajo, hasta saber el peso de su isla, el peso de una isla en el amor de un pueblo (Piñera 2011: 43). [Beneath rain, beneath scent, beneath everything that is a reality, a people makes and unmakes itself leaving testimonies [. . .] a people stay next to their beast at the hour of departure, howling at the sea, devouring fruit, sacrificing animals, always lower, until they know the whole weight of their island; the weight of an island in its people’s love.]

The rain brings a physical awareness of the “cielo” not as the transcendental heaven but as the phenomenological situation of the human body in the physical cosmos, underscored in the following lines: “happily we do not carry the sky in the mass of our blood / we only feel its physical reality / communicated by the rain as it strikes our heads.” The rain here connects the sky with the island and the bodies that populate it, bringing it all into a continuous and interconnected web rather than situating humans outside of or separate from natural elements. The poem presents a cacophony of sensorial elements and embeds human bodies, especially copulating ones, within this symphony, rejecting the elevation of the intellectual and spiritual over the corporeal and thus articulating the nation in its final verse not through any transcendental narrative but as the weight of its physical reality, “the weight of an island”. Piñera’s presentation of Cuba embraces the notion of tropicality as an atmosphere that affects and sensualizes human and nonhuman bodies, making them permeable to one another. His foregrounding of the inextricability of human life and culture from the tropical climate eschews both essentializing tropes of tropicality and reified images of civilization to offer a vision of the nation more grounded in its cultural but also physical reality. In this way, his poem not only responds to dominant (Europeanizing) discourses of Cubanidad but also offers a poetics for inhabiting a

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world of climate change in which the dreaded effects of the tropics (i.e. the reversal of forces between ‘man’ and ‘nature’) are becoming a reality in ever more extensive parts of the globe.

Works Cited Araripe Júnior, Tristão de Alencar. “Estilo tropical: a fórmula do naturalismo brasileiro” [1888]. Sopro 83 (janeiro de 2013). http://culturaebarbarie.org/sopro/arquivo/araripe.html#.Y_6QurTMKvA (February 2023). Arnold, David. The Problem of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1996. Casid, Jill. Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Coccia, Emanuele. The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. De Alba, Francisco Fernández. “Cosmopolitan Postnationalists.” Postnational Perspectives on Contemporary Hispanic Literature. Eds. Heike Scharm and Natalia Matta-Jara. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2017. 171–186. Dugatkin, Lee Alan. “Buffon, Jefferson and the Theory of New World Degeneracy.” Evolution: Education and Outreach 12.15 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-019-0107-0. Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste, and Fabien Locher. Les révoltes du ciel: une histoire du changement climatique, XVE– XXE siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2022. Freyre, Gilberto. Novo mundo nos trópicos. São Paulo: Global Editora, 2015. Murari, L. “O Espirito Da Terra: A Teoria Da Cultura Brasileira De Araripe Jr.” Luso-Brazilian Review 44.1 (2007): 20–44. Piñera, Virgilio. La isla en peso / The Whole Island. Trans. Mark Weiss. Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2010. ——. Órbita De Virgilio Piñera. Ed. David Leyva. Havana: Ediciones Unión, 2011. Pinzón, Felipe Martínez. Una cultura de invernadero. Pittsburgh: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2016. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. London: Routledge, 1992. Pratt, Mary Louise. Planetary Longings. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. Román Medina, Giselle. La insólita tropicalidad de la poesía argentina: Enrique Molina, Néstor Perlongher y Washington Cucurto. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Schneuer, María José. “Reseña de Sylvia Dümmer Scheel, Sin tropicalismos ni exageraciones. La construcción de la imagen de Chile para la Exposición Iberoamericana de Sevilla en 1929.” Historia 47.1 (2014): 207–259. Stengers, Isabelle, and Andrew Goffey. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015.

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Contagion Brazilian artist Vivian Caccuri’s multimedia installation Mosquito Shrine (2018), first exhibited at the III Kochi-Muziris Biennial in Kochi, Kerala, India, presents both a reflection on the centrality of multispecies contagion in the colonial history of Latin America and the recreation, through both traditional craft and high technology, of a space of embodied coexistence of humans and mosquitoes. The installation includes a large embroidery made on mosquito netting depicting the entanglement of humans and mosquitoes in the physical, historical, and political environments of Latin America (Figure 1). The images of Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes in the contexts of wars of independence, plantation systems, and sexual tourism allude to crucial debates on contagion and colonialism, such as the relationship between extractive capitalism and mosquito-borne epidemics, and the role played by disease-carrying mosquitoes in the history and politics of empire.1 In one particularly evocative scene on the embroidery for Mosquito Shrine II (2020) womanized and sexualized mosquitoes drink a red beverage from wine glasses amidst signs alluding to brothels in the tropics (Figure 2). The figures are reproductions from the anti-malaria animated cartoon “It’s Murder She Says” (1945), part of the Private Snafu series produced by Warner Brothers for the US Army during World War II. The short film opens with maps tracing regions in the Global South where an “outcast” who “had lived life to the full [. . .] left a trail of broken men.” The maps are followed by a tracking shot through a region of tropical vegetation that leads to the main character’s “hideout.” In an empty cabaret-like space, a mature and decadent mosquito-prostitute named Anopheles Annie—a reference to the female Anopheles annularis,2 a common malaria vector in South Asia—talks about her good old days (Figure 3). “It’s Murder She Says” establishes a connection between mosquitoes, women, and contagion that is not unprecedented in public health campaigns aimed at US troops. Historian Warwick Anderson uncovered, for example, that early-twentiethcentury STD prevention campaigns in the Philippines referred to local women as  One of the main references for Caccuri’s work is J. R. McNeill’s Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (2010). McNeill traces how European colonial exploitation, through deforestation and the plantation agro-systems, changed ecologies in the Greater Caribbean, and how the effect of ecological changes in malaria and yellow fever epidemics shaped the fates of empire and revolution. Following McNeill, Caccuri nettings include images of both Anopheles mosquitoes, which are vectors of malaria, and of Aedes, which transmit viruses such as yellow fever, as well as dengue fever, chinkungunya, and Zika. Running the risk of glossing over the differences in the ecologies of these two genera of mosquitoes, I will follow Caccuri’s choice to emphasize the presence of both Aedes and Anopheles in the Latin American historical imagination.  The natural history of malaria involves cyclical infection of humans and female Anopheles mosquitoes with parasitic protozoans (a type of unicellular microorganism) of the genus Plasmodium. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-007

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Figure 1: Vivian Caccuri, Mosquito net for Mosquito Shrine. III Kochi-Muziris Biennial, Kerala, India, 2018.

Figure 2: Vivian Caccuri, Detail of Mosquito Shrine II, 2020.

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Figure 3: Frames from It’s Murder She Says. Animated film, Warner Bros, 1945.

mosquitoes, dangerously thirsty to exchange bodily fluids with unsuspecting soldiers and settlers. 3 Referencing this twentieth-century imperial archive, the embroidered mosquito-women on Caccuri’s nets shed light on the gendered and racialized imperial anxiety regarding contagion in tropical environments. But the mosquito nets are not simply a canvas for the visual reproduction of this archive. Instead, they allude to the spatial techniques of separation that both contain and make visible the intimate coexistence between species and peoples. Scholars who work on multispecies relations that involve “awkward creatures” (Ginn et al. 2014) that bother and sting, fascinate and repulse, have challenged often romanticized views of multispecies relations (Lorimer 2014; Latimer 2013; Reis-Castro 2021; Kelly and Lezaun 2014). Similarly, Caccuri’s nettings remind us that mosquitoes demand that we go beyond a focus on entanglement to address forms of coexistence that include both killing and care, separation and connection, and above all, the differential vulnerability that makes togetherness dangerous (Ginn et al. 2014: 113). Contagion sheds light on those unwanted entanglements, which involve “becoming with” (Haraway 2008), in the sense that “we” do not exist outside our being-with others, as well as developing technologies to disentangle, keep afar, kill, and survive. Because it unmakes borders (of the body, the house, the nation) and exposes vulnerability, contagion both influences the practices, movements, and rhythms of our everyday lives and lies at the center of national and global politics of empire. Through the nets in Mosquito Shrine we can see both the mosquitoes with whom we share our households and many shapes that these insects have taken in our historical imagination. Hence, as both visual display and contagion management device—both picture and handmade artifact—Caccuri’s embroidery weaves together a larger historical framework on multispecies contagion with the embodied experience of those who dwell in shared mosquito-human environments. The embroidered mosquito net is but one of the ways in which Caccuri’s Mosquito Shrine presents an embodied aesthetic of contagion that challenges scalability (Tsing 2017: 37–43) through the interaction of local and global infrastructures and experiences. The installation also includes a sound system playing both the buzzing of real  See also Fedunkiw (2003) and Meerwijk (2019).

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female mosquitoes of several genera as recorded by entomologists and synthesized female Aedes aegypti frequencies.4 Identifying herself as primarily a sound artist, Caccuri is interested in the physiological and cultural conditionings of sensory perception.5 But Mosquito Shrine also de-centers the human body: along with the female buzzing, a sculpture composed of UV lights aims at attracting mosquitoes to the gallery, turning the exhibition room itself into a continuation of the city (Figure 4). In interviews about this work, Caccuri recounts that her initial interest in mosquitoes was triggered by a German curator’s panic over the risk of contracting malaria, which she witnessed when she participated in an exhibition in Nigeria.6 The curator’s efforts to contain his contact with mosquitoes was, according to the artist, reflective of his broader detachment from local life, culture, and ecology. In contrast, Caccuri’s attempts to de-insulate the exhibition space make contagion not only a theme of Mosquito Shrine but its aesthetics.

Figure 4: Vivian Caccuri, Mosquito Shrine. III Kochi-Muziris Biennial, Kerala, India, 2018.

 Aedes aegypti is the vector of diseases such as urban yellow fever, dengue, chinkungunya, and Zika. It is only the female Aedes that bites humans in order to acquire protein and iron for their oviposit.  See last chapter of Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media (2010) for an insightful analysis of other feminist media art that recreates insect sounds through technology. For an approach of sound art, science, and the environment, see also Joanna Page’s Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art, in particular her chapters on the Interspecifics collective’s experiments with bioelectrical activity of microorganisms (2021: 165–170).  The anecdote, which she narrated to me in person, is also recounted in this video: https://www.delfi nafoundation.com/platform/delfina-presents-vivian-caccuri/ (04 Apr 2023).

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In this article, I place Caccuri’s installation in the context of recent scholarly debates on the multispecies aesthetic and politics of contagion. By undoing scalar distinctions and historic, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries, contagion has become an area of interest among artists as well as scholars working at the intersections of new materialisms, science and technology studies (STS), critical studies of empire, and environmental humanities. This essay examines the contributions of an emergent feminist politics and aesthetics of multispecies entanglements to these debates. Instead of the most common critique of top-down measures and discourses of disease control, I argue for a feminist concept of contagion that takes into consideration the ongoing, intimate, embodied, and risky coexistence of people, technology, and mosquitoes in the precarious, human-transformed environments where mosquito-borne epidemics thrive. Without romanticizing multispecies worlds, a feminist politics and aesthetics of contagion brings together theories of reproduction and of material entanglements to account for embodied life-making activities, forms of knowledge and care, as well as patterns of movement and perception that emerge from risky relations. An increasing interest in the concept of contagion in the field of culture was in part driven by the social, political, and moral climate induced by the recrudescence of infectious diseases since the late twentieth century, including HIV/AIDS, and, more recently, SARS, Ebola, Zika, and, of course, COVID-19. In a seminal work on the topic, Sontag pointed out that the term “contagion” was used as a moralizing metaphor to refer to bodies that were deemed abject and was applied also to noncontagious diseases like cancer. Recent scholarship on the topic, however, has mostly departed from Sontag’s emphasis on demystifying the metaphorical use of the term. Arguing that contagion itself unsettles the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, recent studies of contagion have instead challenged the separation between language and matter, and biology and culture.7 A number of highly interdisciplinary, transnational, and transhistorical collections and monographs devoted to the subject have done the groundwork of studying the moral, medical, and political responses to events—from disease outbreaks to mass behavior—that are seen as contagious.8 As Nixon and Servitje suggested, the focus lies often on how these events, described as disruptions to social and biological status quo, trigger never-fully-accomplished dreams of hygienic containment (2016: 2). Works analyzing the relationship between biological contagion and colonial and class anxieties about social  These discussions have taken place under the so-called new materialist umbrella, which includes prominent scholars like Haraway, Latour, Barad, and Alaimo. For an overview of the central role of feminist thought in the development of new materialisms see Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekmam’s Material Feminisms (2008).  Most notably, see Bashford and Hooker’s seminal collection Contagion, which brings together history of science and cultural studies; Nixon and Servitje’s Endemic, which focuses on the endemicity of the contagion paradigm to conceptualize cultural phenomena; and the most recent Transforming Contagion, edited by Fahs et al. (2018), which brings together works in the humanities and social sciences. On the contemporary narratives on “the next pandemic,” see Wald (2008) and Lynteris (2020). For an approach of contagion through queer and disability studies see Fritsch and McGuire (2018).

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contamination by the “other” have also reclaimed contagion as a critical tool with which to examine “some of the central assumptions about the individuated ‘human’ self who must be protected from the animalized ‘others’ and otherized ‘animals’” (Woo 2016: 192).9 Recognizing this inseparable symbolic and biological dimensions of contagion, scholars of Latin America have scrutinized the role of measures for disease control in the biopolitics of empire and stressed racialized fears of contagion in the context of military, economic, and territorial expansion.10 The fields of Latin American literature and cultural studies have offered important contributions to thinking through the relationships between medical discourses, modernization, and cultural formations and aesthetic experimentation in the region.11 Focusing on the development of the field of tropical medicine, some of the aforementioned works contribute to the topic of multispecies contagion that lies at the core of imperial and national politics of disease and vector control in the region. But it was in the field of environmental history that the history of Latin America has been reframed through the lens of multispecies relations and contagion, such as in J. R. McNeill’s seminal Mosquito Empires (2010). The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has highlighted the relevance and actuality of such studies, exposing the ongoing racialized responses to contagion, questions of health inequality, and multispecies relations. But the current pandemic has also exposed the shortcomings of some of our theoretical apparata to critique the biopolitics of disease control,12 demanding that we take into consideration the frictions of local and global infrastructures and politics.13 Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented scholarly attention to the different effects of politics of disease control on women and people of diverse gender identities, including gender-based violence within households and increased burden of unpaid care work (Fisseha 2021). While Latin Americanist scholars in the humanities have examined extensively practices and discourses of medicine and hygiene and their role in the biopolitics of

 See also Tsing (2017) for a productive approach on contamination and the indeterminacy of encounters that generate mutual worlds that transform us.  For accounts of the imperialist politics of tropical medicine see Stepan (2002; 2011); Espinosa (2009); Anderson (2006); Cueto and Palmer (2015). It is also important to stress the vast contribution of the field of cultural history and history of medicine in Latin America in studying the relationships between disease control, modernization, and the state (Chalhoub 2017; Armus 2003; Löwy 2006; Carter 2012; Cueto 2017; Hochman 2016; Sevcenko 2018).  Some book-length studies in the fields of literature and cultural studies have done important work in examining the intersection between the cultural and medical languages and practices in topics such as national fictions (Nouzeilles 2000), jungle narratives (Rogers 2012), and sexuality (Guerrero 2014). Several articles have focused specifically on the relationship between the avant garde aesthetics and contagion (Martínez-Pinzón 2014; Botelho and Lima 2019; Kunigami 2020).  For a critique of the early interpretations of COVID-19 by continental philosophers see Segato (2020); and Mitropoulos (2021).  As a way of example, see Cueto et al.’s (2022) study on India’s and Brazil’s opposing measures of disease control as both necropolitical policies.

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colonization and nation-building, there is much important work yet to be done on the workings and meanings of contagion in local knowledge, stories, and aesthetics. Thinking with Vivian Caccuri’s Mosquito Shrine and feminist writings on more-than-human relations, reproduction, and mosquito-human contagion, I follow some stories of humans and mosquitos in Latin America, and more particularly Brazil, to argue that a politics and aesthetics of contagion emerges in relation to—but is never completely subsumed by—the always incomplete and unequal promise of hygienic containment. Following the track of mosquitoes, the first section of this essay traces some of the debates on contagion and the politics of empire in Latin America, while the second focuses on feminist approaches to the gendered work of caring for Aedes aegypti-human relations, especially in the aftermath of the 2015 Zika epidemic. While necessarily traversed by both national and transnational networks of extractive industry, hygiene campaigns, medical interventions, and activism, this feminist politics of contagion emphasizes local knowledges and embodied realities.14

Germs, Eradicationism, and the Politics of Empire Contagion refers, etymologically, to touch, togetherness. Because contagion is about transformation through contact, it poses both social and ontological questions concerning the understanding of who “we” are both in biological and social terms, as well as at the individual and collective levels. In other words, contagion puts into question the borders on which are based the very ideas of a proper body or a national body. Although uses of the term “contagion” have changed throughout history, its current uses cannot be separated from the so-called microbiological revolution of the late nineteenth century, when contagion acquired its connotations of invasion, the unmaking of borders and of excessive,15 uncontrolled replication. Germ theories of disease not only placed the management of multispecies contagion at the core of imperialist practices and politics, some of which are still in place today, but also provided much of the current language we use to talk about the political body, social interactions, and cultural and technological phenomena. The reverse is also true: epidemiological language and narratives are themselves cultural texts traversed by sociological theories, literature, journalism, and film (Wald 2008; Bashford and Hooker 2001; Nixon and Servitje 2016).

 Via concepts such as “friction” (Tsing 2017), “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016), and “transcorporeality” (Alaimo 2010), feminist scholars have been advocating for the need to navigate global phenomena, scientific discourses and practices, and universal timelines without losing site of local, messy, material, multispecies entanglements in the context of uneven histories of environmental destruction. At the same time, recent scholarship on social reproduction has highlighted the “macrological (not merely micrological and bodily) registers” of processes of reproduction (Murphy 2017: 24).  On the relationship between excess and disease see Guerrero and Bouzaglo (2009).

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Until the late nineteenth century, Western discourses on health understood bodies as porous entities that were in constant interaction with the environment—an environment, in historian Linda Nash’s words, “that retained a complex agency of its own” (Nash 2006: 18). Environments could be the cause or the cure for a disease, and health was commonly referred to as a state of balance between the body and the surrounding world (Nash 2006: 12). In the context of the European colonial project, the tropical environment was largely constructed as inhospitable to the white body and European “civilization” (Stepan 2002). The source of moral laxity, lethargy, and an excessive sexuality that could lead to promiscuous miscegenation, tropical environments were viewed not only as a threat to the health of white settler bodies but as a threat to whiteness itself. Even if not all bodies were seen as equally porous to the environment—white women’s bodies, like those of Indigenous peoples, were understood as relatively more permeable than those of white men—understanding the environment’s interactions with the white body was key to “produc[ing] able-bodied and unambiguously white children” (Nash 2006: 42). In Jungle Fever, Charlotte Rogers demonstrates the ways that vulnerable bodies of settlers, travelers, and explorers continued to be the focus of literary narratives of degeneration and disease in the tropics well into the twentieth century. Even in the field of public health, as Nash has convincingly argued, this earlier “environmental medicine” did not disappear with the rise of microbiology but continued to inform local narratives and practices. My aim here is not to contribute to the extensive body of work on the continuities and discontinuities in the history of medicine, but to suggest that germ theories of disease and of vector transmission introduced a new perspective—even if they did not replace an old one—on the relationships between human bodies and the environment that had important repercussions on imperial enterprises and extractive practices in Latin America. The discovery that microorganisms caused diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, and, equally important, new theories concerning mosquito-vector transmission of disease, renewed hopes that “the tropics” could finally be conquered by white men. This hope was summarized in 1912 by US doctor Carl Lovelace, who worked as the medical chief of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway construction site in Porto Velho, Brazil: Amazonas e Matto Grosso constituem um Eldorado prodigiosamente rico, aguardando proxima conquista. O phantasma da enfermidade e da morte inherente aos climas tropicaes, desappareceu, pois agora sabemos que as molestias das regiões equatoriaes não são devidas ao calor ou humidade, e sim a parasitas ora dominados pela intelligencia humana. Amazonas and Mato Grosso constitute an impressively rich El Dorado, waiting to be conquered. The ghosts of disease and death inherent to the tropical climates have disappeared because now we know that the maladies of equatorial regions are not due to heat or humidity, but are instead caused by parasites presently mastered by human intelligence (Lovelace 1912: 331).16

 Translations for all texts not published in English are mine.

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While Lovelace is referring primarily to malaria falciparum, which is caused by the plasmodium falciparum parasite and was the main cause of death in the MadeiraMamoré region, he generalizes this framework to all the “maladies of equatorial regions.” What Ed Cohen refers to as the “parasite paradigm” that frames all contagious diseases, including those that are caused by other pathogens such as viruses, is formulated here through an extractive logic: Humans are extracted from the broader domain of biosocial life, represented as a self-contained species. Complementarily, humans can extract elements from their environment, separating them into usable resources or disposable entities. As extraneous bodies, pathogens are isolated with the use of a microscope and the vectors that carry them, such as mosquitoes, are cast as “epidemic villains” (Meerwijk 2019) that should be exterminated. If “human intelligence,” with the help of the microscope, revealed what Brazilian writer Monteiro Lobato called in 1918 “a microsociety of invisible bellicose dwarfs transforming our bodies in an ongoing battlefield” (Lobato 2010: 25), the early-twentieth-century hygienic ideal was conceived as the warlike enterprise of disentangling our bodies from other species that can penetrate or inhabit us, such as insects and parasites.17 As historians of science have argued, theories of vectorial transmission gave rise to the idea that diseases could be eradicated through the eradication of species (Stepan 2011; Löwy 2006; Benchimol 1999). Although not indigenous to the Americas and brought to the continent by the European conquest, through the routes of the slave trade, the “war” on yellow fever and the deadly form of malaria falciparum, became instrumental for justifying militarized imperialist interventions in the region. The tiny insects that embodied contagiousness by rendering futile virtually all attempts to isolate contaminated human bodies, while insidious, also appeared, in Löwy’s words, as the “weak link” (2006: 14) that could be eliminated from the cycle of transmission. Focusing on the history of yellow fever control in Brazil, Löwy explains that eradicating the mosquito seemed a more economically attractive and hopefully permanent solution than quarantining people and goods. Extermination became the goal of highly successful early-twentieth-century public health campaigns, often conducted like military operations in US-occupied Cuba or the Panama Canal Zone, as well as in cities like Rio de Janeiro (Chalhoub 2017; Stepan 2011; Löwy 2006). As I have argued elsewhere (Sá Carvalho, 2023), this focus on vectors and microbes did not imply, however, a moving away from racialized fears of contagion. Rather, microscopic bodies themselves became, in Neel Ahuja’s words, “the very matter of racial

 Although recent developments in the fields of immunology and virology, as well as new modes of pharmaceutical intervention have contributed to a production of “the human” that challenges species fix boundaries (Cohen 2011; Ahuja 2016; Lorimer 2016; Haraway 2017), the association of contagion with specific geographical sites, the language of war to refer to the fight against microorganisms, and the use of spatial techniques such as quarantine, social isolation, and eradication are not over, as we can see in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic and, as I argue in this article, with Aedes aegypti-borne diseases such as dengue and Zika.

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differentiation” (Ahuja 2016: 5), as certain populations were associated with a dangerous proximity to the non-human and an irrational resistance to modernizing public health measures.18 This relocation of racialization to the inside of the body is particularly clear in Lobato’s work. In 1918, the writer, who had previously described the Brazilian “caboclos” (mixed-race peasants) as indolent and unproductive—as parasites of the land—celebrated the sanitarians and their microscopes for revealing that the caboclos were themselves, in fact, occupied by parasites. Lobato’s emphasis on contamination by parasites not only implies, as Lima and Hochman argued, a new temporality of assimilation through the possibility of reforming the sertão dweller through sanitary interventions, but it also constructs the subject of such hygienist interventions as undisciplined, ignorant, and dangerously intimate with the non-human. The most crucial element to Lobato seems to be the unwillingness, or incapacity, of the caboclos to see contamination as a “vital problem,” as they, in Lobato’s words, “affectionately shelter in their midst the infernal fauna” (Lobato 2010: 30).19 In Wald’s analysis of “outbreak narratives,” she suggests that recent epidemiological narratives continue to plot the routes of disease from spaces where human beings live in close proximity to animals to the airports and cities of the modern global village, “proclaiming the danger of putting the past in (geographical) proximity to the present” (Wald 2008: 7). This formula reappears, for example, in the recent attempts to locate the origin of COVID-19 in the Wuhan wet markets. Such temporal rendering of the trajectories of contagion would, according to Wald, allow outbreak narratives to propose modernization as a promised solution, thus effacing the ways in which processes of modernization are themselves related to disease outbreaks as well as to the unequal distribution of disease among the global population. Going back to Dr Lovelace’s extractive dreams, we can appreciate how the discovery of germs and vectors of contagion is presented as an opportunity to disentangle humans from nature and transform the environment through infrastructure work and resource extraction. What is absent from such view is the ways in which human-made changes to the environment, labor exploitation, and global inequality affect vector ecologies and the outbreak of epidemics. Even when environmental degradation is present in contemporary discourses on contagious diseases, such as in the case of discourses linking global warming to the threat of mosquito migration from the South to the Global North, a racialized rhetoric still pervades discussions on vector control, border control, and “invasive species” (Beisel and Wergin 2021).

 See also Warwick (2006).  For a more developed version of this argument, see Sá Carvalho (forthcoming).

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Gendered Intimacies If yellow fever and malaria lie at the heart of the development of tropical medicine in Latin America, Zika, another mosquito-borne disease, has recently put the region back into the global public health spotlight. In 2015, the year before Caccuri started her research on mosquitoes, Brazilian health professionals and researchers in one of the poorest regions of the country announced findings that made headlines around the world:20 A new epidemic of Zika, a virus first identified in the 1950s, was linked to an increase in births of infants with microcephaly. Zika’s vector, the mosquito Aedes aegypti, is an old acquaintance of Brazilians, responsible for the cyclical epidemic of dengue in the country over the past forty years. The Zika prevention campaign was thus based on already established guidelines targeting Aedes aegypti (Corrêa Matta et al. 2019; Lopes and Reis-Castro 2019), such as the identification of breeding sites in residences and the recommendation to use insect repellents, now with focus on women, who were also advised to postpone pregnancy during the outbreak. Even though studies published as early as 2015 recognized that Zika could be transmitted in other ways, including sexual intercourse, the campaign focused on the elimination of mosquitoes from human environments and on women’s responsibility for avoiding both contact with mosquitoes and pregnancy.21 In this context, scholars and activists emphasized that the public health crisis was gendered, inextricably linked to issues such as the access to sexual and reproductive health, gender-based violence, and the burden of caregiving responsibilities (Diniz 2021; Johnson 2017; Nading and Lowe 2018), and criticized public health campaigns for reproducing long-established language depicting mosquitoes as “epidemic villains” (Corrêa Matta et al. 2019; Lopes and Reis-Castro 2019). When the Zika epidemic broke out, a new biopolitical technology being tested in Brazil promised to change this history of human-mosquito relations. Great quantities of genetically modified (GM) male Aedes aegypti carrying a transgene that could prevent mosquito offspring from reaching adulthood were released into the environment. In order to promote collaboration among the local population, Oxitec, the company responsible for the engineering of what they branded in Portuguese Aedes do bem (the good Aedes), produced videos teaching people how to care for their new companions. In one of these videos, a soft-spoken woman identified as a “managing director” of Oxitec Brasil sits in an intimate setting and talks straight to the viewers while holding a well-designed box containing Aedes do bem.22 The so-called Caixa do bem, which bears the inscription “Eles são seguros e não picam” (They are safe and don’t sting), resembles the packaging of an environmentally friendly hygienic product for the household. The managing director explains that the GM mosquitoes can find  For a feminist account of the 2015 Zika epidemic and the role of Brazilian patients and caregivers, see Diniz (2021).  For a lengthier discussion of Zika transmission and gender, see Reis-Castro and Nogueira (2020).  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm-2DJAgMTU.

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the most hidden breeding spots, which are beyond human reach, thereby weaponizing the (now tamed) insects’ own capabilities for human benefit.23 Bringing up questions of care and reproduction, discourses surrounding the 2015 Zika outbreak and those transgenic mosquitoes take us back to Caccuri’s Mosquito Shrine and serve to introduce the contribution of feminist scholarship focused on reproductive labor in rethinking the meaning of contagion.24 Caccuri’s mosquito nets not only display, through the mosquito-as-prostitute figures, a residual fear of women and non-human animal sexuality, they also recreate a human-mosquito intimacy that sheds light on the gendered world-making activities in the precarious environments where mosquito-borne epidemics tend to be cyclical. Even though Caccuri herself does not make any gender-specific claims regarding the embroidery, the hand-stitched mosquito nets remind us of the work of caring for a potentially contagious household. This gendered housecare labor has been the focus of anti-mosquito campaigns even before Zika. Although Aedes aegypti ecologies are intimately related to larger questions of city infrastructure and public services,25 public health campaigns have for decades put the onus of disease control onto households, and particularly on women, to identify and eliminate mosquito breeding sites (Figure 5). This gendered work has been studied in ethnographic monographs such as Alex M. Nading’s work on Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, in which Nading suggests the existence of an “ecological aesthetic,” a pleasurable engagement with mosquito-human lifeworlds. The gendered housemaking observed by Nading emphasizes patterns of connections instead of purely hygienic separation. I contend that Caccuri’s Mosquito Shrine does something similar. The artist’s work of studying mosquito patterns, synthetizing mosquito sounds, and embroidering mosquito nets amplifies this contagious aesthetic of the tropical household without either romanticizing or vilifying mosquito-human relations. Living with, or in Joanna Latimer’s expression, “being alongside”26 mosquitoes involves attuning to different  See Parikka (2010) for a media studies approach to the relationship between insect capabilities and technology.  Along with the feminist responses to the Zika crisis, Mosquito Shrine weaves together debates that lie at the core of both historical materialist feminisms, and their focus on reproductive labor, and feminist new materialisms’ emphasis on changing, unstable material entanglements. I am paraphrasing here Elizabeth Wingrove’s essay “Materialisms” for the The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, which examines these two theorizations of the material that have informed feminist approaches to the conditions of material, embodied realities. Relevant to this dialogue is Michelle Murphy’s concept of “distributed reproduction,” which highlights the centrality of built infrastructures, chemical substances, environmental conditions, and nonhuman actors to reproduction theory (Murphy 2017).  Aedes aegypti are known by entomologists as an anthropophilic, urban mosquito, whose ecology is closely related to the social inequalities of modern cities. See biologist and anthropologist Tulio Maia for a “more-than-vector approach” to mosquitoes, which takes cities ecological stressors as key in the narratives and experiences of disease.  In dialogue with Marilyn Strathern’s notion of “partial relations,” Joanna Latimer coined the expression “being alongside” to emphasize the never-complete series of attachments and detachments that make up the always relational character of dwelling. While the biological, ecological, and political

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Figure 5: Frame from Campanha Nacional do Combate à Dengue. Ministério da Saúde, 2015.

patterns of movement, temporality, and rhythms. Moreover, Caccuri’s works deinsulates and de-individualizes these mosquito-human environments, by connecting them to larger questions such as urban infrastructure and environmental degradation. The visible thread of cables connected to both the stacked concrete speakers and the UV lights that is supposed to attract mosquitoes to the room evokes an urban energy infrastructure common in poorer urban centers throughout the Global South,27 where Aedes aegypti thrive. In a related work entitled “Água Parada” (Still Water), a reference to the well-known fact that female Aedes aegypti tend to lay their eggs in relatively clean still water, Caccuri creates a sensorial environment through technologies of human-mosquito “disentanglement” (Kelly and Lezaun 2014) that make up the everyday life in dengue-endemic cities, such as the fumacê (mosquito fogging). Through its combination of materials and media, Caccuri reminds us that mosquito-contagion sheds light on the frictions between local and global infrastructures, bodies, and forms of knowledge. Similarly, feminist STS anthropologists have studied the use of biotechnologies of vector control that involves temporarily increasing contact between humans and mosquitoes, such as Oxitec’s Aedes do bem, through both embodied experiences, larger histories of mosquito-human relations, and biopolitical focus on reproduction. As

histories of mosquito-human contagion bring forth what Donna Haraway called “becoming with,” which challenges the human as an undivided, self-contained figure, Latimer emphasis on partial connections and disconnections is a productive way to conceptualize the everyday activities and technologies of care and separation, connection and detachment, in mosquito-human households.  Caccuri has worked with stacked speakers before in works that explore the Brazilian baile funk aesthetics.

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Reis-Castro notes, scientists involved in such experiments hope “to turn mosquitoes— framed as ‘enemies’ of humans—into an odd kind of ‘ally’” (2021: 324). From a feminist STS perspective these works call attention to new forms of multispecies management and affect (O’Connor 2020; Reis-Castro 2021). They approach biotechnology not as human mastery over insect life, but as an interference that generates potential relations, differentiations, and affectation.28 Focusing on a key aspect of the program, that of human interference on mosquito reproductive life, another video produced by Oxitec, this one in English, brings up gendered anxieties related to contagion that the hygienic approach to the Caixa do bem tries to avoid. Harkening back to Anopheles Annie from Warner Brothers, an evil, selfcentered female mosquito wearing high heels and pink makeup talks about how she will do anything to reproduce, no matter if she is transmitting deadly diseases, while a smaller, emasculated male specimen is presented as irrelevant and deprived of will (Figure 6). The female mosquito here is the agent of a double emasculation—of both the male mosquito and of humans, whom she penetrates to fulfill her own purposes. The female then goes on to make fun of previous human attempts to get rid of mosquitoes until a voiceover describes Oxitec’s new GM mosquitoes. The female mosquito ridicules the new project, affirming that she will never be fooled into mating with transgenic mosquitoes. As she flies off the scene, the (until then) insignificant male Ade winks at the camera, establishing his complicity with the human species; together, they will finally be able to contain the insatiable and contagious female.

Figure 6: Frame from Haedes & Aegypta e a abordagem da Oxitec, 2013. Online video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHYADWpNidc (04 Apr 2023).

 For a discussion of biotechnologies of mosquito control and their effects on multispecies relations, see also Segata (2019); Beisel and Boëte (2013).

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By explaining that it has engineered under laboratory conditions modified male mosquitoes that will be attractive to female mosquitoes, Oxitec’s video reminds us that in the age of Zika, the entangled sexual lives and reproductive health of humans and mosquitoes renew old stereotypes and anxieties. The company offers the promise that human control over the sexual lives of Aedes aegypti will guarantee human selfcontainment as well as capacity to reproduce healthy bodies.29 If not in practice, at least in discourse, the idea is that the Aedes do bem will end up sterilizing the entire species, referring back to older hopes of mosquito eradication. Along with such optimism, technological interference in mosquito DNA has generated fearful speculations of what GM mosquitoes can end up doing to human bodies. As with other experiments in genetic engineering, fears surrounding human interference in other species’ lives mirror fears that these non-human others will then turn against “us.” This also in turn induces fears predicated on a deep-seated anxiety about the plasticity and permeability of species themselves, of the possibility of losing control of supposedly welldefined borders between self and other. While both traditional anti-mosquito campaigns and Oxitec’s promotional videos focus on strategies to cut off mosquitoes reproductive capabilities and on a disentangling of humans and mosquitoes, a feminist perspective on the politics of contagion pivots towards forms of life in and care for risky, contagious multispecies environments. Latin American arts, history, and environmental and critical studies, having already contributed to the study of medical discourses and their relationship to varied cultural texts and aesthetic movements, are particularly well positioned to add to this debate. To think about contagion in the field of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics involves shedding light on how different artistic expressions have put forth a contagious aesthetics that do not romanticize multispecies coexistence, or simply oppose hygienic processes and logics, but that recognize the entanglements between contagion and a larger history of empire, capitalist extraction, and exploitation of the value and labor from racialized, gendered, and non-human subjects.

Works Cited Ahuja, Neel. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan J. Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

 For critical approaches to the ableist, gendered, and racialized narratives of contagion as a threat to the reproducibility of abled citizens in the context of Zika, see Day (2018); Oikkonen (2017); and Amarillo (2017).

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Javier Uriarte

Desert It can be said that the figure of the desert adequately encapsulates the ever-growing landscapes of devastation, abandonment, and precariousness that currently proliferate in Latin American cultural production.1 These contemporary deserts are the result of specific forms of understanding the relationship between nature and the human, and between the human and the more-than-human world, that have been recurrent throughout the history of the region since—at least—the post-Independence period. The desert-producing practices of monoculture, as well as the carbon imaginary, constitute two key forms of the extractive logic that has reconfigured Latin American ecologies over recent decades. They represent forms of late-capitalist extractivist reason, and its understanding of nature, which are increasingly pervasive in the region. However, this logic is not new. Today, we witness new powerful and destructive reconfigurations of elements that have characterized the environmental aesthetics of Latin America in the last two centuries. This article will suggest that the desert has been a recurrent way of approaching nature and of proposing ecologies of domination and devastation since the nineteenth century. It argues for a necessary historization of the relationship between forms of imagining geography and nature, and extractive logics of production. The notion of the desert has proved productive to think the nation-state from the point of view of the landscape: understanding modernity through images of barren and inhospitable lands has been a key element of Latin American political and aesthetic imaginaries. Deserts have always been a creation: an invention of imagination in the post-Independence period, a result of systematic statesponsored campaigns of extermination toward the end of the nineteenth century, or the product of the devastation of lands through monoculture production. In a way, the foundational deserts created by intellectuals such as Argentines Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Esteban Echeverría are the very same deserts created by monoculture today. As Axel Pérez Trujillo Diniz has affirmed in his recent Imagining the Plains of Latin America, “The establishment of large transgenic soy monoculture in the Argentine Pampas is dialectically bound to the dominant metaphor of these grasslands as a desert” (Perez Trujillo 2022: 11). The history of the Latin American ecological imagination is, then, one of successive desertifications. Creating voids, lifeless environments has been the preoccupation of the lettered elites first, and, more recently, of the capitalist and industrial elites. This chapter also seeks to show how several of the desert imaginaries have in common—sometimes contradictorily enough—the absence of labor. If the classical image of the desert is that of a space that lacks labor (among

 I thank the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study for having given me the time and resources to work on this article. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-008

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other things), the contemporary logics of monoculture imply forms of relating to crops that need less and less concrete bodily labor: it is also in this sense that these fields are deserts. The richness of the notion also implies that it is a slippery and complex one: there is arguably no clear-cut definition of the desert and, above all, its connotations change according to the political, geographical, and ecological context. Given the innumerable ways in which the desert has been understood, this essay does not aim to point to all of its uses or meanings, but to study some of them, particularly those that can prove illuminating for thinking about the relation between human beings and the environment.2 First, I discuss some of the ideas suggested by the use of this notion in the first half of the nineteenth century, and then I focus on the way the desert adopted new meanings in contexts of war during the process of state consolidation in the final decades of that century. This discussion will illuminate the analysis of twentieth and twenty-first century works and show how the desert is today, once again, a powerful image for critically approaching Latin American environmental aesthetics, now transformed under the deadly logic of extractivism and monocrops. In examining the various forms of desertifications in contemporary Latin American cultures, I take into account the work of historians Gastón R. Gordillo and Kregg Hetherington, who have explored the effects of the soy boom in northern Argentina and Paraguay respectively, demonstrating how this logic affects soils, labor regimes, political systems, landscapes, and environments. From a different perspective, in her book Geontologies, Elizabeth Povinelli has emphasized the relationship between the figure of the Desert and relations between life and non-life that govern what she calls late liberalism. The Desert is typically associated with lifelessness, but within the imaginary of carbon and oil, it can be thought of as a site where things are infused with life again. The chapter will show how these approaches to contemporary desert-making logics can be related to historical operations that go in the same directions. Let us begin with an assertion that may not be entirely obvious: in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, the desert did not necessarily refer, in the language of writers and statemen, to a dry or arid land, characterized by sand and barely populated, as we would assume today. The desert was not primarily a geographical term, but a cultural, political, or ideological one. Historian Brian DeLay, in War of a Thousand Deserts, has studied the way in which the desert appears as a category in the context of the nineteenth-century Indian Wars and the Mexican-American

 I will focus on some specific geographies, namely the Argentine pampas, the Brazilian sertão, and Paraguay. However, the imaginary of the desert is crucial to understanding other environments, such as the US-Mexico border (and the Northern region of Mexico in general). The Atacama Desert has also been central to specific imaginaries of war, conquest, forced disappearance, migration, and extractivism, and it occupies a pivotal role in contemporary environmental aesthetics. The concepts of frontier and border have historically been central to the imaginary of the desert in Latin America, and these are two clear cases in point.

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War. He explains how the desert was understood by his nineteenth-century sources: “the term referred not to aridity, but to emptiness, silence, fruitlessness, desolation, to the absence of industry and improvement and of human mastery over nature” (2008: xvi–xvii). The point is that it is difficult—and perhaps even useless—to distinguish the literal—that is, the specifically geographical descriptions—from the metaphorical or ideological when referring to the desert. Povinelli makes a similar argument, proposing the Desert as one of the figures of late-liberalism, making clear that “the Desert does not refer in any literal way to the ecosystem that, for lack of water, is hostile to life” (Povinelli 2016: 17). In much of Latin America, the desert has been understood as a primordial solitude, an elemental void. This trope was used repeatedly, first by foreign travelers and later by Latin American intellectuals; it was a construction, a necessary fiction for the establishment of nations. This idea of America as a tabula rasa in which history was always about to begin, as a virgin space waiting for projects to be brought to fruition in it, was a constant in the literature on the continent from the so-called discovery until the first half of the nineteenth century. Considered from this perspective, the term has many elements in common with the notion of “wilderness,” foundational in the US territorial imagination and identity. In this sense, “desert” refers to a vast piece of land from which labor, the law, the state, and modern institutions are absent.3 Thus, the desert would be defined by lack, by absence, by what there is not in it. It is not only understood as a legal void, but also as an epistemic one: a place that is unknowable or even resists the penetration of colonizing men and their logic of exploitation, and, more importantly, their ways of generating knowledge and understanding the relationships between humans and the environment. That is why, on many occasions, the desert is a place where the technologies of seeing that the traveler brings with him turn out to be useless: it is a space that resists the very act of seeing (understood as observation, knowledge, and as an act of possession). In the case of Argentina, this way of conceptualizing the desert was clear in the writings of two of the most influential nineteenth-century intellectuals: Esteban Echeverría (1805–1851) and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–1888), who described the pampas as a desert. The opening pages of their works in the first half of the century present an ominous, alien, and menacing nature. In its very first stanza, Echeverría’s long epic poem “La cautiva” (The Captive Woman) (1837) describes the “desert” as incommensurable, open, and mysterious, insisting on the fact that the land is “sad” and

 I thank my colleague Niall Binns for pointing out the importance of the connotation of vastness in the uses of the notion of wilderness. In fact, it seems to be an idea far more connected to the territorial imagination of the Americas than to that of Europe. It is necessary to highlight the role of labor (or its lack) in this context, as labor constitutes one of the key elements in the separation between nature and culture, which is so essential for the Western understanding of space. The wilderness (and the desert) is the space that has not been modified by labor, that is not part of a (modern, Western) system of production.

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“taciturn,” presumably due to the absence of civilized man (Echeverría 1991: 62). In addition to this state of abandonment (the notion of unexploited natural resources clearly contributes to this state), the second stanza insists on the fact that the desert is a place where the gaze gets lost, where all sense of orientation disappears: the limitless horizon prevents the eyes from resting on a given point. The desert is thus the primordial landscape: it is the place of beginnings, the reign of untamed nature, the Latin American wilderness. The famous first lines of Sarmiento’s Facundo describe a menacing vastness that he conceives of as haunting the nation. This fictional, hyperbolic, and enormously influential description, which insists on the immensity of the landscape and its lack of population, on the impossibility of distinguishing the horizon from the earth due to a “vaporous” atmosphere, could be an example of what Yi-Fu Tuan characterizes as “landscapes of fear”: the fear of unknown spaces that is instilled by powerful discourses, for example images projected by states or state institutions in general.4 Here, natural resources are wasted as they “await”—another preferred fiction of colonizing discourse—civilized man to make them productive. Sarmiento also emphasizes the impossibility of finding one’s way in the desert: nothing can be seen. This insistence on resistance to observation, contemplation, or mere sight is telling, as it emphasizes the alien nature of this environment, in epistemological terms as well: it is not only resistant to capital, but also to modern Western science and knowledge.5 In this sense, the desert is a place that transforms the practice of travel, as it imposes on the traveler new forms of relating to the environment and traversing space: it is easy to get lost there. This is why the word “desert” has been used to make reference to spaces that are phytogeographically different from one another, such as the pampas and the Amazon rainforest. This could be surprising, for it is difficult to imagine something more different from a desert than the tropical forest. The expression can nonetheless be found in nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts about this region. The best-known example could be José Eustasio Rivera’s 1924 classic novel La vorágine (The Vortex), in which the term is not only used to describe the forest, but also the Colombian llanos, or plains. The novel could be read, in fact, as a trip from one desert to another, since both the llanos and the jungle were construed as uncivilized and dangerous by the Colombian elites.6 However, after the protagonist Arturo

 In more general terms, Tuan refers to the desert as one of those landscapes that generates anxiety as it is the opposite of home: “Beyond the home base is a threatening and confusing world: this may be forest, bush country, or desert” (Tuan 2013: 21).  It is not possible to overstate the pervasiveness of this notion in Argentina’s nineteenth-century cultural production. Some influential critical approaches to it are Halperin Donghi (1980), Montaldo (1993), Andermann (2000), and Rodríguez (2010).  In Colombia, the territorial imagination of the elites attributed ideas of backwardness and absence of civilization to the places that were not the Andes highlands, where, incidentally, Bogotá, where these white men lived, was located. The opposition between the tierras frías and the tierras calientes

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Cova ventures into the jungle, he begins to construct the plains as a synecdoche of the fatherland, as a national space, while the Amazon becomes the real desert, completely alien to laws and to the state. While in the llanos Cova insists that he wants to be back in Bogotá, but once in the Amazon, the llanos become the reassuring place to where he longs to return. This progressive shift in the term’s actual referent makes clear its subjective, relative, or even fictional character. If the notion of deserts has been associated with spatial elements, the ways of imagining them have also implied temporal connotations: the desert is the past.7 A past into which desires and projects of futurity—those of the lettered and governing elites—are deposited. Connected to this is the fact that the supposed void never in fact existed: the term was a fiction that created an empty space, since, as we know, people, cultures, and other life forms abounded in those regions; in many cases, cultures that had—and defended—other forms of conceiving of relations between human beings and the environment, displacements, and logics of production and labor. The operation carried out by the term “desert,” then, was twofold: it erased cultural manifestations and ways of dealing with the world that characterized the inhabitants of those places, on the one hand, and on the other hand, it legitimized their colonization and transformation on behalf of the state. The desert was that place which, since it was conceived of as a threat to civilization, and since it was represented as containing valuable natural resources, was doomed to disappear.8 In the second half of the nineteenth century, across much of Latin America, the project of doing away with the desert was accomplished through war. However, the result of this process was not progress, but another desert: not a fictional or ideological one, but a concrete and tragic new void. The word “desert” originates in the Latin participle desertus, derived from the verb deserere (to abandon, to desert), and which means abandoned, alone, empty. So, the desert, in its very etymology, was not always there. The participle implies the connotation of an outcome or a conclusion, which is lost in the noun form. The desert is, properly speaking, a place that was made desert. The transformation of the arid or wild desert into a productive space first requires the transformation of the desert into the deserted. It is the concretization of what has previously been an expression of desire. Upon that void, which after war became objective and indisputable, the process of modernization and consolidation of national states could be carried out. The desert, in the second half of the nineteenth century,

was key, as climate was a key component of civilizing discourse. On this issue, see Martínez-Pinzón. It could be said that in Colombia the notion of desert is close to that of tierra caliente.  Anne McClintock’s notion of “anachronistic space” could prove useful here. This is a typical element of the rhetoric of empire, which conceives of travel as a movement not just in space but also in time: “Geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time” (McClintock 1994: 40).  This is also true of the Brazilian sertão, which will be discussed below. Haruf Salen Espindola defines it as “a landscape built to be extinguished” (quoted in Saramago 2021: 37).

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ceased to be a metaphor or image and took on a tragic, absolute character. The ideas of modernization, order, and progress hide the true destructive nature of the process: the desert is the void that results from war.9 Deserts have not been constructed solely through discourse, imagination, or war, though. At least since the beginning of the twentieth century, writers have expressed awareness of the ways in which landscapes are turned into deserts through destructive forms of production and land management. In his best-known work Os sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands) (1902), the Brazilian intellectual Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909) already points, with great lucidity, to modern civilization’s active capacity for destruction: Esquecemo-nos, todavia, de um agente geológico notável—o homem. Este, de fato, não raro reage brutalmente sobre a terra e entre nós, nomeadamente, assumiu, em todo o decorrer da História, o papel de um terrível fazedor de desertos (Da Cunha 2001: 138). [There is one notable geologic agent that we have overlooked: man. The truth is, man has not infrequently exerted a brutal reaction upon the earth and has assumed, throughout the long course of our history, the role of a terrible maker-of-deserts] (Da Cunha 1944: 43).10

This idea, which appeared first in Euclides’s 1901 article “Fazedores de desertos” (Desert Makers), turns out to be a constant presence in his descriptions of barren lands as spaces that result from the destructive agricultural practices of modernity. In fact, these images of newly created spaces of devastation also appear in his essays about the Amazon, where he refers to the rubber tappers as “construtores de ruínas” (Da Cunha 1909: 99) (“builders of ruins”, Da Cunha 1944: 55) a notion that has recently reappeared in contemporary writings on the same region, such as by the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and the journalist and activist Eliane Brum. In Os sertões there is already an eloquent and consistent equivalence between the imaginary of the desert and that of the ruin, as both are new results of violent—frequently man-made—processes of destruction related to exploitation and extractivism.11 This affinity between the  Much of this section of the article is based on my book The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America (2020), where I make this argument discussing—from the perspective of travel narratives—four conflicts which made clear the closeness between the idea of progress and the violent erasure of spaces considered as resistant and the cultures and systems of production inhabiting them.  In recent years, scholars have turned to the study of Euclides’s environmental thought and aesthetics. See for example, Anderson (2008) and Nielson (2022).  See the following quotation from Os sertões, referring to the devastation caused by modern man on the land, where the equivalence becomes clear: “Atacou a fundo a terra, escarificando-a nas explorações a céu aberto; esterilizou-a com os lastros das grupiaras; feriu-a a pontaços de alvião; degradou-a correndo-a com as águas selvagens das torrentes; e deixou, aqui, ali, em toda a parte, para sempre estéreis [. . .] as grandes catas, vazias e tristonhas, com a sua feição sugestiva de imensas cidades mortas, derruídas . . .” (Da Cunha 2001: 140). [He attacked the earth stoutly, disfiguring it with his surface explorations, rendering it sterile with his dredges, scarring it with the point of his pickax, precipitating the process of erosion by running through it streams of water from the wild torrents.

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image of the desert and that of the ruin is of course not limited to the work of Euclides: it not only preceded him, but has also survived to our present, in which the desert is seen as yet another form of the barren, abandoned, or devastated environments that characterize late capitalism. In his book about the image of the desert in literature and philosophy, Aidan Tynan affirms that “The various deserts, wastelands, junkscapes and depopulated zones that our culture so often fascinates itself with constitute the environmental aesthetics of an uneven planetary expansion that devastates the Earth in order to fashion it anew [. . .] An obsession of the landscape of ruins begins in the landscape painting of the seventeenth century and carries through to Robert Smithson’s photographs of the waste spaces of New Jersey in the 1960s” (Tynan 2020: 9).12 The Brazilian sertão has had an outsized influence on the country’s cultural imaginary.13 The exact origin of the Portuguese word “sertão” is obscure, but one theory is that it derives from the word “desertão”, that is, a large desert (Antônio Filho 2011: 85). The first meaning in the Aurélio Dictionary is that of a wild region, distant from urban centers or cultivated lands (Ferreira 2004: 1837).14 Similar to the Hispanic American “desierto,” this notion also appears to be characterized by an association with rural areas and, significantly, with a lack of physical labor. Nísia Trindade Lima studies the uses of the term in Brazilian social science discourse, and refers to “the conservative character, resistant to change, that has historically been attributed to the term sertão” (Trinidade Lima 1999: 23). In fact, most of the connotations of the idea of the desert are present in “sertão”: in both cases, rather than designate specific geographical elements (or a concrete region), these are relational terms that designate faraway lands that are unknown, mysterious, and unconquered or uncivilized.15 The image of climate refugees that has become so visible in our current environmental state of emergency, has a long tradition in Brazil, where millions of people,

And he left behind him, here, there, and everywhere, great melancholy and deserted catas, tracts forever sterile now, . . . which bore the suggestive appearance of enormous dead cities, crumbled in ruins] (Da Cunha 1944: 44). The quotation is also a good example of Euclides’s style, full of chaotic enumerations and long, meandering and frequently twisted sentences.  Tynan’s book, while very useful, refers only to so-called Western culture, and does not engage with Latin America. For example, in Sarmiento’s Facundo, the descriptions of the desert make the narrator think of Oriental ruins. The mention of ruins is one of the various strategies used in Facundo to construct the Argentine pampas as a completely foreign space, as on many occasions the text compares the region to an exotic Arabian desert.  Spatial notions have had a significant role in debates regarding national identity and political projects (and not only in Brazil). Regarding the importance of spatial imagination in the long and rich tradition of Brazilian social thought, see Maia (2008).  The second and third meanings identify the sertão with the forest and the lack of population.  For example, the canonical Brazilian romantic novel Inocência [Innocence] (1872), by the Viscount of Taunay, insistently refers to the region in the Western part of the country, close to the border with Paraguay, using the term “sertão”. In any case, this is an old word: “sertão” was already used by Portuguese travelers in Africa and America to designate territories that had not yet been colonized. In this respect, see Saramago (2014).

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known as retirantes, have been forced to leave their homes and lands expelled by terrible droughts. This occurred with more intensity toward the end of the nineteenth century (this is discussed, of course, in Os sertões) and, in the first half of the following one, and was the main topic of two of Brazil’s most canonical novels: O quinze [The year 1915] (1930), by Rachel de Queiroz, and Vidas secas [Barren Lives], published in 1938 by Graciliano Ramos. The image of families of poor sertanejos (backlanders) wandering desperately through lands where nothing—in terms of food or drink— could be found was a powerful presence in the national imaginary, reverberating in other cultural manifestations. Between the years 1944–1945, the painter Cândido Portinari worked on a series he called “Retirantes,” in which he represents different scenes of suffering of these ruined bodies that traverse deserted landscapes. The 1963 film Vidas secas (Barren Lives), by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, based on Ramos’s novel, is a classic of Brazilian Cinema Novo in which these plights are again powerfully represented. Both in Ramos’s novel and Pereira dos Santos’s film, the characters’ loneliness and abandonment are not solely a consequence of the drought, but also of the exploitative work conditions imposed by landowners. The state does not only condone this situation but, through the figure of a corrupt, violent, and coward policeman, abuses its power sending the main character to jail without due process. Here, the desert is also man-made. These canonical works give a picture of the capacity of extreme weather conditions and deserted spaces to be an engine of cultural production. A final note about desertification in the Brazilian sertão: this is a process that has not stopped, and today it looks like the region is about to be turned into a desert in a more definitive way. An article published on December 3, 2021 in The New York Times explores the history of droughts in the region and explains that, currently, the almost irreversible process of desertification is also the consequence of human activity, mainly of deforestation and overfarming, activities that leave the soil parched, lifeless, and nearly devoid of nutrients, unable to support crops or even grass to feed livestock.16 But abandonment is not only the result of droughts and the absence of labor; it is also caused by capitalist expansion and the depletion of land’s capacity due to largescale plantations. This is precisely what has transformed the Argentine interior in recent decades, as the country has become one of the world’s top soybean producers. Gastón R. Gordillo studies the ruined landscapes caused by the expulsion of locals due to the appropriation of large tracts of land for planting soy in Argentina’s Chaco region. He explores processes of what he calls “destructive production” in the province of Salta and works with forms of the destruction of space that are “geared toward the production of new commodities and places” (Gordillo 2014: 52).17 The book also

 See Nicas (2021). Several Brazilian researchers are pointing to the same process. The process is largely parallel to what is currently going on in the Amazon. It is worth reiterating here the modernity of Euclides’s alarming descriptions more than 120 years ago.  In a sense, Gordillo is close to Euclides’s association between deserts and ruins, to the latter’s idea of newly generated ruins, although Gordillo prefers to use the notion of rubble, which lacks the

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explores how the fight to do away with the desert in the nineteenth century, which promised to bring a new era of stability, modernization, and a better quality of life, failed miserably: today, the Chaco is Argentina’s poorest region, in which a significant Indigenous population lives. These factors have contributed to making it become invisible and forgotten. These “nonwhite margins of the nation [. . .] have become ‘the desert’ of the twenty-first century: a spatial emptiness subjected to a new wave of civilizing conquest, led this time not by cavalry regiments but by bulldozers” (Gordillo 2014: 126). Despite being a relatively small country, Paraguay, located very close to the region investigated by Gordillo, is nonetheless the world’s sixth greatest soybean producer: it is easy to imagine how profoundly the pervasiveness of these crops has transformed the country’s rural landscape. The figure of the desert also has a long presence here, as its connotations have been transformed over time: from the nineteenth-century idea (which truly began with the Jesuit missions in the region) that the country was a mysterious and unknown land (an idea that was used as legitimization to attack it), to the utter devastation provoked by the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), to the contemporary ruination of the rural landscape generated by a soybean producing machine that practically controls the state. Before the war, the elites who ruled the allied nations saw Paraguay as an unknown, barbaric space—in a word, as a desert. After the war, what had been described as a void was effectively turned into one, as the country lost about sixty percent of its population, according to the most reliable estimates. This had devastating effects in the social tissue of the country. In the first years of the twentieth century, the lucid and passionate chronicles of Rafael Barrett (1876–1910), a Spanish anarchist intellectual who lived in Paraguay from 1904 almost until his death, made clear the ruinous state in which the country still found itself several decades after the end of the war. In his text “Hogares heridos” (Wounded homes), included in El dolor paraguayo (The Grief of Paraguay) (1909), the image of the ruin is used to describe the persistent devastation: El hogar paraguayo es una ruina que sangra: es un hogar sin padre. La guerra se llevó los padres y no los ha devuelto aún (Barret 1920: 84). [The Paraguayan home is a bleeding ruin, a fatherless home. The War took the fathers away and has not yet brought them back.]18

harmony, stability, and aesthetic value of the ruin. He argues that rubble indicates “the disintegration of recognizable forms,” while the ruin “is the attempt to conjure away the void of rubble and resulting vertigo it generates” (Gordillo 2014: 9–10).  This is a reference to the fact that, again according to the most consistent estimations, the country lost around ninety percent of its men in the years of the conflict. On the same page, postwar Paraguay is identified with a desert, as it is described as “el desolado desierto de la patria” [the desolate desert of the Fatherland].

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Similar to what Argentine intellectuals Canal Feijóo and Orestes Di Lullo would affirm some twenty years later, Barrett was a scathing critic of the exploitation of workers (in this case, in the yerba mate fields). He wrote a series of articles under the title “Lo que son los yerbales” (What the yerba fields really are, 1908), in which he denounces the system as a form of slavery, of debt peonage.19 In 2008, the journalist Luis Rojas Villagra published an article in the newspaper Correo Semanal, titled “Lo que son los sojales” (What the soybean fields really are), an obvious reference to Barrett, in which he expresses that “yerba became soy,” as more than 3 million hectares throughout the country were devoted to its cultivation at the time: the bodies of peasants that were exploited in the yerba fields have now been expelled to cities as their relationship with the land represents an obstacle for the mechanized cultivation of soy; again, new modern forces of production generate void territories (Rojas Villagra 2008: 10).20 Kregg Hetherington, in his recent book The Government of Beans, has shown that, in fact, local campesino organizations call the soybean fields “deserts.” And he explains: “The desert was not just devoid of life; it was somehow outside of legitimate political community” (Hetherington 2020: 43). In this sense, the use is similar to the nineteenth-century use of “desert,” as Hetherington explains that campesinos used it “to describe forests they believed had no legitimate owner” (Hetherington 2020: 230). Again, here the desert is conceived of as a margin, but in this case not precisely a geographical one (as soybeans are everywhere in Paraguay). In a way, the desert is once again—as it was for Echeverría and Sarmiento in nineteenth-century Argentina—that zone where state power and laws are absent. However, in this case it is because the state has willingly retreated, not taking responsibility for protecting workers’ rights, for example, and leaving the soybean fields at the mercy of the laws and logic of capital. If the idea that soy fields are lifeless has to do with mechanization and its consequence, forced migration, as Rojas Villagra (2008) and Jorge Contrera (2017) explain, Hetherington complicates this idea. While genetically modified beans, as well as the overuse of chemicals and pesticides, are associated with lifelessness, he discusses what he calls the “agrarian neovitalism” related to soy: it looks like soy lives on its own, that it produces revenue automatically, independently from labor. This is an imaginary in which, following the ideas proposed by Povinelli regarding the carbon imaginary and the desert, life and non-life appear indistinguishable at times. Hetherington describes a system he calls “agrobiopolitics,” characterized by crop manipulation and toxicity that triggers this new labor regime of soy. The desert is again the place from where labor is absent.21

 For a detailed analysis of these denunciations in the context of the production of yerba as a commodity, see French (2022). For an analysis of the work of Di Lullo and Canal Feijóo, see Andermann (2018).  See also the somewhat more detailed blogpost, by Jorge Contrera (2017), with a very similar title: “Lo que son los sojales: La agonía de la agricultura familiar”.  “[C]ampesinos often called soy fields ‘deserts,’ not because there was nothing living there but because there were no people. The argument that genetically modified organisms are ‘unnatural’

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As alluded to above, Povinelli has proposed the term geontology (or geontopower) to give an idea of the power of these landscapes of lifelessness in late liberalism. In other words, for her the desert helps us understand how capital works today. Linking the idea of the desert to the imaginary of carbon, she discusses how the process of extraction is understood as bringing fossils to life again: the Desert “stands for all things perceived and conceived as denuded of life—and, by implication, all things that could, with the correct deployment of technological expertise or proper stewardship, be (re)made hospitable to life” (Povinelli 2016: 4). This is not new, as in the nineteenth century the desert was already understood as the place that contained fossils from other times, and the discourse of science as that which could bring those pieces of the past to life again. In the writings of Argentine explorer and traveler Francisco Pascasio Moreno, that is precisely what the modern museum could achieve. While traversing Patagonia, he states: Esta inmensa tumba que conserva un mundo que la erosión desentierra y revela al feliz observador, guarda los vestigios de la vida de miles de años. He investigado sus ruinas, he recorrido sus paredes y al menor indicio las he atacado batiéndolas con el martillo y el pico; y entre esa árida soledad he encontrado la animación de las épocas perdidas, ¡han resucitado a mi vista los extinguidos vertebrados de los tiempos de la aurora del terciario! (Moreno 2003: 321) [This immense tomb, which contains a world that erosion unearths and reveals to the lucky observer, conserves traces of life from thousands of years ago. I have investigated its ruins, I have explored its walls, and at the slightest indication I have assaulted them, striking them with hammer and pickax; and amid that arid solitude I have found the spirit of lost eras—the extinct vertebrates from the dawn of the Tertiary Period have been resurrected to my sight!]

We can sense here how the power of science could resurrect dead ruins, infuse them with life, in this case by locating them within a national discourse of progress, in which they would still be a recovered past.22 In the case of Povinelli, this “life” is that of capital, suggested by the intense flux of merchandise and energy involved in these forms of extraction. But this is at the cost of forced displacements, desertification of the land, elimination or marginalization of all forms of life. In fact, Povinelli’s idea of geontology is based on the late liberal indistinction between life and death: or, we could add, between, for example, the “life” of oil and the death (or dispossession, displacement) of local populations. An additional example of this in Patagonia occurred after the Conquest of the Desert, as the landscape did not become the projected space with bustling cities and busy mobility of people and goods. Instead, Patagonia was

operates on a similar vitalist premise: the machinic quality of engineered plants stirs anxieties around the decline not just of nature but of work itself as a privileged way of producing value” (Hetherington 2020: 106). And, of course, the notion of a laborless space is attached to the idea of the desert already in its nineteenth-century uses, as the DeLay quotation above shows.  For an analysis of much more violent forms of extractive desertification in contemporary Argentina, see Nieva (2020).

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populated . . . by sheep. Alberto Harambour has proposed the concept of “ovine sovereignty,” as he explains how states managed to advance through the “desert” thanks to the introduction of millions of sheep in a few years. He shows how the state and global capital transformed the landscape through the imposition of ranches. In Tierra del Fuego, this colonization through sheep implied the eradication of indigenous sovereignty, the displacement of the Aonikenk and the genocide of the Selknam, as the supposedly empty territory was transformed into “cattle territory” (2019: 185). Thus, this process implied the imposition of “a mode of knowing the grasslands of the Americas that ignores the local knowledge” of the bioregion (Trujillo Diniz 2022: 7). An additional consequence of this process has been another desertification, as the enormous number of sheep contributed to erosion and to the disappearance of native vegetation in the region, a degradation of soils and of vegetation.23 One powerful example of this imaginary in contemporary literature is the novel Carvão Animal (Animal Coal), by Ana Paula Maia (2011) in which issues of labor, coal extraction, and coal production appear in dialogue, in the midst of a devastated and impoverished landscape. The protagonists of the novel are two brothers: one works as a firefighter and the other works at a crematorium; both of them, in a way, work with carbonized human bodies. These remains end up being used as energy or fertilizers. The novel includes (deadly) scenes of coal extraction as well, and thus the impoverished, barren, and devastated society appears to exist between moments that describe the extraction of energy from the land, and others when this energy is given back in the form of carbonized human remains. The town of Abalurdes, where the story takes place, is a contemporary figuration of the desert: A impossibilidade de os raios de sol atravessarem tanto a camada de fuligem que cobre o teto da cidade quanto as nuvens carregadas transforma Abalurdes num lugar desolador. Uma espécie de deserto de cinzas; com o céu pesado, formado por blocos de nuvem que aparenta [sic] concreto. [. . .] Ao largo do horizonte, em qualquer direção que se olhe, existe uma sensação de infinito, como se aquela vastidão desoladora se estendesse até os limites possíveis do entendimento de cada cidadão (Maia 2011: 94). [The fact that the rays of the sun cannot traverse the soot layer that covers the city’s roof, nor the heavy clouds, turns Abalurdes into a devastating place. Some sort of desert of ashes; with its heavy sky, made of blocks of clouds that look like concrete. [. . .] All along the horizon, no matter where one looks, an impression of the infinite exists, as if that desolate vastness extended all the way to the possible limits of the understanding of each citizen.]

The quotation repeats some of the images of the classic first chapter of Sarmiento’s Facundo, alluded to above. This is a different space of death: the devastation is seen in the hopelessness of innumerable carbonized corpses which are the result of marginalized

 Regarding studies of desertification in Patagonia, see “Desertificación y ovinos en la Patagonia: estado de la cuestión”, by Gatti, Hilson Foot and Stryjek. In Tierra del Fuego, the number of sheep went from 7,000 in 1895 to 843,339 in 1930 (Harambour 2019: 95).

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forms of labor. This is a region that produces coal, where the river is dead, where fish and waters are polluted (Maia 2011: 70), and where electric energy no longer exists. Furthermore, the text explicitly compares a coal mine to a desert (Maia 2011: 74).24 This is a place where life and non-life seem to exist together, where life comes from lifeless forms, and where death can produce new life forms. O calor dos mortos ajuda a suprir parte da energia usada tanto no crematório quanto no hospital que fica a um quilômetro daqui [. . .] Os mortos do hospital, principalmente os indigentes, são cremados no Colina dos Anjos e seu calor transformado em energia para abastecer os vivos. Os vivos de Abalurdes sabem aproveitar bem os seus mortos (Maia 2011: 69). [The heat from the dead helps to supply part of the energy used both in the crematorium and in the hospital that is one kilometer away from here [. . .] The dead from the hospital, mainly the poor, are cremated at the Colonia dos Anjos and their heat is transformed into energy for the living. In Abalurdes, the living know how to take advantage of their dead.]

So, the desert that Maia builds in Carvão animal is a space where death is everywhere, even becoming indistinguishable from life, even insufflating things with life. From Povinelli’s perspective, “A Desert is where a series of entities have withdrawn care for the kinds of entities humans are and thus has made humans into another form of existence: bone, mummy, ash, soil” (Povinelli 2016: 28). Perhaps with the exception of the mummy, the enumeration can illuminate the forms of life and energy that appear in the Abalurdes’s desert. The bones of people that become charcoal or ashes, the ways in which the ashes of people are mixed with vegetal carbon, the idea that once turned into carbon, humans and animals are indistinguishable. Also, coal and ashes are used as forms of energy or as nutrients for the land or for certain animals. In this way the novel constructs a space where nature is dead, and life can only come from inanimate or already dead entities: Quando os solos são contaminados e os rios poluídos, a cidade jaz na esterilidade. Mas os habitantes de Abalurdes valem-se da natureza morta do carvão para subsistirem. [. . .] A vida é o carvão, mas que também é a morte (Maia 2011: 118). [When the soils are contaminated and the rivers are polluted, the city is in a state of sterility. However, the inhabitants of Abalurdes use the dead nature of carbon in order to survive. [. . .] Life is carbon, which is death too.]

Again, we have here an imaginary that reworks and complicates classical tropes of the desert, representing forms of labor that deal with lifelessness, as the carbon imaginary and its death-producing logics of extraction are what keep this depleted and devastated environment alive and working.

 The descriptions that suggest a desert-like landscape continue: “Grande parte do solo é improdutiva: de aspecto ressequido e sem cor. A água potável para o consumo está se extinguindo” (Maia 2011: 71) [Much of the soil is not productive: it has a dry and colorless look. Drinking water is extinguishing].

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Works Cited Andermann, Jens. Mapas de poder. Una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2000. ——. Tierras en trance: Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje. Santiago de Chile: metales pesados, 2018. Anderson, Mark. “From Natural to National Disasters: Drought and the Brazilian Subject in Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões.” Hispania 91.3 (2008): 547–557. Antônio Filho, Fadel David. “Sobre a palavra ‘sertão’: Origens, significados e usos no Brasil (do ponto de vista da ciência geográfica).” Ciência Geográfica 15.1 (2011): 84–87. Barrett, Rafael. El dolor paraguayo. Lo que son los yerbales. Buenos Aires: La protesta, 1920. Contrera, Jorge. “Lo que son los sojales: La agonía de la agricultura familiar.” Nuestro Paraguay. Historias y algo más: El blog del Prof. Jorge Contrera. Jan 11, 2017. https://realidadparaguaya.blogspot.com/2017/ 01/lo-que-son-los-sojales.html (25 June 2022). Da Cunha, Euclides. À margem da história. Porto: Livraria Chandon, 1909. ——. Rebellion in the Backlands (Os sertões). Trans. Samuel Putnam. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1944. ——. Os sertões (Campanha de Canudos) [1902]. Ed. Leopoldo M. Bernucci. São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial, 2001. ——. Amazon: Land without History. Ed. Lúcia Sá. Trans. Ronald Souza. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. DeLay, Brian. War of a Thousand Deserts. Indian Raids and the US-Mexican War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Dos Santos, Nelson Pereira. Vidas secas [1963]. New Yorker Video, 2006. Echeverría, Esteban. “La cautiva”. Obras escogidas. Ed. Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1991. 61–121. Ferreira, Aurélio Buarque de Holanda. Novo dicionário Aurélio da língua portuguesa. 3rd ed. Curitiba: Positivo, 2004. French, Jennifer. “Yerba”. Latin American Literature in Transition 1870–1930. Eds. Fernando Degiovanni and Javier Uriarte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 89–102. Gatti, Ignacio, Roberto Hilson Foot, and Leandro Stryjek. “Desertificación y ovinos en la Patagonia: estado de la cuestión.” Estudios patagónicos. https://www.estudiospatagonicos.com.ar/informes/desertifica cion_ovejas.htm (accessed March 9, 2023). Gordillo, Gastón R. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Halperin Donghi, Tulio. “Una nación para el desierto argentino” [1980]. Proyecto y construcción de una nación (1846–1880). Ed. Tulio Halperín Donghi. Buenos Aires: Ariel/Espasa Calpe, 1995. 7–107. Harambour, Alberto. Soberanías fronterizas: Estados y capital en la colonización de Patagonia (Argentina y Chile, 1830–1922). Valdivia: Universidad Austral de Chile, 2019. Hetherington, Kregg. The Government of Beans: Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. Lima, Nísia Trindade. Um sertão chamado Brasil: Intelectuais e representação geográfica da identidade nacional. Rio de Janeiro: IUPERJ/Editora Revan, 1999. Maia, Ana Paula. Carvão animal. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2011. Maia, João Marcelo Ehlert. A terra como invenção: O espaço no pensamento social brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2008. Martínez-Pinzón, Felipe. Una cultura de invernadero: trópico y civilización en Colombia. Madrid and Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2016. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, 1994. Montaldo, Graciela. De pronto, el campo: Literatura argentina y tradición rural. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1993. Moreno, Francisco P. Viaje a la Patagonia austral [1879]. Buenos Aires: El Elefante Blanco, 2003.

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Nicas, Jack. “A Slow-Motion Climate Disaster: The Spread of Barren Land”. The New York Times, Dec 3, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/world/americas/brazil-climate-change-barren-land.html (Feb 2, 2022). Nielson, Rex P. “‘Filhos do mesmo solo’: Euclides da Cunha’s Environmental Imagination.” Literature Beyond the Human: Post-Anthropocentric Brazil. Eds. Luca Bacchini and Victoria Saramago. New York: Routledge, 2022. 29–43. Nieva, Michel. “Un desierto para el Capitaloceno—escombros y fin del paisaje”. Badebec 10.19 (September 2020): 161–175. Pérez Trujillo Diniz, Axel. Imagining the Plains of Latin America. An Ecocritical Study. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Ramos, Graciliano. Vidas secas [1938]. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2013. Rivera, José Eustasio. La vorágine. Ed. Monsterrat Ordóñez. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1990. ——. The Vortex: A Novel. Trans. John Charles Chasteen. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Rodríguez, Fermín. Un desierto para la nación: La escritura del vacío. Buenos Aires: Eterna cadencia, 2010. Rojas Villagra, Luis. “Lo que son los sojales: Homenaje a Rafael Barrett”. Correo Semanal. Asunción, 21 June, 2008: 10. Saramago, Victoria. “Sertão dentro: The Backlands in Early Portuguese Writings”. Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 27 (2014): 254–272. ——. Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2021. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Facundo [1845]. Ed. Noé Jitrik. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, n.d. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Landscapes of Fear [1979]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Tynan, Aidan. The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Uriarte, Javier. The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America. New York: Routledge, 2020.

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Extinction In the life of species, extinction is the final stage of the evolutionary process. Before Darwin’s evolutionary theory, it was not “extinction” that was spoken of, but “species loss.” In Imagining Extinction, Ursula K. Heise indicates that in order for extinction to become part of the cultural horizons of modern societies, the discovery of geological time scales, the uncovering of prehistoric fossils, and the emergence of Darwinist theory in the 19th century were necessary (Heise 2016: 20). This entry seeks to reflect on extinction. What do we mean by extinction? What are its historical occurrences?1 How and why does it constitute an urgent issue in our contemporary moment? How do the arts and aesthetics imagine it in the Latin American context? We could say that extinction is a hyperobject, as defined by Timothy Morton (2019). Like climate change itself, the hyperobject refers to things that are massively distributed in time and space. They are characterized as viscous, non-local, and reference a temporality that is radically different from human temporality. That is why there is not a pure work or object that encompasses it in its totality. According to Morton, hyperobjects provoke irreductionist thinking, that is, they are presented to us as dilemmas that involve scale. This means that every decision that we make is, to a certain extent, related to hyperobjects. They are entities that become visible based on a statistically post-Hume and post-Kantian causality: a characteristic of phenomena, rather than of things in themselves. Extinction as a hyperobject encompasses a space and temporality that exceeds the human, with local and global examples that have developed over generations, but that have been accelerating recently. Their occurrence is due to a multiplicity of causes, both environmental and anthropogenic, the latter linked to our decisions, both individual and social, at varying scales.

 Over the course of the geological past, there have been five mass extinctions: the Ordovician period (440 million years ago), an extinction triggered by a climatic change that provoked an abrupt sea level fluctuation, causing the loss of 25% of families of existing species; the Devonian species (370 million years ago), an extinction caused by global warming and the loss of oxygen from seawater, in which 19% of families of existing families disappeared; the Permian period (250 million years ago), an extinction caused by a climatic change along with the movement of tectonic plates, which caused the loss of 54% of families of existing species; the Triassic period (210 million years ago), an extinction caused by volcanic activity and global warming, which led to the disappearance of 23% of families of existing species; and the Cretaceous period (65 million years ago), an extinction caused by the impact of a meteorite on earth’s crust, in which 17% of the families of existing species were lost, including the dinosaurs (Rodríguez Sousa 2018: 179–189). Note: Translated by Liz Mason-Deese. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-009

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In the contemporary moment, we are facing an acceleration of the disappearance of terrestrial species, which is why there is talk of “the sixth great mass extinction,” with an enormous impact on biodiversity. Antonio Rodríguez Sousa explains: While all the mass extinctions have been caused by natural causes, this sixth extinction has a biotic cause along with a physical cause, due to the influence of anthropic activity on species loss (Pievani 2014). In this sense, the main threats to biodiversity from human activity are: 1) Destruction and fragmentation of natural environments, which restricts the distribution of species’ geographic range (Atmar and Patterson 1993); 2) Over-exploitation of species, which leads to ecological impacts on the structure and functioning of the ecosystem (Rosser and Mainka 2002); 3) the introduction of exotic species that, if they become invasive, can displace native species (Gurevitch and Padilla 2004); 4) Climate change, whose impact can cause the disappearance of ecosystems, altering the distribution range of species (Pearson and Dawson 2003); and 5) Other factors such as human overpopulation, the spread of agriculture, and pollution (Rodriguez Sousa 2018: 181).

The anthropic activity to which Rodríguez Souza refers designates that generated by human activity, hence some geologists have proposed that the current geological era —the Holocene—has concluded, giving rise to a new era denominated the Anthropocene, in which humanity has become a geological force.2 In Facing Gaia, Bruno Latour argues that, in the Anthropocene, human power becomes comparable to the tectonic plates: humanity’s energy use is similar to the force of volcanoes and tsunamis, which are more violent, but over shorter time spans (Latour 2017). This new period of instability, in which the earth becomes sensitive to our actions, would be starting after eleven thousand years of relative stability. This radical transformation of the planet is no longer stated in a triumphal tone: it is no longer a matter of “dominating nature” as in 19th-century literature, organized under slogans of progress, such as Sarmiento’s “civilization or barbarism”3—but rather, the question of the catastrophic effects that this transformation could trigger for different forms of life in the present.

 Humanity is constituted as a determining agent for the transformation of living conditions in the planet, through the accumulation of carbon and methane in the atmosphere, mainly starting in the 18th century with the Industrial Revolution. The industrial origin of this transformative process has caused some to question how to best name this period. Jason Moore proposes the term “Capitalocene,” which designates a process of socioeconomic mutations that begins with the emergence of capitalism in the 16th century, which were merely intensified by the Industrial Revolution (Moore 2015). According to Donna Haraway, the incomplete concept of the Capitalocene questions the universalist humanism of the Anthropocene (Braidotti 2018: 80). The author proposes two new ways of naming the period: “Plantationcene” to refer to the radical transformation of farms, pastures, and forests in extractive plantations based on slave labor, and later, the “Chthulucene,” a term of feminist and speculative fabulation that mobilizes “the diverse tentacular powers and forces across the earth and from the things gathered in names such as Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa, emerges the aquatic fullness of Papa, Terra, Haniyasu-him, Woman-Spider, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven, A’akuluujjusi, and many, many more” (Haraway 2016: 18–19).  In this slogan, the pole of the term “barbarism” not only includes natural elements, but also nonwhite peoples and the whole set of political and existential forces that live on the margins of the city as the civilizational center par excellence.

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Under this new understanding of human agency, life in its diverse forms cannot be conceived as a passive element that develops in an environment constructed based on physical and geological processes over which we have no control, but rather, we must recognize that the biota has shaped the environment throughout time, in constant imbrication. In fact, the relation between the living and the environment is always one of interdependence. In this sense, it is revealing to think about the concept of metamorphosis, proposed by Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia: “if organisms come to define their identity thanks to the life of other living beings, this is because each living being lives already, at once, in the life of others” (Coccia 2019: 48). In The Life of Plants, Coccia indicates, from a philosophical point of view, that plants are the primordial soup of life on earth, as they enable material to become life through the process of photosynthesis. Thus, the whole world is presented as a type of mixture between different forms of life that, far from competition and reciprocal exclusion, enables coexistence and the fluid passage between the organic and the inorganic. This perspective dilutes the very possibility of extinction, because the transformations of the existing suppose a passage and transfer between entities as a form of presence and expanded permanence. Extinction, in this sense, would be a radical eruption or rupture, an impossible cut, that would break the fluid relations among all the existing.

Postnature, Metamorphosis, and Varieties of Environmentalism: The Limits of a Concept Modern and colonial human beings, and the forms of life they have developed in the West over the last two centuries, have put nature at risk, to the point that the very idea of nature that we have had since Romanticism has been critically transformed and some authors, such as Bruno Latour, now speak of “postnature.” This claim is not merely a nostalgic gesture, but also a powerful anchor for adopting a political posture and resistance (Heise 2016: 7) toward the present. For example, Latour takes the notion of “Gaia” from the scientist James Lovelock as a way of understanding the post (natural) as an actor-network, without limiting the capacity of agency merely to the human. Biodiversity often appears as a proxy for nature; sometimes, as a sign of something that we lost over the course of modernization or colonization, however, landscapes that European colonizers considered “savage” or “untouched by man,” had, in fact, been modified by Indigenous societies for thousands of years before Europeans’ arrival, through fires, plant cycles, flooding, etc. Even the Amazon was cultivated and domesticated. The difference lies in the respectful way in which those communities tended to face their environment.

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Thus, there is a diverse range of perspectives regarding nature-humans relation that has given rise to “varieties of environmentalist” (Alier and Guha 1997),4 some with a greater tendency to conservation in a more essentialist sense. While some specialists advocate for the importance of eradicating or reducing non-native species, others argue that it is impractical to attempt to restore ecosystems to a historically “correct” state, since transformation of the environment is inseparable from human history. The truth is that humans alter biodiversity not only by putting other species in danger, but also by creating new forms of biodiversity. This occurs through the use of fire, hunting, agriculture, horticulture, domestication, having pets, and the creation of medicine such as antibiotics, etc. Nor should all human interventions in nature be characterized as necessarily destroying biodiversity (for example, the creation of seed banks is a human initiative that contributes to species conservation5). In fact, thinking about extinction sometimes means confronting certain conceptual traps of thinking that human intervention only produces the disappearance of forms of life. Unlike what we might think, the appearance of new species is also a common occurrence. For example, in regards to insects, specialists can barely keep track of the new findings. And the speed of these discoveries comes from the same causes behind the loss of biodiversity: the spread of human populations in previously uninhabited areas or the appearance of new invasive species, sometimes inserted by human hand.6 Another issue that should be taken into account when thinking about extinction is the representativity granted to some species over others in conservation campaigns in the media. As Heise affirms, the forms of life most represented in these instances always tend to be animals, usually large mammals such as gorillas, tigers, bears, pandas, whales, and white rhinoceroses. Birds also receive attention, but reptiles, amphibians, and fish

 Joan Martínez Alier intersects ecology and economy as two interdependent variables and postulates an “ecologism of the poor” that resists the market, insofar as the latter undervalues future needs and does not take into account damages external to market transactions, such as environmental damages. Meanwhile, the social struggles of the poor to maintain the use of natural resources outside of the market economy are struggles for the conservation of nature, although no civilization—whether modern or traditional—will ever be ecologically innocent.  A recent Latin American film that addresses the issue of seeds is Sembradoras de vida (Peru 2019) by the brothers Álvaro y Diego Sarmiento, which premiered in the Berlin Film Festival.  We can see an example of the latter case in the documentary Los castores (Chile, 2014) by Nicolás Molina and Antonio Luco. The directors address the consequences of the introduction of twenty pairs of beavers, originally from Canada, in Tierra del Fuego, in the 1940s to encourage the skin industry, a project which was ultimately unsuccessful. Molina and Luco follow a pair of biologists on their field work, which includes the use of a nocturnal surveillance camera and weapons to exterminate invasive animals. The documentary establishes parallels between human life and that of the beavers, as species that destroy the environment to build their home, and reveals the record of the territory as affected by the construction of damns and beaver dams that cause droughts or floods of large areas of the native forest. The documentary’s dark humor, characteristic of its producer Francisco Hervé, reveals the quixotic work of the biologists, incapable of effectively confronting the impact of the destruction caused by the introduction of this species.

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are rarely mentioned; and plants receive almost no attention. Worms, crabs, fungi, and bacteria remain invisible, despite the fact that they occupy a privileged position in the food change and can help preserve a habitat. According to Heise, environmental mourning has been commodified in many ways, one of the most notorious of which is that less distinctive animals and the majority of plants do not count in the narrative format. While environmentalists have contributed with their critiques of the dominant narratives of social, economic, and technological progress, it is artists, writers, and film makers who have contributed to imagining the present and its possibilities in relation to diverse species. The web-memorial What is Missing? by artist Maya Lin (n.d.) brings together information, images, sounds, and memories about extinct species or those in the process of extinction. Something similar occurs with the interdisciplinary project Feral Atlas (2020) by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Saxena Keleman, and Feifei Zhou, in which histories, processes, and complex relations are established about feral forms of life in the Anthropocene. In the Latin American context, one interesting and persistent case of reflecting on forms of life and the current state of the environmental crisis is the work of Ana Vaz, a Brazilian filmmaker based in the United Kingdom. In her most recent work, Pseudosphynx (2020), she records the process of transformation and metamorphosis of a fire caterpillar becoming a butterfly. This work resists the format of a natural documentary by using experimental techniques, such as the strobe effect, a montage with rapid cuts and captions that are coupled to the rhythm of the music. The materiality of Vaz’s film combines image and thought, since the filmic materiality allows her to think about the very notion of species: the etymology of Pseudosphinx, as a variety of Brazilian caterpillarbutterfly that appears as a “sphinx” or divining monster, and as something artificial or deceitful, based on the prefix “pseudo.” Vaz, along with Tristan Bera, Nuno da Luz, Elida Hoëg and Clémence Seurat, is one of the co-founders of the COYOTE collective, a transdisciplinary group that works in the field of ecology, ethnology, and political science. In A Film, Reclaimed (2015), produced in collaboration with Tristan Bera, Vaz reflects on the Anthropocene and capitalist production, based on the consumption of fossil fuels. This bilingual film, in English and French, argues that slavery, racial and sexual discrimination were not considered crises until abolitionism, the civil rights movement and feminism made them into one, thus advocating collective organization and agency in the face of the Anthropocene. Through the use of captions and a sound montage with sounds of rain, which recalls the use of militant documentary of the Third Cinema of the 1970s, the film declares that nature is a construction, that there is no such thing as natural disasters, because we ourselves are part of nature. “The absence of a future has started,” they declare, while fixed images of the atomic bomb appear in the montage. The use of sequences taken from movies7 seems to be a

 Some of the film sources used include Fitzcarraldo (1982) by Werner Herzog, They Live (1988) by John Carpenter, Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott, A.I. (1999) by Stanley Kubrick and Steven

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situationist strategy, like that used by Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle, establishing connections between the Anthropocene, colonialism, and consumer capitalism. A Film Reclaimed calls for politicizing catastrophes and for us to change our form of life, since transformation is the only option. This must be carried out in alliance with other species, appealing to the ideas of authors such as Donna Haraway. Also along an experimental line, we find the work of the Mexican audiovisual collective Los Ingrávidos. In the short films Iguana (2021) and Lagarto (2021), they use a jazz musical improvisation as a base, while the avant-garde style montage plays with colors and textures, creating haptic surfaces that reference the creatures in risk of extinction which the films are named after, but which they never aspire to represent. In this sense, these short audiovisual pieces are not thought of as archives for documenting or informing about these forms of life in a traditional way, but rather as sensory, spectral, and performative interventions that erupt in cultural space. According to the collective’s spokesperson Davani Varillas, the group references the spectral from a political point of view (Derrida), based on disappearance in the Latin American context, for which an expansion toward the idea of disappearance—or extinction —of other forms of life would always have a political significance.

Ways of Imagining Extinction In Imagining Extinction, Heise argues that in the 1970s and 1980s, evolutionary scientists began emphasizing the historical importance of mass extinctions over gradual ones and this view generated awareness of the generalized catastrophe, which led to the appearance of the first works around the issue, both in the scientific context and cultural production. The cultural logic of discourses about extinction lies in their power to criticize or resist modernization and colonization, to the point that scientific arguments themselves are influenced by this logic (Heise 2016: 23). The dominant themes in works regarding the disappearance of forms of life are regret, mourning, and melancholy applied to genres such as tragedy and elegy. Comedy appears as an alternative model, which emphasizes contingency and improbable survival strategies (Heise 2016: 14). The most important—in the author’s opinion—is that these “narratives” do not appear as falsely inevitable, but rather as a possible history. In the Latin American context, the concern for ecology emerges at the same time as it does in the rest of the world. In Brazil, an early example of this ecocritical concern can be found in the short film from the 1970s by the Brazilian direct Leon Hirszman, Ecologia (1972). The film begins with of a montage of views of Amazonian landscapes filmed with wide angles and pans that show the jungle, mountains, and

Spielberg, and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, edited together with random images from National Geographic.

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enormous rivers, while the voice-over narrator recounts that human beings are part of the chain of relations between plants and animals. While the camera makes a tracking shot that records the assembly line of an automobile factory, the narrator warns that at the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th, an industrial revolution took place, which was accompanied by the appearance of millions of vehicles for the transportation of people and goods. Coal, petroleum, electricity, and uranium successively became the energy sources to expand the force of human labor. Industrial activity and agriculture involved the rapid consumption of energy and natural resources, producing environmental contamination in water (due to pollution), air (due to deforestation), and food (due to pesticides). The most paradigmatic image from the documentary shows the river’s waters covered with foam, a frame that adopts the standardized form of a framed view or landscape, accompanied by dissonant electronic music, which ruptures the sublime character of the representation. The natural (forest) or urban (cities and industries) territory is filmed from a zenithal or aerial perspective, indicating, at the same time, a change of scale and perspective. Thus the documentary signals that it is no longer about the 19thcentury notion of landscape, exhibited for a subject, whose placement is fixed by a camera position that replicates the hegemonic model of perspective as a form of representation; but rather a cartographic view in movement, that erases any reference to the particular point of view and the subject’s presence through its magnification of scale. Now it is about a non-human point of view, one that covers large territorial surfaces, only visible thanks to the technological mediation through two apparatuses of modernity: the camera and aerial transportation. These views account for a concern for the destruction of ecosystems, whose most radical consequence is the potential disappearance or extinction of species, embodied in the non-human point of view of the camera. In Marcos Loayza’s documentary tetralogy,8 Planeta Bolivia (2016), in contrast to Hirszman’s short film, we see that the change of scale is not gradual, but rather, we are presented with a non-human gaze from the beginning, accompanied by captions that replace the materiality of one voice (there is not a voice over narrator like in Ecologia). The use of drones and an aerial perspective signals the non-anthropocentric visibilization of places in the absence of the human, even the human voice. This, along with numerical data about the destruction of the environment contributed by the captions, would seem to be announcing the future extinction of the human species. Following Timothy Morton in Dark Ecologies, we could say that in the zenithal or aerial perspective, the subject/object dualism typical of romantic aesthetics would give rise to a notion of the environment (Morton 2019: 22) in which it is possible to conceive an “impossible point of view” of which all the others are equally (in)significant (2019: 80). The sublime image as a result of contamination reveals that garbage space—or junkspace (2019: 86)—that extractivist capitalism leaves in its ghostly

 A set of documentaries entitled “Tierra,” “Agua,” “Ciudades” and “Cambio climático.”

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passage toward progress, in a sort of waiting room to extinction or the destruction of biodiversity, the product of human action. As Claire Colebrook states in The Posthuman Glossary (Braidotti 2018), extinction is, at the same time, the most human and the most inhuman of concepts, because it prefigures the end of humanity combined with the end of the world: “The thought of human extinction, in turn, entails the sense of ‘us’ as a species: while the preliminary mourning and panic that accompanies the thought of human extinction indicate a fetishised and supreme self-regard which is brought to the fore [. . .]” (2018: 153). This threat of possible human extinction as a consequence of the Anthropocene is repeated in apocalyptic narratives that begin emerging in the contemporary context, with global examples such as Lars von Trier’s Melancholy (2011) or Adam Mckay’s Don’t Look Up (2021), one tragic and another comic way of thinking about the end of the species. In the Latin American context, the threat of human disappearance is perceived not as a spatial change or one entailing a planetary scale, but rather as an effect on the perception of time. We find one example of this in the monumental novel Leñador (2013) by Mike Wilson, a sort of almanac that brings together definitions and descriptions of trees, non-human animals, tools, and processes linked to forest activity, in a return to that natural whose motivation seems to be the deacceleration of time: to go backwards, advance slowly, going into the Yukon forest after having fought in the Malvinas War. This experimental exercise cannot be read without contextualizing it in the present, in which human action has become a geological force. Another example is the novel Mugre rosa (2020) by the Uruguayan Fernanda Trias, which presents the description of a landscape affected by contamination that is mixed with the memories of the protagonist’s past, which come and go in repetitive circles without linear order, creating the sensation of a time that does not move forward. Toward the end of the novel, the protagonist declares with impotence: “I cannot stop a future that is already here” (Trias 2020: 276). With emphasis on the perceptive, the beginning of the end is announced, with dead fish on the ocean surface: The beginning is never the beginning. What we confuse with the beginning is only the moment when we understand that things have changed. One day the fish appeared; that was a start. The beaches awoke covered with silvery fish, like a carpet made up of bottle caps or pieces of glass. It shone, with sparkles that hurt your eyes (2020: 45).

Disappearing species are also present in contemporary Latin American narratives, such as the novel De gados e homens (2013) by Brazilian Ana Paula Maia, in which a mass suicide of cattle occurs, or La extinción de las especies (2017) by Argentine Diego Vecchio, a natural history of natural museums. We can find a recent example of the disappearance of species in the feature length film La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro (2022),9 by the Chilean Francisca Alegría, which addresses the strange events that occurred following the contamination of a river by a pulp mill. A woman biker returns

 The idea for the feature film comes from the short film Y todo el cielo cupo el el ojo de la vaca muerta (2016), which premiered in Sundance in 2017. The screenplay for La vaca que cantó una

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from the afterlife, emerging from the river, to visit her family dedicated to dairy production. In a strange night during her visit, the cows sing a song that announces their own end and, the following morning they are all found dead. The filming of the cows partially makes use of a documentary style, similar to that employed by Andrea Arnold in Cow (2021) and, on the other hand, has an ominous character, in which the camera reports a ghostly presence, that is perceived through a subtle movement of the shot which seems to float. In Alegría’s work, the human point of view is questioned and an alternative and ghostly view is proposed as a counterpoint to the anthropocentric view. In his work Padece (2019), Chilean visual artist Máximo Corvalán Pincheira works with the araucaria tree, a species in danger of extinction since 2018 that has major cultural importance for the Pehuenche people. The installation uses photographic images of the Mortierella fungus that attacks the araucarias and dries them out from within. The photographs of petri dishes containing the fungus have the words “system,” “suspicious,” and “suffers” written in neon over them, referring to the relationship that the fungus establishes with the tree. Corvalán works with the help of scientist Eduardo Castro, who studies the genome of araucaria trees in the University of California—Davis’s Life Sciences Innovation Center laboratory in Santiago. The installation also includes maps with the perforated image of the fungus to make reference to an expanded territory and two sculptures or mixtures with the remains of araucarias crisscrossed by LED lights and tied with plastic tape, objects that reference human technology and intervention. Reflecting on the disappearance of forest species is a fundamental line running through Chilean Victoria Ramirez’s collection of poems Teoría del polen (2021). The book is divided into three sections: inflorescence, pollination, and fertilization, in which the author intersperses narrative monologues, reflections on ideas taken from Aristotle, Linnaeus, and Darwin, among others, and poems built around lists and enumerations. The poems in the collection repeat the following format: it is still possible to see thin leafed white myrtles red leaf myrtle lucumillos colorados white oaks dwarf radales island cypresses yellow pines petrillos pitaos hazelnuts (Ramirez 2021: 39)

canción hacia el futuro was written in collaboration with the playwright Manuela Infante. Inti Briones, one of the most important cinematographers in the contemporary Chilean scene, was the director of cinematography.

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The first verse “it is still possible to see” precedes different enumerations of species, creating a melancholic tone or one of mourning faced with forms of life that we are perhaps seeing for the last time. The sonic quality of the poems acquires the form of a litany that grants solemnity to the named species. It is interesting to note that in the acknowledgments Ramírez references “Michael Marder and Stefano Mancuso’s theories of plant intelligence and the detailed record of plants at risk of extinction in south-central Chile made by the Austral University along with the Edinburgh Botanical Garden” (2021: 57). These inputs or work tools account for the emergence of new forms of writing, in which an artistic and archival interdisciplinary research process becomes fundamental for creation and the latter becomes an affective and cognitive way of relating with the environment.

Extinction and the Survival of Other Worlds Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro make a radical critique of the Western philosophical tradition drawing on Amerindian thought and experience. According to these authors, the American Indians that survived the conquest of the 16th and 17th centuries and saw themselves as people “without world,” today “can serve as an example of and call attention to contemporary processes in which the economy and ecology enter into a mutually reinforcing collapse” (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2019: 193). Faced with the threat of “the end of the world” embodied by climate change and the Anthropocene, extractivism and the ecological crisis, these survivors and their forms of life can materially exemplify forms of future survival.10 In the documentary feature Surire (2015), Chilean documentary filmmakers Betina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff record, in an observational mode, some of the daily routines of the inhabitants of the Surire salt flat, located 4,300 meters above sea level, on the border with Bolivia. The majestic landscape is filmed with a wide angle and in the montage the salt flat, the bubbling hot springs, the colorful mountains, and the sky share their presence with flies, flamingos, guanacos, vicuñas, dogs, cats, the Aymara population, a forest ranger, and a mining company’s trucks and cranes, in constant extractive work. The perspective varies between large general pans and a microscopic perspective, indicating a diversity of scales and forms of life. The filmmakers’ impersonal gaze favors the simultaneous visibilization of apparently

 The feature length film Utama (2022) by Bolivian Alejandro Loayza Grisi, for example, tells the story of a couple of survivors: Virginio and Sisa, an elderly couple who live and speak traditionally in a rural area, dedicated to agriculture and raising llamas, and who find themselves confronted by the climate crisis and decreasing population due to the lack of water. Traditions, rituals, and traditional beliefs are put up against modern exploitation and the Anthropocene, calling into question different notions of dignified life and the centrality of the human, in the face of nature’s cycles.

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different temporalities: that of inorganic nature, that of animals, that of machines, and that of the Aymara women, whom it accompanies in her daily routines. This could be read as a view of a form of life in the process of extinction in the face of modern advances. However, these sequences could also be understood in the opposite way: the presence of the Aymara woman allows for thinking about an alternative to Western forms of relating with the environment. The fourth feature-length film by Paraguayan Paz Encina, Eami (2022), is paradigmatic in terms of the idea of the end of the world and survival. The film focuses on the history of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode, an Indigenous tribe that established their home in Paraguay’s Gran Chaco and was forced to abandon the forest due the invasive practices of colonial extractivist. Eami (which means “forest”) is the protagonist and primary narrative voice of the movie, a child who recounts the people’s history in the form of an oral myth, in which the past, present, and future are mixed together in ways that escape Western linearity. The view focuses on the perceptive, primarily the sonic and tactile aspects of the human sensorium, in constant relation with more than human forms of life. The camera adopts the height of the girl, who is also a bird: the Asojá, the bird-god-woman of the Ayoreo, a bird that flies low and is part of of the mythology that founds the origin story of the people and their future. The film includes documentary sound recordings of the violent invasion by the coñone (nonIndigenous people), which generates a rupture within the cinematographic field, both due to its Western origin and the ferocity of the occupation. Films such as Eami signal the destruction of an ethnic group as a form of genocide, that, for the Indigenous peoples, is perceived as the “end of the world,” marking both an apocalypse and a new start in the form of survival. The advance of the capitalist productive model destroys diverse forms of existence and, in its wake, calls into question the survival of the species. In his essay “Climate and History,” historian Dipesh Chakrabarty starts from the experiment of journalist Alan Weisman—author of The World Without Us (2007)—by imagining a world in which the human species has disappeared (Chakrabarty 2009). That supposition leads him to the conclusion that the current climatic crisis has the capacity to visibilize humanity as a species and interrupt the idea of historical time, since, faced with that threat of disappearance, the past and the future become disconnected. Both Surire and Eami present, in different ways, this interweaving of temporalities that challenges the linearity of historical time. Can the extermination of Indigenous populations be understood as a form of extinction? Rather than focus on dualisms that separate us from all forms of alterity, those that modern reason defined through taxonomies, the disappearance of worlds such as Indigenous ones, which has occurred since the arrival of Europeans on the American continent, should be thought as synecdoches or models at scale of the extinction of the species. The remains of these worlds, exhibited like mausoleums in museums, are part of the story of modernity.

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In the novel El museo de la bruma (2019), Galo Ghigliotto brings together a series of objects belonging to a lost museum, located in the Chilean Patagonia. The novel itself is the reconstruction of a catalog with numbered pieces, most of which are accompanied by a white square on a gray background to give space to the exhibition object that they describe. The novel recounts the genocide of the Indigenous people and the presence of the Nazi Walter Rauff in Magallanes. One of the entries refers to the “extinction” of the ethnicities of Patagonia, which occurred in the early 20th century. However, nomadic representatives of those native peoples are seen in Central Park in the mid 20th century, as if they returned, like ghosts, or refused to disappear. It is believed that they escaped from a human zoo that was traveling to Paris on a ship: A nomad sect lives in Central Park. They are descendants of the ancient selk’nam of Patagonia who have continued reproducing for decades after the extinction of the race, around 1920. [. . .] Like all their ancestors, they wear guanaco and fox skins. Lately they have had to adapt and use domestic dog skins. A New Yorker has reported being lucky enough to have seen a woman dressed in poodle skin sinking into the lagoon (Ghigliotto 2019: 45–46).

Undoubtedly, there are earlier works that record the extermination and/or survival of Indigenous populations, such as the Awá-Guajá population in Andrea Tonacci’s film Serras da desordem (2006), the Selk’nam and Kawésqar in Calafate zoológicos humanos (2011) by Hans Mülchi, the Aché in Damiana Kriggy (2015) by Alejandro Fernández Mouján, the Waimiri-Atroari in Apiyemiyekî? (2019) by Ana Vaz, the Kawésqar and yaganes in Paz Errázuriz’s photographic work, the natives of Tierra del Fuego in the photo-book Tarjeta Postal by Jorge Gronemeyer, or the Yanomami Juan Downey’s work or that of Claudia Andújar with that community. In all of these works, the Indigenous emerges as a figure of knowledge about the end of the world, with the Amerindian figure in the place of the extinct, which survives through practices, objects, experiences, and relations that are transmitted, stay and, like ghosts, resist disappearing. In his documentary El botón de nácar (2015), Patricio Guzmán establishes a parallel between the ethnocide of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego and the forced disappearances during Pinochet’s dictatorship. He uses a maritime element to establish the link between those two events: based on a button found on the ocean floor, Guzmán connects the canoeing customs of the natives from Tierra del Fuego with the launching of bodies into the ocean by the dictatorship. As both processes are the result of human action, the idea of “extermination” further emphasizes the intentionality and biopolitical character that underlies the genocidal practice. But the idea of connecting extinction and the dictatorship is not new either. In Clicks modernos, in 1983, the Argentine rock artist Charly García already sang “Los dinosaurios”: “Neighborhood friends can disappear / Radio singers can disappear / Those in the newspapers can disappear / The person you love can disappear / Those on the air can disappear on air / Those on the street can disappear on the street / Neighborhood friends can disappear / But the dinosaurs are going to disappear.”

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Thus, the signifier of disappearance remains closely linked to that extinction, generating a curious disjunction of temporalities, in which the time of enunciation—the final stage of the Argentine dictatorship—is further away than the disappearance of the dinosaurs, whose extinction is predicted as a proven fact, but toward the future: “The dinosaurs are going to disappear” [emphasis added], referring to the agents of the dictatorship. Breaking with temporality as a continuum is presented as a promise and survival strategy. Thus, work with temporality is one of the most noteworthy features of narrative forms in the face of the Anthropocene, even if climate change is not explicitly referenced by the authors. What comes after extinction? One possible response, postulated by those who defend technology, is that intelligence survives without humans, and that only technology will be able to save us (a sort of radical rational, post or inhuman colonialism). The scientific possibility of cloning species is already widely known, the issue that remains is whether experiments can achieve a population that could be released back into the natural world. If so, the questions that emerge are about its ecological consequences and what will happen with the species that occupied the niche of those disappeared species. Heise sees this as another symptom of our nostalgia for the past, like Jurassic Park (1993). But addressing extinction means taking on our responsibility as a geological force, both at the individual level and the collective-productive level. One possible response is eco-cosmopolitanism11 and multi-species justice, which would include a reflection on the cultural meaning of species at risk or, going beyond the language of species, adopting a view of our interdependence with other forms of life, in line with ideas like Haraway’s “companion species” or metamorphosis, proposed by Coccia, in which the notion of care must include all forms of life, because we are inseparable from them. As we saw in the cited examples, Latin American environmental aesthetics, in contrast to those globally, do not focus so much on mourning—although it is undoubtedly an affect that crosses the imagination of that which is extinguished—but rather on celebrating the singularity of what is left: a sort of reconnection with the territory and memories of our ancestors, including the teachings of Amerindian cultures, not in a romantic way, but rather situated in the present, conscious of the colonial legacies and productive matrices that generate the Anthropocene. Similarly, extinction as a Latin American hyperobect opens the possibility of imagining new forms of interacting with the environment, perhaps inspired by latent knowledges that we discarded when we tried to be modern.

 In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, The Environmental Imagination of the Global, Heise proposes an Eco-cosmopolitiniasm that looks toward a “more-than-human” work, including the connections between animate and inanimate networks of influence and exchange (Heise 2008: 60–61). In other words, it is a matter of seeing individuals and groups as part of both human and non-human planetary “imagined communities.”

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Works Cited Alegría, Francisca. La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro. Chile, France, USA, and Germany, 2022. 88 mins. ——. Y todo el cielo cupo en el ojo de la vaca muerta. Chile, 2016. 19 mins. Arnold, Andrea. Cow. United Kingdom, 2021. 94 mins. Braidotti, Rosi, and Maria Hlavajova, eds. Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Carpenter, John. They Live. USA, 1988. 94 mins. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Clima e historia: cuatro tesis”. Pasajes. Revista de pensamiento contemporáneo 31 (2009): 51–69. Coccia, Emanuele. The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. Trans. Dylan J. Montanari. Bedford, MA: Polity Press, 2019. Colectivo Los Ingrávidos. Iguana. Mexico, 2021. 4 mins. ——. Lagarto. Mexico, 2021. 2 mins. Corvalán Pincheira, Máximo. Padece. Galería Arte Espacio, 2019. Danowski, Deborah, and Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. ¿Hay un mundo por venir? Ensayo sobre los miedos y los fines. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra Editora, 2019. Debord, Guy. La société du spectacle. France, 1967. 88 mins. Encina, Paz. Eami. Paraguay, USA, Germany, Netherlands, Argentina, France, and Mexico, 2022. 83 mins. Fernández Mouján, Alejandro. Damiana Kriyygi. Argentina, 2015. 94 mins. García, Charly. “Los dinosaurios.” Clicks Modernos. Audio album, 1993. https://letrasbd.com/charly-garcia /los-dinosaurios/ (April 12, 2022). Ghigliotto, Galo. El museo de la bruma. Santiago: Ediciones Laurel, 2019. Gronemeyer, Jorge. Tarjeta Postal. Santiago: Taller Gronefot, Sala de Máquinas, 2018. Guha, Ramachandra, and Joan Martínez Alier. Varieties of Environmentalism. Essays North and South. London: Routledge, 1997. Haraway, Donna. “Antropoceno, Capitaloceno, Plantacionoceno, Chthuluceno: generando relaciones de parentesco”. Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Críticos Animales 3.1 (2016): 15–26. Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction. The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. ——. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. Lin, Maya. What is missing. N.d. https://www.whatismissing.org/index?category=species (April 12, 2022). Loayza Grisi, Alejandro. Utama. Bolivia, Uruguay, and France, 2022. 87 mins. Luco, Antonio, and Nicolás Molina Los castores. Chile, 2014. 66 mins. Maia, Ana Paula. De ganados y de hombres. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2015. Martínez Alier, Joan. El ecologismo de los pobres. Vilassar de Dalt: Editorial Icaria, 2021. McKay, Adam. Dont’t Look Up. USA, 2021. 138 mins. Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London and New York: Verso, 2015. Morton, Timothy. Ecología oscura. Sobre la coexistencia futura. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 2019. ——. Hiperobjetos. Filosofía y ecología después del fin del mundo. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2018. Mülchi, Hans. Calafate Zoológicos humanos. Chile, 2011. 93 mins. Perut, Bettina, and Iván Osnovikoff. Surire. Chile, 2015. 80 mins. Loayza, Marcos. Planeta Bolivia. Mini-series, 1 season. Bolivia, 2016. Ramírez, Victoria. Teoría del polen. Santiago: Editorial Provincianos, 2021. Rodríguez Sousa, Antonio. “Ciencia y Divulgación sobre la sexta extinción masiva de biodiversidad, ¿es realmente el cambio climático el principal responsable?” La comunicación de la mitigación y la

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adaptación al cambio climático. Eds. Rogelio Fernández-Reyes and Daniel Rodrigo-Cano. Sevilla: Egregius Ediciones, 2018. 177–204. https://hdl.handle.net/11441/89460. Sarmiento Pagan, Diego E., and Álvaro Sarmiento. Sembradoras de vida. Peru, 2019. 74 mins. Schefer, Raquel. “Perspectives dialectically intersected: the Mexican audio-visual collective Los Ingrávidos and its film Coyolxauhqui (2017).” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 61 (n.d.). http://www. ejumpcut.org/currentissue/RaquelSchefer/index.html?fbclid=IwAR1VMH0Rhjxr3ZIxQZb102 q5aw8ZVMnGRvec7iBHadVwC_B70nePljU3swo (April 12, 2022). Scott, Ridley. Blade Runner. USA, 1982. 117 mins. Spielberg, Steven. A.I. USA, 2001. 146 mins. ——. Jurassic Park. USA, 1993. 127 mins. Tonacci, Andrea. Serras da desordem. Brazil, 2006. 135 mins. Tsing, Anna L., Jennifer Deger, Alder Saxena Keleman, and Feifei Zhou, eds. Feral Atlas. The More-ThanHuman Anthropocene. Palo Alto: Stanford University, 2020. Trías, Fernanda. Mugre Rosa. Bogotá: Random House Mondadori, 2020. Vaz, Ana. A film, reclaimed. France, 2015. 20 mins. ——. Apiyemiyeki? Brazil, France, Portugal, and Netherlands, 2020. 28 mins. ——. Pseudosphynx. Brazil, 2020. 8 mins. Vecchio, Diego. La extinción de las especies. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2017. Von Trier, Lars. Melancholia. Denmark, Sweden, France, and Germany, 2011. 135 mins. Weerasethakul, Apichatpong. Uncle Boonmee who can recall his past lives. Thailand, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, and Netherlands, 2010. 114 mins. Wilson, Mike. Leñador. Santiago: Orjikh editores, 2013.

Cynthia Francica

Feminisms Feminist movements and queer activisms have long been invested in the material and affective dimensions of subjective experience, gender expression and sexuality. The life of bodies, with their desires, impulses and needs, has been a persistent concern for feminisms. The rich entanglements of subjects with their social and physical environments have similarly constituted a long standing, key focus of feminist and gender theory. More recently, ecofeminisms in particular have drawn attention to the tight links between socially coded gender identities and the natural environment. If, as Silvia Federici proposes, the naturalized, marginalized and undervalued role of women in the home has constituted “the fundamental backbone of the capitalist organization of work” (Federici 2018: 60), other voices have argued that that widespread disdain for reproductive activities, together with the idealization of technology, industrial work, and human dominance over nature, might help explain the link between the stark neglect and depletion to which both natural resources and life-sustaining gendered practices have been subjected under capitalism (Salleh 1997). In line with these reflections, we witness today a reorientation of political work towards issues and relationships connected to the reproduction of our lives and the life of the ecosystems we inhabit (Federici 2018). Latin America—a region characterized by both alarming rates of violence against feminized and queer subjects and the unrelenting expansion of extractivist economies that unequally decimate human and non-human resources and ecologies—offers particularly fertile ground to shed light on the ties between environmental injustice and the lives, and deaths, of gendered and sexualized bodies. At the same time, it is crucial to consider that feminisms and queer/cuir movements in the region are distinctly invested in thinking through the intersection of patriarchal and colonial modes of exploitation, which have resulted, needless to say, in long-term racial, ethnic and class inequalities.1 In the words of Mayan anthropologist Aura Cumes, “the patriarchal system in Latin America cannot be explained without colonization, nor the colonial process be understood without accounting for patriarchal oppression.” The very notion of gender acquires, then,  I use the term ‘queer’ broadly to refer to sexualities, desires, affects, and practices that resist to align with the heteronormative and homonormative models that govern liberal identities, as well as to a series of anti-normative positionalities that exercise modes of systemic critique. To highlight that the term ‘queer’ was imported into the Latin American context, and the complexities inherent to its translation, I also resort to its local version, ‘cuir’. Through both the difference in pronunciation and spelling, ‘cuir’ decenters the English language term while attesting to a fundamental process of appropriation and reinvention of the word and pointing to the variety of cultures of sexual dissent (and the associated terminologies) that have emerged in Latin America. In this line, I am here interested in thinking through the contributions of feminist movements that are based on an intersectional understanding of gender, sexuality and desire, and are invested in systemic social transformations. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-010

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other meanings and specificities than when explained solely as the result of patriarchy as a system of domination (Cumes 2012: 6). An instance of those situated specificities is the emergence of certain key notions in the context of decolonial feminist activist practices, such as that of “cuerpo-territorio” (body-territory). As Verónica Gago proposes, this notion addresses the ways in which territorial exploitation today is structured under neo-extractivist codes, and how those codes, in turn, reconfigure the exploitation of workers’s bodies, resulting in a series of consequences such as the dispossession of common goods (Gago 2019: 96). A concept that stresses the inextricable continuity of bodies and territories becomes key in the Latin American context, which operates globally as a new frontier of inexpensive commodities and is subjected to economic development models that unevenly distribute environmental injustice and ‘sacrifice zones’ not only between the geopolitical North and the South, but also within local communities across racial, class, gender and social lines (Svampa 2019). Territorial conflict has emerged as a central focus of a series of Latin American activist movements around socio-environmental struggles that include indigenous peoples, non-indigenous peasant organizations, feminist organizations, socio-territorial movements and environmental groups that confront both governments and large economic corporations. Interestingly, the social movements in the region have undergone a gradual process of feminization, with growing participation of women from popular and middle sectors. With a focus on situated and practice-based knowledge, Latin American popular and eco-feminisms engaged in environmental struggles generally distance themselves from liberal feminisms and their modernist search for individual rights and freedom, centering instead on our relation of interdependence with the natural world. This recent line of feminism originated in the global South, sometimes labeled “ecofeminism of survival” due to its commitment to the defense of physical health, wellbeing and territories, has raised increasing awareness on the tight links between gender and the environment, feminism and ecology (Svampa 2015).2 In this context, proposing new vocabularies to further the struggle against extractivist megaprojects in the region and, at the same time, reinvent the ways in which we conceive of gender, sexuality and embodiment becomes an important task. According to Verónica Gago, the term cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) is both a strategic idea and a practical concept “that makes evident how the exploitation of community territories (urban, suburban, peasant and indigenous), entails violence against the body of each person, and against the collective body, through dispossession”. In her words,

 More recent than the environmental social justice movement located in the global North, the “ecofeminism of survival” located in the so-called Third World is focused on the diverse experiences of women in contexts of environmental injustice. According to Maristella Svampa, it is characterized by the anthropological basis of its discourse and by a sustained attempt “to overcome both equality and difference feminisms through the notion of interdependence, that is, an understanding of the human relationship as an ‘I’ in relation” (Svampa 2015: 130).

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The conjunction of the words “body-territory” speaks for itself: it says that it is impossible to cut out and isolate the individual body from the collective body, the human body from the territory and the landscape. ‘Body-territory,’ compounded as a single word, ‘de-liberalizes’ the notion of the body as individual property and signals a political, productive and epistemic continuity of the body as territory. The body thus reveals itself as a composition of affects, resources, and possibilities that are not ‘individual,’ but become singular because they pass through each person’s body to the extent that each body is never just “one,” but always with others, and with other non-human forces (Gago 2019: 97).3 [La conjunción de las palabras cuerpo-territorio habla por sí misma: dice que es imposible recortar y aislar el cuerpo individual del cuerpo colectivo, el cuerpo humano del territorio y del paisaje. Cuerpo-territorio compactado como única palabra ‘desliberaliza’ la noción de cuerpo como propiedad individual y especifica una continuidad política, productiva y epistémica del cuerpo en tanto territorio. El cuerpo se revela así como composición de afectos, recursos y posibilidades que no son ‘individuales’, sino que se singularizan porque pasan por el cuerpo de cada quien en la medida que cada cuerpo nunca es sólo ‘uno’, sino siempre con otr✶s, y con otras fuerzas también no humanas (Gago 2019: 97).

The notion and practice of “body-territory” takes up what can be deemed an essentialist, deterministic association between the female body and the land in order to rethink it, expand it beyond its conventional referents and redeploy it as a political and conceptual tool. This idea, derived from and central to activist practices, resonates and enters into dialogue with images and figures developed in contemporary literary and visual works. The bodies of the protagonists of the aesthetic pieces I discuss here take shape in close correspondence with the territories and spaces they inhabit. It is fundamental to note that the focus on territories in these works implies a questioning and a rethinking of conventional notions and practices of national and regional identities which, often associated with patriarchal, capitalist, and extractivist conceptions of the land and its inhabitants, have played a crucial role in Latin American cultural production. Territories become a space for the manifestation of other actants, practices and concepts, capable of housing new meanings. Environmental and territorial movements suggest alternative forms of living outside the logic of the rural as opposed to the urban, outside the productive national organization of the land. We will broadly look at the ways in which contemporary aesthetic works, drawing on environmental injustice, social and ecological dispossession, reconfigure imaginaries of the land and the nation in conjunction with ideas about gender, sexuality and desire, among other vectors of difference. We will also pause to consider how, besides working with toxic lands and territories, key contemporary aesthetic pieces delve into the loaded issue of water, recovering and mobilizing indigenous ontologies to explore other ways of conceiving our connection to the living, the dead and the inert.

 All translations from Spanish into English in this article are mine.

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According to Maristella Svampa, ecofeminisms and current environmental activist movements often rescue the feminist culture of care as a central inspiration to envision an ecologically and socially sustainable society. In the context of a broad resistance to extractivist practices, “the language of women’s validation and legitimation framed in the culture of care tends to express a potentially radical pro-communal ethos, which conceives social relations on the basis of another logic and alternative modes of rationality, questioning capitalism through the acknowledgment of eco-dependence and the validation of the work entailed in the reproduction of the social” (Svampa 2015: 131). If the dimensions of reproduction and care are currently being revisited in feminist practices as privileged scenarios for social transformation and political struggle, contemporary Latin American aesthetic works turn an attentive eye toward the crucial tasks performed in those areas by gendered, racialized and marginalized bodies. In the face of the acute devastation and dispossession historically unleashed by necropolitical regimes, it is, perhaps, not surprising that the region’s cultural production insistently explores the work of care, sustenance, and the reproduction of life. And precisely that work of care, on which feminisms have much to offer, carries a fundamental value when it comes to imagining potential survival tools in the context of our ‘end of the world.’ In the literary and visual works I address here, gendered and racialized bodies take shape, more than in terms of fixed and legible identities under liberal subjective codifications, in close correspondence with non-human forces and intensities. Gendered and otherwise marked bodies are deployed as spaces of tension and connection, as forces that mess up the knots of identifications, hierarchies, perceptions and regimes of the sensible, with the capacity to reorganize not only social identities but, crucially, our ways of relating with the natural, the non-human, and the multiplicity of worlds that surround us. The imaginaries associated with the feminine and the marginal multiply and become ever more complex under the influence of materialities and affectivities that are not exclusively human. It is important to note that, as a result of the long and loaded history of symbolic, affective and material imbrication of the non-human and marginal subjectivities, which have too often been degraded on the basis of their purported proximity to the status of animals and other-thanhuman beings, gender, class, racial and sexual difference offer a privileged platform precisely to think through, and re-imagine, our connections to the more-than-human. Similarly, the non-human constitutes a fertile space to re-assess the socially dictated dynamics of gender and desire, of bodies and their potentialities. The aesthetic works that we will dwell on here evidence how gender, class, sexual and racial inequalities, along with environmental injustice, differentially affect Latin American subjects. In the face of the erosion of familial and social bonds, an erosion unleashed both by the long-standing inadequacy of traditional, patriarchal modes of relation to fulfill physical and affective needs and by the precarity of means and resources to survive in dispossessed territories, these pieces investigate other potential bonds and alliances that expand beyond the human. Echoing activist practices and

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notions, they explore the continuity between the human and the non-human, such as that between body and territory, giving way to alternative conceptions of corporeality and desire that clash with traditional understandings of (gendered) identity.

The Toxic Body-territory and its (Re)productive Forces A series of contemporary Latin American novels written by women resort to incorporating elements of the fantastic to recreate scenarios of environmental and social damage. Part of that production delves into the dire situation of the countryside in the Southern Cone, devastated by the soy monoculture, the use of toxic pesticides and the impact of these practices on the living conditions and health of the population. The 2014 novel Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream), by Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin, examines and interrogates the deteriorated bonds between mothers and their children in the context of a dystopian scenario that feels, however, disturbingly close and familiar given the increasing cases of cancer and development issues in children in soybean-growing areas. In the novel, Carla’s son David suffers from an acute intoxication caused by the use of agrochemicals in the soybean field. His life is at risk, and his mother decides to resort to a healer, “the woman of the green house,” to save him. As Carla tells Amanda, a woman who vacations in the countryside with her daughter Nina, when faced with the imminent death of the child the witch proposes to migrate the spirit of David to another body. Then, according to her logic, “part of the intoxication would go with him too. Divided into two bodies, there were chances to overcome it” (Schweblin 2014: 27). However, the transmigration would have consequences that Carla will ultimately not be able to deal with: as the witch explains, “the transmigration would take David’s spirit to a healthy body, but it would also bring an unknown spirit to the sick body. Something of each would remain in the other, it would no longer be the same” (2014: 28). And, in fact, David becomes unrecognizable and monstrous in Carla’s eyes. In the novel, the search for new vocabularies around motherhood materializes in the very concept proposed in its title, “rescue distance,” a kind of invisible thread which, metaphorically extending the umbilical cord, unites mothers with their children. “Rescue distance,” as the protagonist points out, is transmitted from generation to generation—the thread that unites mothers and children raises key questions about lineage and heritage while, at the same time, crystallizing the maternal duty to anticipate and act on any imminent danger to the child. However, this affective and performative practice fails in the novel: both David and Nina, the children of the protagonists Carla and Amanda, are intoxicated while playing only a few meters away from their respective mothers, who are incapable of perceiving the toxic danger and of rescuing the children from their tragic destiny. In this scenario, motherhood, along

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with its affects, strategies and stereotypes, collapses. In the universe that the novel imagines, the power of the non-human, embodied in agrotoxins, raises the question of how to think about maternal and (re)productive bonds today and what new tools, or affective vocabularies, could emerge not so much to safeguard the world we knew as to deal with the devastating social and environmental consequences of global capital. Motherhood as a foundational and unbreakable bond and a space for the production of gender norms is declared vacant: Carla rejects her son and finally runs away, abandoning David; Amanda dies, unable to protect Nina. Paternity, figured in the text as a merely pragmatic and superficial bond—the children’s fathers are always absent and devoted mostly to productive work, even in situations of family crisis—, is all that survives towards the end. The failure of the traditional kinship models is such that a series of contaminated animals, whom he accompanies in their agony and buries in the garden, seem to constitute David’s new “family.” They are the only ones whose departure causes him sorrow and pain, and David remembers and memorializes them through his drawings, which replace the classic familiar composition: “here I am with the ducks, the dog and the horses, this is my drawing” (Schweblin 2014: 77). In the text, the contaminated territory becomes contiguous with the toxic body of children, adults and affected animals. Faced with the collapse of the basic patriarchal structure on which the social is organized, the (re)productive function of the toxic emerges from the ruins of a collapsing world as a counterpart to motherhood—a model of propagation governed no longer by inheritance or DNA, but by an overwhelming and random force that, as in the case of the transmigration of souls, disarranges identity systems to give way to hybrid forms of life. In the face of intoxication, the only possibility of survival is “curandería”—a tradition of popular knowledge that, in the lineage of the witch figure, represents another type of feminine legacy different from the patriarchal imperative of ‘rescue distance,’ which ties the woman to her child and paradoxically fails to sustain life. The ever-present thread that unites mothers and children in the novel, measuring the ‘rescue distance’, speaks of a maternal bond defined by constant fear, complete dependency, lack of freedom and the disproportionate burden of responsibility culturally placed on mothers when it comes to their child’s survival and wellbeing. While patriarchal motherhood is based on the proximity of the thread that, in the novel, unites mother and daughter, the migration of souls practiced by the woman in the green house implies the separation and loss of children by their mothers while at the same time engendering other forms of life that, more than emerging from the genetics of a man and a woman, are the product of a blind propagation impulse whose effects cannot be foreseen. In María Inés Krimer’s 2016 novel Noxa, journalist Marcia investigates to unearth the truth about the effects of unregulated pesticides in the Argentine countryside. That search is compounded by the need to locate Ema, her missing childhood friend. As Marcia untangles the corrupt web around the soybean-growing business in the region, she gathers information about her friend and becomes herself intoxicated with

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noxa, the pesticide which causes cancer and birth defects in the town’s population. Noxa is, like Ema, everywhere and nowhere at the same time—the invisible presence, the open secret that cannot be quite located or identified but everybody knows, everybody feels, is there. The invisibility of the toxic threat in both Noxa and Distancia de rescate is posited as a key element of the agrotoxic sensorium of the Argentine crountryside. In this line, the logic of the open secret permeates Noxa, and becomes a narrative strategy for working through the sensorial and physical disorientation generated by noxa, which operates at a scale that, though largely undetectable to human perception, is yet capable of producing lasting damage. Ema’s secret life; her political activities against agricultural producers that use noxa, which leads to her being persecuted and threatened; her affair with a married man, who turns out to be none other than Marcia’s now former husband; and the fact that she conceived a child who was born with a disease most probably derived from her exposure to agrotoxins gradually unravel as the text progresses. That secret life, however, was actually at the surface of the narrative all along: Marcia herself experiences, from the first few pages, those same circumstances. Her politically charged journalistic investigation places her in harm’s way, to the point that corrupt producers threaten Vera, her adolescent daughter who lives in the capital city; she too has an affair with a married man, the town’s doctor who is committed to denouncing the health problems derived from noxa; she too is exposed to the pesticide and, at the end of the novel, we learn that she is also pregnant with what will most probably be a sick baby. Marcia and Ema are two women whose parallel stories come closer and closer as the narrative progresses until they become one. Marcia’s insistent search for her childhood friend turns into a specular search for her own purpose, which is ultimately to complete Ema’s mission once the latter commits suicide towards the end of the novel. The two friends’ identities thus become blurred—the political struggle against environmental injustice is figured as an ongoing task that, rather than being carried forward by individual women, is articulated through communal, shared efforts. It is interesting to note that, in the last few moments of her life, Ema urges Marcia to take care of her sick baby, who is most probably the result of her affair with her friend’s husband. Like in the case of Distancia de rescate, where Carla decides to leave town and her son behind after his intoxication, the maternal bond is revealed as insufficient to wade through the contaminated bodies/territories that the texts evoke.4 Furthermore, if in Schweblin’s novel the narrative seems to operate as a toxic force (once Carla tells Amanda her story, it will replicate itself, like a virus, in the bodies of Amanda and her daughter Nina), the specular relation between

 In this line, the extended dialogue between David and Amanda that articulates the text is not only woven around toxicity but, we might think, enables and gives way to death.

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Marcia and Ema in Noxa similarly signals a (re)productive and performative power of contamination that takes place in and through the very story.5 The underlying question of how to narrate environmental injustice, and how to accommodate non-human scales within the stories we tell, surfaces in the textual artifact La compañía (2019) by Mexican writer Verónica Gerber Bicecci. The volume, printed on black and white pages and illustrated with oversaturated photographs, maps and diagrams, focuses on the consequences of extractive mining in the region of Nuevo Mercurio, Zacatecas, which saw its heyday in the period spanning from 1940 to 1970. The region was particularly affected by the hazardous toxic waste left behind, compounded by the industrial residues later imported from the U.S. The book is divided into two parts, a and b: the first is a rewriting of the story “The guest” (1959) by Amparo Dávila, which also includes fragments of pictograms from Manuel Felguérez’s La máquina estética (1975), and the second a montage of journalistic texts, environmental and geological reports and studies in English and in Spanish, letters to political figures, conversations with miners, and excerpts from the story “José Largo”, by José Luis Martínez, alongside visual elements such as photographs and plans of the mercury mine. This practice of re-writing, collage and appropriation has been defined by Gerber as a form of ‘composting,’ as part of an effort to evoke and think through the materiality and organicity of sediments, waste and recycling by means of aesthetic experimental formats (Gerber in Castillo Morales 2021). In the first part of the work, which we will center on, the original text is rewritten as follows: the characters of the unwanted ‘guest’ and Guadalupe, the cleaning lady, are substituted by ‘Company’ and ‘machine’, the verb tense is changed to the future and the narrative voice to the second person. These transformations lend the work an ominous feel, de-familiarizing Dávila’s story while simultaneously preserving its known character. The estrangement of the familiar is deployed here as a narrative strategy to encompass the affective, felt quality of living within toxic bodies/territories. A further difference between the two texts, and an open reference to the mining projects, is that the Company consumes water rather than meat. In an eco-feminist key, Gerber’s work explores the tight connections between domestic violence in a patriarchal family made up of the mother, the husband and their children, and macrolevel extractivist economies—it is precisely the husband who, insensitive to his wife’s wishes, brings the Company into the space of the home, insisting all along that it is

 In contemporary aesthetic production, other bonds between women, such as sisterhood, are similarly presented as inadequate to enable life in toxic territories. In Chilean writer Lina Meruane’s novel Fruta podrida (Rotten Fruit, 2015) the sick body of Zoila, one of the protagonists, is depicted as in symbolic and material continuity with the fruit for export she grows alongside her sister María in the countryside. Despite her sister’s pleas, Zoila refuses to follow medical treatment for her diabetes, and ultimately leaves the family home, and María, behind. Zoila then becomes an axis of contamination that expands to the geopolitical North as she travels there to attack the transplant wing of a central hospital, while her sister decides to poison the fruit they produce before exporting it from Chile to the First World, thus globally disseminating and redistributing toxicity.

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completely harmless. The Company, however, becomes a terrifying presence that threatens the wife and the children, to the extent that it attacks the machine’s son (the most vulnerable inhabitant of the home due to his socio-economic standing) while the latter is left unattended as his mother performs her duties. The wife rescues the child from the Company’s grasp, risking her own life in the process. Curiously, the Company does not bother the machine, perhaps aware of its strategic use on the basis of the exploitation of labor it is already being subjected to—once more, extractivist economies emerge as closely connected to unequal gender, racial and class dynamics. As the husband gradually retreats from family life with the excuse of having too much work and possibly, the wife thinks, “other matters that also entertain him”, the patriarchal family begins to disintegrate, and this opens up space for the bond between the wife and the machine to develop and become stronger. Towards the end of the text, the two women unite and concoct a plan to eliminate the Company, mostly out of fear that it will harm them or their children. The work thus introduces a somewhat utopian, communal approach to motherhood—a mode of relationality that is no longer based on the patriarchal family unit but on mutual care and sustenance among women across social lines. Towards the end of the narrative, the work of mothering becomes more evenly distributed between the two women as the wife fiercely defends the machine’s child from the Company’s violent assault as if it were her own. It is this communal understanding of motherhood that allows the characters to overcome class differences. After the wife tells her husband about the attack and the latter ignores her pleas, calls her “hysterical” and repeats that the Company is completely harmless, the two women come together for the shared goal to defeat the Company. When the husband leaves town in a business trip, they decide to board up the door of the room where the Company sleeps during the day. They thus successfully manage to starve it to death in a gesture that evokes the activist act of refusing to consume the products generated by extractivism.

Non-binary Waters as Territory In contemporary activist struggles in Latin America, as well as in academia and in artistic practices, water is increasingly being conceptualized as closely articulated with territories. The case of Chile is paradigmatic, both in the sense that the 1981 Water Code, established during Pinochet’s dictatorship, defines water as a marketable good,6 and that most of the country’s water supplies are used by the mining, agriculture and forestry industries. The privatization of rivers and water channels in the country is an extreme example of the dispossession to which natural and social ecosystems have been subjected

 It was not until very recently, on April 6 2022, that the latest reform to the Water Code was passed in Chile under the law 21.435, which defines water as a common resource for public use that belongs to all inhabitants of the nation.

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under neoliberal regimes, and the struggle to “liberate the water” has become a fight flag for environmental and territorial activisms and for protesters during the 2019 social outburst.7 In this context, the Mapuche territorial vindication consists not only of a request for land but, crucially, involves an integral set of natural elements within geographical spaces identified with indigenous cultures, and water is a key part of those territories. In the context of Latin American recent history, illegal mass graves and floating bodies in rivers and oceans often evoke the infamous actions of the dictatorial regimes, which included throwing the bodies of the illegally detained “desaparecidos” (disappeared persons) in water courses to hide their crimes.8 These collective memories related to necropolitical regimes are recovered in literary and visual pieces that work through environmental damage alongside long histories of colonial genocide and violence against women and other marginalized groups.9 As part of that working

 The 2019 “estallido social” in Chile consisted of a series of massive demonstrations originating in Santiago, the capital city, which spread to all regions of Chile. The immediate triggering factor for these events was the increase in the rate of Santiago’s public transport system, which came into force on October 6, 2019, after which thousands of high school students organized themselves to carry out acts of mass evasion in the Santiago metro. On October 18, several outbreaks of protests, looting, and riots emerged throughout the country and in the early hours of Saturday, October 19, President Sebastián Piñera decreed a state of emergency and a curfew in Greater Santiago. The situation spread a few hours later to five other regions of the country and by the 23rd, the state of emergency had been declared in fifteen of the sixteen regional capitals. Although the immediate trigger can be attributed to the rise in public transport fares, the protests and demonstrations soon exposed a series of deep-rooted causes: the high cost of living (until 2019 Santiago was the second most expensive city in Latin America), low pensions, high prices of drugs and health treatments, and a generalized rejection of the entire political class and the institutional discredit accumulated in recent years.  In the case of Argentina, the military coup of March 24, 1976 gave way to the 1976–1983 dictatorship, which took the form of an authoritarian state and was characterized by its systematic plan of state terrorism, which included the disappearance of people and the theft of babies born in captivity. In Chile, a dictatorial regime led by Augusto Pinochet ruled the country between 1973 and 1990 after the military coup that ousted the democratic government of President Salvador Allende. The dictatorship involved systematic human rights violations and was based on principles emanating from the extreme right, such as the legal prohibition of political parties and trade unions, the limitation of freedom of expression, and the dissolution of the National Congress.  African philosopher Achille Mbembe postulates, based on the Foucauldian formulation of ‘biopolitics’ and the specific context of post/colonial nations, the concept of “necropolitics.” Mbembe dates the emergence of this form of social control, based on the premise of “kill” and “let live,” during the colonial period. In this context, the notion of ‘necropower’ implies an experimental mode of radical instrumentalization and material destruction of bodies and populations that would expand later: it is a precursor, for example, of the logic of Nazi concentration camps. According to Mbembe, the postcolonial space is determined by a diffuse (state or para-state) power that operates by activating the “economy of death,” that is, exercising its authority through violence and its right to decide on the life of the governed (Mbembe 2011). In this sense, the notion of necropower is useful to think through both the Latin American (post)colonial periods and the state of exception established by dictatorial regimes in the region. In these periods, the modes of violence and disciplining suffered by dissident subjectivities in terms of gender and sexuality—whose mere existence was read as a direct confrontation with the normative models of morality and heteropatriarchal family on which these regimes were based—were particularly brutal.

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through past and present trauma, and drawing from both indigenous epistemologies and feminist activist impulses, contemporary aesthetic pieces conceive of water as a live, forever shifting, non-binary space particularly suited to welcome, embrace and contain feminized and dissident bodies.

Figure 1: Still from Patricia Domínguez (in collaboration with Mujeres del Agua), La Balada de las Sirenas Secas. Video, 2020. Comissioned by TBA21.

In her video-instalation La balada de las sirenas secas (The Ballad of the Dry Sirens, 2020), Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez works with the mythical figure of the siren to think through the urgent social and environmental problem of water scarcity in the area (Figure 1). The piece foregrounds the activist struggles carried out by Modatima Women (Movement for the Defense of Access to Water, Land and Environmental Protection) in the Petorca area, as well as the performances of the group “Las viudas del agua” (The Widows of the Water), directed by Raquel González. Cheril Linett (1988) is a Chilean feminist artist whose works sits at the intersection of violence against feminized subjects, political violence and environmental injustice. In 2016 Linett authored and carried out the piece Procesión Melinka, which consisted of a procession to the former Melinka torture center in Puchuncaví, active during the dictatorship, in the Valparaíso region. In Linett’s piece the performers, holding funeral wreaths and shovels,

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walk the streets with their panties hanging from their ankles and their shoelaces untied, in an area declared a ‘sacrifice zone’ due to the high levels of environmental pollution. Once at their destination, they remove the earth and lie down on it, lifting their dresses so that their bodies are naked, and their faces covered, with the circular crowns placed on their pelvis in such a way that their genital area is visible and surrounded by flowers.10 The figure of the corpse and the use of the funeral wreath in Linett’s work result from her investigation of the theme of femicides in Chile through the implementation of mortuary rites. The piece embodies and stages violated female bodies whose anonymity potentially opens space for the configuration of a vulnerable community and the negotiation of collective mourning. Linett’s performance Memorial (2020), which is part of the series ‘Poetics of the waters,’ similarly consisted of a funeral procession. A group of performers in transparent dresses with their heads covered carry crosses that symbolically stand for victims of femicide and transfemicide. They walk across rural and urban territories, to finally board a boat in the area of Lago Rapel, an artificial lake in central Chile that is part of a hydraulic system made up of a hydroelectric plant and a dam, and land on a deserted beach where they ceremonially place some of the crosses. The performers then enter the lake carrying two crosses each, and swim together, drawing shapes that are captured in an aerial shot. The waters receive and surround the collective body that results from those actions, in a gesture that memorializes the victims of sexist and homophobic violence. Hence, water becomes the medium of memory and recognition while evoking, in spite of the violence of human intervention in that particular environment, a sort of “home” after death, as it represents the final destination of all life according to indigenous ontologies. They then paint a victim’s name on each cross and prop them up in the now practically dry land that used to be the busy course of the Mapocho river in Santiago. The artwork, moving across different regions of Chile, thus links the problematics of femicide, transfemicide and drought. Seba Calfuqueo (1991), an artist of Mapuche origin whose work proposes a critical reflection on the place of indigenous subjects in Latin America, addresses the issue of water in a number of recent works. Their installation piece Ko ta mapungey ka (Agua también es territorio/Water is also territory, 2020) establishes, according to their own description, a poetic and political relationship between the water, the artist’s cuir body, the Mapuche language and the territory. The work consists of a series of blue ceramic moldings shaped as water containers of different capacities and sizes, intervened with the concepts ‘drought’, ‘looting’ and ‘Petorca river.’ The installation proposes a path that goes through the water toponyms in Mapudungun, along with the insistent message ‘the soil does not dry up on its own, others dry it up,’ and includes a map of the territory that today corresponds to Chile, extracts from articles 5 and 9 of the 1981 Water Code, and pine and eucalyptus incense, evoking two pervasive monocultures in the

 The performers’ breasts were uncovered, but their nipples were covered with flowers to avoid censorship (personal communication with the artist, 2022).

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Figure 2: Still from Seba Calfuqueo, Kowkülen/Ser líquido. Video, 2020.

region responsible for water scarcity. In a similar line, their audiovisual and performance piece Kowkülen (Ser líquido/Liquid Being, 2020) enacts a transmutation of the artist’s corporeality, which becomes immersed in the liquid materiality of water in the context of water privatization and looting in the South of Chile (Figure 2). In this practice of “becoming landscape,” as Calfuqueo defines it, their body appears as a lifeless body without its own mobility, channeled by the waters where the piece is filmed. A body that “wants to be a fish / without recognizing sex / like shumpall, interstices of man, of woman” that traverses “non-binary waters.” Shumpall is a mythical being in mapuche tradition associated to the water. The shumpall is entrusted with taking care of rivers, lakes and the ocean, and there is no shortage of water where they live. According to traditional chants, the shumpall, half fish and half human, is a dual being in terms of gender, as they can materialize as either female or masculine according to the circumstances. In Shumpall, a book of poetry by the woman writer of Mapuche-Huilliche origin Roxana Miranda Rupailaf, the mythical being lures, enchants and seduces an infatuated poetic persona from the depths of the ocean it inhabits. Interestingly subverting the gendered stereotypes around the Western figure of the mermaid that appears in Domínguez’s work, throughout most of the poem the shumpall Rupailaf summons is a male seductor whose aquatic body and chants the persona finds irresistible. At the same time, however, gender ambiguity and queer desire permeate the poem. If at points the poetic persona, gendered female, acquires masculine capabilities such as spilling their ‘broken sperm’ on the ocean, the shumpall similarly appears to materialize as female in certain sexual passages: “I love you with that choir of nymphs that sing to you, / mirrors on which you comb your hair. / With them you enter my waters. / They are the nymphs

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that you salt with your body. / I dive into one and she smells of you. / I go around loving her to contain your liquids” (Rupailaf 2018: 20). [Yo te amo con ese coro de ninfas que te canta/ espejos en los cuales peinas tus cabellos./ Con ellas tú entras en mis aguas./ Son las ninfas que salas con tu cuerpo./ Me sumerjo en una y huele a ti. / La voy amando por contener tus líquidos (Rupailaf 2018: 20).] Strikingly, the persona embraces her own gradual transformation into an inhabitant of the ocean as the poem progresses, echoing the way in which, in Mapuche chants, the humans seduced by shumpalls would sometimes turn into shumpalls themselves. Once in the realm of water, her gender characteristics become, like those of the shumpall, more mobile and contingent: I look at my body in the mirrors and they are algae my body-algae green white that finds me my eye of water that finds me chants I emit chants and a foam flowers I have flowers in abyss a garden that is a delirium an attire of skins fish that lick me. My body-algae repeats itself in the mirrors. It multiplies. A map of me there is a map of me on the water I am confused I touch myself and I am not that water that salt that falls apart (Rupailaf 2018: 24). [Miro mi cuerpo en los espejos y son algas mi cuerpo alga verde blanco que me encuentra mi ojo de agua que me encuentra canto me salen cantos y una espuma flores yo tengo flores en abismo un jardín que es un delirio un atavío de pieles peces que me lamen. Mi cuerpo alga en los espejos se repite. Se multiplica. Un mapa de mí hay un mapa de mí sobre el agua me confundo me toco y no soy yo esta agua esta sal que se deshace.] (Rupailaf 2018: 24).

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The persona undergoes a metamorphosis that turns her body into a more-thanhuman body-algae and, ultimately, into water itself—a forever shifting body of water, materializing the mapuche people’s understanding of water courses as the final destination of life. In both Calfuqueo’s visual artworks and Rupailaf’s poetry, the figure of the shumpall thus brings forth non-Western understandings of gender, sexuality and desire, along with other markers of difference, which visibilize the inextricability of the human, and of the human body, from the natural world. To conclude, the aesthetic pieces centered on water, along with the literary works centered on toxic Latin American territories subjected to unregulated extractivist practices, focus on a series of marginalized subjects, including women, feminized, indigenous and dissident bodies, and on the more-than-human, in order to investigate alternative knowledges, affects and aesthetic sensibilities which might, in turn, offer possible tools for collective action and survival in the Anthropocene. These literary and visual artworks evoke other ontologies and ways of understanding the human that might push us beyond a scheme of subjectivity today in crisis, and which complement those proposed by feminisms and queer/cuir movements in the region. Echoing activist, feminist and indigenous practices and concepts, contemporary Latin American cultural production visibilizes and further builds on images and vocabularies that might help us name, think and feel differently.

Works Cited Calfuqueo, Seba. Kowkülen (Ser líquido). Video, 2020. 3 min. https://sebacalfuqueo.com/2020/04/13/kowku len-ser-liquido-2018/ (10 Jan 2023). Calfuqueo, Seba. Ko ta mapungey ka (Agua también es territorio). Multimedia installation, 2020. https://sebacalfuqueo.com/2020/04/13/ko-ta-mapungey-ka-el-agua-tambien-es-territorio-2020/ (10 Jan 2023). Castillo Morales, Alejandro. “Verónica Gerber: Escritura compostaje.” Revista Temporales (2021). https://wp. nyu.edu/gsas-revistatemporales/veronica-gerber-escritura-compostaje/ (9 Dec 2022). Cumes, Aura. “Mujeres indígenas, patriarcado y colonialismo: Un desafío a la segregación comprensiva de las formas dominio.” Anuario Hojas de Warmi 17 (2012). https://revistas.um.es/hojasdewarmi/article/ view/180291 (21 Aug 2022). Domínguez, Patricia. La balada de las sirenas secas. Video, 2020. 31:57 min. https://vimeo.com/680613378 (1 Mar 2023). Federici, Silvia. El patriarcado del salario. Críticas feministas al marxismo. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2018. Gago, Verónica. La potencia feminista. O el deseo de cambiarlo todo. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2019. Gerber Bicceci, Verónica. La compañía. Ciudad de México: Almadía, 2019. Krimer, María Inés. Noxa. Buenos Aires: Editorial Revólver, 2016. Linett, Cheril. Procesión Melinka. Video, 2016. 6:20 min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml4dwUN h9UA&t=3s (3 Sep 2022). ——. Memorial. Videoperformance, 2020. https://registrocontracultural.cl/memorial/ (3 Sep 2022).

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Mbembe, Achille. Necropolítica. Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2011. Meruane, Lina. Fruta podrida. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2015. Rupailaf, Roxana Miranda. Shumpall. Santiago: Pehuén Editores, 2018. Salleh, Ariel. Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. London: Zed Books, 1997. Schweblin, Samantha. Distancia de rescate. Buenos Aires: Random House, 2014. Svampa, Maristella. “Feminismos del Sur y ecofeminismo.” Nueva Sociedad 256 (2015, 127–131). ——. Antropoceno: Lecturas globales desde el Sur. Córdoba: La Sofía cartonera, 2019.

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Forest As Robert Harrison suggests in his book Forest: The Shadow of Civilization (1992), the idea that the forest is at the origin of civilization belongs to the constitutive traditions of the Western world. For the Greeks, it is in the forest that Artemis and Dionysus produced the metamorphoses from which humanity would eventually emerge; for the Romans, the first “race of men” surged from the trunks of trees; and a sort of forest, the “garden of Eden,” is at the center of the genesis of the world and humanity in Judeo-Christian tradition (Pogue Harrison 1992: 33, 12, 84). And yet, the notion that the forest “was first” did not encourage any of the cultures of Western antiquity to care for and preserve these ecosystems: the construction and expansion of the Greek and Roman civilizations resulted in the deforestation of the large forests of the Mediterranean (Harrison 1992: 55),1 and the spread of Christianity throughout the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries brought with it its own process of deforestation as well as the gradual extermination of the wild animals of Europe (Harrison 1992: 92), as was the case with wolves (Moriceau 2014: 2).2 In other words, Western cultural traditions understood the precedence of the forest with respect to “civilization” as something it had to leave behind and beyond its domain, and as something to be used and discarded to build “civilized” places: cities (Harrison 1992: ix). In this way, throughout the majority of Western history, the forest was understood as an “archaic” domain of “perdition” and, as such, the realm of threatening mythological beings, witches and pagan rituals, savages and madmen, fugitive lovers, or hardened outlaws. These ideas constituted, of course, part of the baggage that Europeans brought to

 According to Harrison, in their impulse to build and expand their civilization, both the Greeks and Romans promoted “a mindless deforestation of the Mediterranean” (1992: 55). As he explains, as early as the fourth century B.C. Plato nostalgically recalls a time when forest covered most of Attica. The deforestation to which Plato alludes was the consequence of the construction of Athens’ naval armada (Harrison 1992: 55). On their part, the Romans’ “insatiable mouth of empire,” Harrison states, “devoured the land, clearing it for agriculture and leading to irreversible erosion in regions that were once the most fertile in the world” (Harrison 1992: 55). The author, quoting David Attenborough, mentions the theory that the Roman empire could have collapsed due to climate change resulting from the deforestation of the Mediterranean basin. These facts and theories, of course, contribute to discussions on the origin of the notion of “nature” as an object and domain separate from “culture” and the beginning of the Anthropocene.  Jean-Marc Moriceau argues that the extermination of wolves in Western Europe, which occurred definitively in France at least between 1832 and 1930, actually began in the eighteenth century, when multiple European kingdoms mobilized significant resources to eradicate the animals, which they considered to be “harmful pests,” in part due to selective attacks on humans by those with rabies (Moriceau 2014: 2–4). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-011

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the Americas in the sixteenth century when they first penetrated the tropical American forests via the Atlantic Ocean and other waterways. Given that this encounter occurred during the transition between the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, the first Spanish explorers of the jungles and, in particular, of the Amazon basin projected upon this region the mythical universe of Greco-Roman antiquity, the marvelous imaginary of the chronicles of Marco Polo’s voyages, and Christian imagery of “paradise” and “hell” (Pizarro 2011: 30), as well as their own interpretation of the indigenous world. In this way, in accordance with the Greek mythological imagination, the Amazon jungle appeared to the first Spanish explorers as the dangerous and seductive land of the Amazons, woman warriors that lived in the forest without men, possessed large caches of gold, and fought to the death to defend their territory from foreigners.3 The jungle appeared to them as “paradise” since they believed they would find El Dorado, a changeable colonial legend whose essential elements include a yet-to-discover indigenous kingdom full of gold and an indigenous ruler supposedly coated in gold dust from head to toe.4 Simultaneously, the jungle appeared as a type of “hell” to these first explorers, insofar as it was a land where they were constantly plagued by hunger, madness, and death, except when they could rely upon the hospitality of the natives.5 During the Enlightenment, the jungle acquired new and more radical meanings when several European naturalists, such as Charles Marie de La Condamine, Aimé Bonpland, and Alexander von Humboldt, traveled to the Americas to study the continent’s nature, where they viewed its ecosystems, including its tropical forests, through the lens of their “utility” for scientific knowledge and their capacity to elicit aesthetic enjoyment and the experience of the sublime (Pratt 1992: 120). This process also involved the reinvention of the Americas and even the planet as a whole as the site of “nature,”6 as Mary

 Information about the Amazons appears in the 1542 chronicle by Fray Gaspar de Carvajal titled Relación del descubrimiento del río de las Amazonas. This chronicle, which narrates the expedition of Francisco de Orellana on the Amazon River, went unedited for over 300 years until the Royal Academy of History in Madrid published it in the Historia General de Indias by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in 1851. Forty years later, the Chilean José Toribio Medina located a copy of the chronicle, which he published in Seville in February 1895. For more information, see Descubrimiento del río de las Amazonas by Fray Gaspar de Carvajal in the Cervantes Virtual Library.  For an analysis of the legend of El Dorado as well as its influence in Latin American literature, see Charlotte Rogers (2019).  As Ana Pizarro states, the notion of “hell” is implicit in the chronicle written by Fray Pedro Simón on Pedro de Ursúa’s expedition on the Amazon river in 1561, which tells how Lope de Aguirre, the expedition’s second in command, convinced the party to kill Ursúa and several others heading the enterprise, return to Peru, and declare independence from Spain. It consists of a story of madness and violence in which the Spaniards experienced not only intrigue and murder, but also all sorts of privations during their navigation of the Amazonian rivers. A variation of the story was famously portrayed in Werner Herzog’s 1972 film Aguirre, the Wrath of God.  According to Pratt, “Humboldt sought to reinvent popular imaginings of America, and through America, of the planet itself. Even as he undertook to recreate South America in connection with its new opening to Northern Europe, Humboldt sought simultaneously to reframe bourgeois subjectivity, heading

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Louise Pratt has argued, ultimately resulting in a new, trans-Atlantic and hemispheric process of natural resource exploitation on a large scale, which would allow for enormous opportunities for the expansion of capital, technology, trade, and systems of knowledge. For their part, the elites of the newly independent Latin American nations would find in this process of reinvention of the Americas as nature a form of self-invention—in relation to both Europe and their own local populations (Pratt 1992: 112). This latter process occurred precisely in Latin American romantic literature, which would emerge at the beginning of the nineteenth century and would view nature as “the raw material for national feeling” (Rama 1984, 2008: 13–14). This idea, when related to the far-off jungle that the Spaniards—unlike the Portuguese—did not colonize until the nineteenth century, was not merely symbolic: in the Venezuelan poet Andrés Bello’s “Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida” (1826), for example, the jungle appears literally as a “swift conflagration” that leaves “deceased trunks” so as to give way to the “fruitful garden bed” that will be the pride of the new Latin American nations. It was the writers that Rama calls “regionalists”—and, in particular, the works of Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga, Brazilians Alberto Rangel and Euclides da Cunha, and Colombian poet and novelist José Eustasio Rivera—who would eventually propose a new vision of the forest based on documentative observation and criticism of the impacts of colonization and large-scale extraction of raw materials in this territory. These writers shared the belief in a “rational” project of colonizing wild nature, whether via state intervention or low-intensity settlement. At the same time, these authors’ works are permeated by contradictions and ambiguities in relation to this utilitarian and exploitative vision of their nations’ natural environment.7 In José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine, in particular, ambiguities toward rubber exploitation are not just prolific, but even go so far as to erase the differences, delineations, and hierarchies between Western modernity’s own notions of “humanity” and “nature.” However, Latin American literary and cultural criticism would not manage to articulate this approach and its “environmental” methods until over 80 years after the publication of the novel, arising from the dialogue between, on the one hand,

off its sundering of objectivist and subjectivist strategies, science and sentiment, information and experience. Along with others of his time, he proposed to Europeans a new kind of planetary consciousness” (Pratt 1992: 119–120).  During these authors’ lifetimes, extractive industries were in large part financed by Britain’s “invisible empire” and were dedicated to the exploitation of rubber in the Amazonian rainforest and wood and yerba mate in the Paranaense forest. For more on Quiroga’s imaginings about the socioenvironmental effects of British neocolonial capitalism on the Paranaense forest, see Jennifer L. French (2005). For a study on the environmentalist imagination in Quiroga, see also Jens Andermann (2018). For more on imaginaries of the forest in Euclides da Cunha and Alberto Rangel and the role of the modernizing state imaginary and settler colonialism see, respectively, Javier Uriarte’s “Euclides da Cunha en la Amazonía: pensar el desplazamiento, controlar los espacios, anunciar la guerra” (2019) and “Corpos, trabalho e meio ambiente na literatura de Alberto Rangel.”

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cultural studies, neo-Marxism, and postcolonialism and, on the other hand, ecocriticism, posthumanism, and new materialisms. At present, La vorágine is considered the foundational novel of the forest in the study of more-than-human aesthetics of the Amazon basin, a territory which has been battleground for the colonial extractivist practices of Western “civilization.”

The forest in La vorágine La vorágine (1924) tells the story of Arturo Cova, a poet from Bogotá who flees with his lover, Alicia, to Casanare, a Colombian-Venezuelan region that forms part of the greater Amazon river basin. At first, Cova and Alicia’s escape has a bucolic and pastoral tone, which recreates the common trope of chivalric literature of the lovers that hide in the forest so as to love one another freely, away from social conventions. And yet, this motif soon changes in tone, when Alicia and Griselda—the mistress of the estate where the lovers are staying—disappear with a rubber merchant, and Cova, Griselda’s husband, and the estate’s majordomo penetrate into the Amazon rainforest to find them. In the jungle, the story acquires the character of an anti-hero’s journey, and is narrated in a lyrical, dream-like, and even delirious tone, as well as a testimonial and documentative one. The former belongs to the principal narrator-character, the urban poet Arturo Cova, while the latter corresponds to other characters in the novel, such as the local guide El Pipa and, above all, Clemente Silva, a poor mestizo peasant that has spent years in the jungle searching for his son and working under debt peonage to various rubber companies. The documentative tone of the novel refers to the story of rubber extraction in the Caquetá and Putumayo regions during the so-called “Rubber Boom,” known in Spanish as the “fiebre del caucho,” or rubber fever. These names refer to the 1870–1930 boom in the demand for natural rubber derived from the Hevea brasiliensis and Castilloa elástica trees, which was commercialized and exported from the Amazonian rivers to England and the United States. This economic activity undertaken by Brazilian and Peruvian elites and “barons,” above all using foreign and particularly British capital, brought a new wave of colonization to the Amazon, including the emergence and expansion of cities such as Manaus in Brazil and Iquitos in Peru. Simultaneously, the Rubber Boom provoked the deforestation of large areas of the Amazon rainforest—particularly in the zones where the Castilloa elástica trees, which had to be cut down for rubber extraction, were located—and a “human holocaust,” in the words of Colombian anthropologist Roberto Pineda Camacho, resulting from the genocide of the indigenous labor force, which was enslaved to support the process. It is calculated that, in the Colombian territories of Putumayo and Caquetá alone, around 40,000 indigenous people died at the hands of settlers and rubber

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companies—in particular, the Anglo-Peruvian Amazon Company, also known as the Casa Arana (Pineda Camacho 2000: 80). Rivera knew this story well from reading the report of Roger Casement (Bernucci 2020: 87) and other documents on the horrors of rubber extraction, as well as from his work in the Amazon river basin as a member of the Commission on Borders with Venezuela between 1920 and 1922. As La vorágine and other documentative materials indicate, Rivera’s interest in the rubber boom was both political and artistic. On the one hand, the novel demonstrates, like a repeat of the secession of Panama from Colombia in 1903 at the behest of the United States, the inattention of the Colombian state toward its territories beyond the Andes. On the other, it had the jungle as its object and backdrop, a territory that Rivera had already explored aesthetically, even before he had ever visited it, in his poetry collection Tierra de promisión (1921). The author’s political and artistic interests in the history of the Amazon are intertwined throughout La vorágine from the very “prologue” of the novel: a letter signed by the author directed to a government “minister,” which declares that what follows is the manuscript of Arturo Cova, and that the manuscript should not be published “without independent confirmation of its denunciations concerning the conditions suffered by Colombian rubber tappers in the Amazonian territories of neighboring republics” (Rivera 2018: 1). In this way, making use of the old trope of passing off a fictional text as documentative, Rivera problematized and entangled his political concern toward rubber extraction in a territory which was under dispute by other Latin American nations and international companies with his aesthetic interest in the jungle as literary motif. Even further, both interests seem to be combined in the question of what brought the rubber industry to “irrationally” engage in the enslavement, torture, and murder of its own indigenous and mestizo labor force, a “madness” that the narrator-character Cova speculates arises from the “green hell” of the jungle itself, particularly from malevolent trees gifted with consciousness and the capacity for communication, which appear to him and other characters when experiencing the effects of fever or yagé—an hallucinogenic vine that many indigenous peoples in the Amazon use for healing and spiritual purposes. On other occasions, however, the narrative demonstrates how capitalism, particularly in the absence of the state, produces—as the character Clemente Silva states—a “money madness” (Rivera 1924, 2009: 216), and forces the rubber workers, in their struggle to extract enough rubber to fulfill their work quota, to destroy the jungle and murder one another. The end of the novel, consisting of a telegram from the Colombian consulate in Manaus, Brazil, explores the multivalence of this active, humanized jungle which simultaneously naturalizes its intruders when, referring to Cova and his companions, it states: “Clemente Silva searched unsuccessfully for five months finding no trace whatsoever. The jungle devoured them!” (Rivera 2018: 219).

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La vorágine and its Readers Despite the centrality of the practices of the rubber industry in the novel, traditional literary historiography during the twentieth century set aside the novel’s historical jungle and focused on the ahistorical and mythical one. As a result, it understood the novel as a text that responded to the necessity of turning toward the “interior” of the Latin American nations in search of the “great American drama as distinct from the European” (Oviedo 2001: 226). For literary historians, like José Miguel Oviedo or Pedro Shimose, the “novels of the land” or “regionalist novels” to which La vorágine belonged elevated a geographical territory to the status of “symbol of political distinction and sovereignty,” which, by extension, was considered typically “Latin American” (Shimose 1993: 249). Such historians ignored the reading of Ángel Rama, who instead highlighted how the political impulse that moved the regionalist authors was the revindication of a middle class that “made the demands of the lower classes their own” (1984: 15) and proclaimed themselves as “the new interpreter[s] of nationality” (1984: 16). And yet, the idea that nature was more important than human matters in the regionalist novels took hold in the literary historiography. In large measure, this was due to readings by Latin American Boom writers. Carlos Fuentes, for example, claimed that the Hispanic American novel, before the Boom, “had been written by men that seemed to take on the tradition of the great sixteenth-century explorers. These literary Solís, Grijalbas, and Cabrals continued until recently to discover with amazement and terror that the Latin American world was confronted with the implacable presence of jungles and mountains at an inhuman scale” (Fuentes 1969: 9). In other words, for Fuentes the regionalist novels were, above all, novels about “nature,” which necessarily implied that “the landscape had a greater importance than people of flesh and blood,” as Mario Vargas Llosa would say (1993: 152). This reading by the Boom writers not only overlooked the fact that La vorágine asserted Rivera’s concerns for the impoverished Amazonian indigenous peoples and peasants that had been enslaved, tortured, and murdered by the rubber industry, but also neglected to problematize the fact that the jungle was constantly intertwined with this historical reality that Rivera sought to represent.8 In fact, criticism would spend quite a bit of time relating the supposed prominence of geography with a political project of a nationalist or “autochthonous” character in regard to the discourses of Western modernity. Carlos J. Alonso, for example, in The Spanish American Regional Novel (1990), states that the discourse of the novels of the land “is simultaneously an attempt to create a genuinely autochthonous work, and an unwitting denaturalization of the concept of an indigenous text by exposing its

 Victoria Saramago also demonstrates in Fictional Environments that, although the Boom writers sought to separate themselves from the exaggerated emphasis on nature that they found in the literary tradition that preceded them, their works nevertheless show that nature persisted as a literary preoccupation, even when it had no mimetic relationship with the environments and imaginaries that they would mobilize (Saramago 2021: 26).

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intrinsically discursive nature, its effective repeatability as a modality of discourse” (1990: 66). In spite of this, Alonso denies that La vorágine’s jungle is the same territory open to the possibilities of human action that he found in Don Segundo Sombra, by the Argentine Ricardo Güiraldes, or Doña Bárbara, by the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos. Rather, he states that in La vorágine the space of the jungle is closed and defensive before humanity, even as it is intimately intertwined with it due to the destructive rubber extraction (Alonso 1990: 137–138). Even so, this observation did not inspire the critic to interest himself in the complexity of this link between humanity and nature in the novel. In his view, “nature acts as a sort of immense echo chamber that returns to the speaker the garbled and amplified reverberations of his own discourse” (1990: 138). In other words, for Alonso, nature did not have greater importance than the beings of flesh and blood in the novel; rather, the beings of flesh and blood were more important than nature, since the latter was nothing more than a projection of their own discourse. Again, criticism falls into one of the poles of the dualism dividing humanity and nature that the novel’s aesthetic approach specifically intended to question. Sylvia Molloy, however, was one of the first critics to locate a particular aesthetic proposal in La vorágine’s jumble of jungle, historical reality, and language. Molloy proposed that the novel’s style was articulated through the figure of “contagion” or “contamination,” and that this figure—far from remaining hidden in the text—is evidenced by the narration as early as the prologue, where “the reality of the document erases borders and contaminates spaces: indicating . . . the splitting—better yet, the perversion—of the narrative voice” (Molloy 1987: 748). According to Molloy, this discursive contagion was also evident in the representation of the jungle. Nature in the novel was permeated not only with Modernist poetic discourse—whose tropes are expressed distantly and parodically (Molloy 1987: 749–750)9— but also with the “popular voices” of characters like Clemente Silva or el Pipa, and even with the “noises” of the jungle—which present themselves to the narrator-character as “unknown voices” that muddle one’s senses and perception (Molloy 1987: 755). In this sense, she concludes, La vorágine is the story of the polyphonic “invasion” of an “active jungle” which, through discursive contagion—a metaphor, undoubtedly, for the contagion spread by mosquito bites—ended up “wilding” Cova’s narration and, in this way, “sickening” the whole text (Molloy 1987: 757–758). Although later readings of La vorágine which revindicate its environmentalist aesthetics are not necessarily directly in debt to Molloy, they start from the idea, which she inaugurated, that La vorágine contains various discourses where nature and humanity are intimately interwoven. Jennifer French, for example, in Nature, Neocolonialism, and  Although Molloy reads the character of Cova as a Modernist poet—albeit a parody of one—in “Imagen y experiencia en La vorágine,” Jean Franco reads him as a Romantic poet, a key in which she also interprets a series of tropes in the novel, including Cova’s constant evocations of “destiny” and the jungle as an “inhuman prison.”

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the Spanish American Regional Writers (2005), would read Rivera’s jungle—like that of authors such as Horacio Quiroga and Benito Lynch—as an expression of the dialectic of a neocolonialism that exercised the “invisible empire” of Great Brain over the Latin American countries through the capital that financed rubber extraction (French 2005: 29). Molloy’s idea that various discourses on the jungle are found in La vorágine is also present in French’s reading, although in the latter, it responds to what she calls the “dialectic of the rubber boom” in Amazonia.10 In particular, French detects a “liberal response” in the novel, which seeks to strengthen internal colonialism and the Colombian borders against foreign incursions (French 2005: 124), and a contradictory and roughly outlined “radical response,” which seeks to undermine the capitalist principles and practices of the Colombian elite and find a new, non-exploitative dynamic between the Colombian government, the population, and nature (French 2005: 125). The novel’s liberal response, which French also refers to as “topographical,” is evident, she states, in the incessant mapping of the jungle, its rivers, its populations, and its borders with other countries. This response reflects Rivera’s work as a lawyer on the Commission on Borders with Venezuela, while simultaneously emphasizing the numerous frustrations that he encountered in this position due to the Colombian government’s lack of response to his reports. Thus, French points out, La vorágine is full of allusions to “losing oneself” and being “devoured” by an unknown jungle before the “blind eye” of the Colombian state (French 2005: 125–133). On the other hand, the radical response is demonstrated by Cova’s identification with the indigenous peoples when they are faced with a common enemy at a certain point in the novel (French 2005: 140).11 French argues that this response is also evident in his impulse to embrace the experience and struggle of the workers indebted to the rubber companies (French 2005: 141) and, finally, in his explicit denunciation of the ecological devastation caused by rubber extraction. “French further finds that the novel frequently recurs to a narrative approach that “personifies trees and treefies people” (French 2005: 150). The former occurs in the “testimonies” of characters such as el Pipa or Clemente Silva, when they relate

 For a reading of La vorágine from the perspective of historical materialism, see Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age by Ericka Beckman (2012), where she argues that La vorágine makes use of several of the tropes of the operation and representation of capitalism, such as “counterfeiting” and “accounting,” in order to highlight the forms in which rubber extraction is organized and represented.  Cova’s identification with the indigenous people is problematic since the character frequently repeats the racialist ideas about indigenous groups that are typical of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Colombian elites [e.g., “these wandering forest tribes with a rudimentary culture lack gods and heroes, or even clear notions of past and future” (Rivera 2018: 91)]. Critic María Mercedes Ortíz also notes that the first part of the novel often situates the Guahibo Indians in the unambiguous position of “savages” and “barbarians” and the Llaneros settlers in the role of “saviors” and “civilized” (2005: 174). If there is an identification between Cova and indigenous people in this second part of the novel, as French suggests, it might only because they both appear as a “defeated race” in the face of rubber neocolonialism.

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experiences where trees have interiority and communicate amongst themselves. The latter occurs in several passages of the novel where Cova feels as though he himself has been transformed into a tree. Although the novel’s explanation of this experience is a medical one since it states an attack of beriberi caused it, French insists that, In the context of the anthropomorphic language with which the jungle is represented, however, the passage also agitates for an extraordinary kind of interspecies identification: if the humans cannot, on their own accord, imagine the suffer of the rubber trees, the jungle itself—by deploying one of its endemic illness—will create the only conditions through which Cova, and perhaps his readers, can finally appreciate the vegetal immobility that makes them the helpless victims of capitalist exploitation (French 2005: 151, my emphasis).12

French’s reading of the treefication of humans and humanization of trees in La vorágine is the first simultaneously materialist, postcolonial, and environmentalist account of the novel interpretation. This type of critical approach would be expanded by Héctor Hoyos in Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America (2019), where he argues that La vorágine is one of the most important examples of what he calls “transcultural materialism.” This aesthetic mode is, in his words, “a sublation of two distinct and, to some extent, two opposing ways of thinking: historical materialism and new materialisms. One puts the human species first; the other, precisely, seeks to decenter it” (Hoyos 2019: 19), by presenting “compelling, enduring stories about people and processes which, by virtue of being outside of narrative, are an easy target of exploitation” (Hoyos 2019: 18). Hoyos reads the jungle in La vorágine, then, as a series of human and non-human material

 On her part, in the book Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-century Tropical Narratives (2012), Charlotte Rogers argues that the jungle in La vorágine is, above all, mediated by medical discourses, psychiatry in particular. As she states, Cova’s diary is above all the diary of a man who has medically gone “mad.” According to Rogers, madness as an aesthetic approach allows Rivera to reflect on the future of Colombia as a nation-state and, in particular, on the need for modernization so as to avoid its genetic decline, a debate that was typical for intellectuals of his generation in Colombia (Rogers 2012: 103). Additionally, it allows him to transform Cova into a writer capable of lyrically evoking the space of the jungle and, in this way, create a new type of autochthonous Hispanic American literature (Rogers 2012: 113) based in psychiatric language. However, as Felipe Martínez Pinzón has said, Rivera did not align himself with the arguments of eugenicists who considered the race to be degenerating in Colombia due to the tropical climate. On the contrary, he was aligned with neoLamarckian theories which posited that the environment could intervene hygienically to better the “race” (where race is a synonym for the people). According to Martínez Pinzón, Rivera therefore uses the language of illness—and, specifically, the language of “madness”—to demonstrate how imaginaries of Colombian modernization which principally resorted to images of incessant mobility not only did not work in the space of the jungle but even made it uninhabitable. In his words, “what truly makes spaces [such as the jungle] uninhabitable” is not racial degeneration as expressed through psychiatric language, but rather “their capture by part of the genocidal rubber industry” (Martínez Pinzón 2016: 148).

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assemblages which revolve around rubber: trees cut into slices; human backs scarred by whips; personified trees and humans that have the experience of having become trees (Hoyos 2019: 81). These assemblages, taken alongside an economy of desire that does not hide its sexual resonances—a connection that Molloy had highlighted, which appears in the novel’s comparison between latex and semen—embody a fantasy of “absolute control” via the extraction and human possession of rubber (Hoyos 2019: 85). Additionally, these assemblages show that, rather than the jungle winning out over humanity, rubber is the substrate for a process of material transculturation, as well as a failed experiment of co-evolution between humans and plants like that which has existed with other natural products (Hoyos 2019: 87).13 In Hoyos’s reading, then, rubber is an “actor” that articulates a series of relationships and processes of hybridization between the human and non-human world. However, for other authors, such as Lesley Wylie, in the novel this hybridization is also the result of transculturation with indigenous cosmologies. Wylie has arrived at this reading of La vorágine after multiple studies of the novel. In Colonial Tropes, Postcolonial Tricks (2009), Wylie focused on Rivera’s parody of the colonial tropes of tropical travel literature in La vorágine. In Colombia’s Forgotten Frontier: A Literary Geography of the Putumayo (2013), she asserted the novel’s local geopolitics based in Amazonian practices and discourses, such as indigenous cosmologies, ontologies, and the consumption of medicinal and spiritual plants like yagé. In her most recent book, The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature (2020), Wylie goes further and reads the novel’s aesthetic approach in light of anthropological studies of indigenous ontologies by scholars such as Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Eduardo Kohn, which highlight the fluidity between the human and non-human in Amerindian ontologies, including the fact that they ascribe lives and personalities to animals and plants and conceive of life as the fruit of multiple metamorphoses that nevertheless maintain the same interiority or “humanity” (Wylie 2020: 136). Inspired by these analyses of Amazonian indigenous cosmologies, Wylie interprets the passages in La vorágine where trees are presented as having subjectivity, as well as those where Cova becomes a tree, as moments of both anthropomorphism and phytomorphism along the line of indigenous ontologies. Furthermore, she states, anthropomorphism in La vorágine is based in a comparison between the physicality of trees and human corporeality. This is clearly seen, she says, in the narrative of the character Clemente Silva, who describes the extraction of rubber from tree bark as an “incision” and an “injury” on the “body” of the tree, which extracts its “milk” or “juice,” leaving it “hacked” and full of “scars, thick, protuberant, swollen, like squeezed tumours” (Rivera qtd. Wylie 2020: 141–142).

 Hoyos dialogues here with North American journalist Michael Pollan who, in books like The Botany of Desire (2002), argues that it is not just human beings that have dominated and benefited from certain plants or natural products, but rather that these natural products have also benefited, in terms of evolution and expansion, from human intervention into their cultivation. This is the case for apples, potatoes, or marijuana, Pollan argues.

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A metamorphosis based in corporeal difference and not the capacity for reasoning or communication also occurs, according to Wylie, in the novel’s moments of phytomorphism. This appears, for example, when Cova suffers from an attack of beriberi and feels like his leg, arm, and hand are “such as a tree must feel on having a dead bough clinging to its living trunk,” or like he is “rooted to the earth” and, along his leg, “swollen, spongy, deformed like the tubers of palms, I felt a hot, petrifying sap creeping” (Rivera qtd. Wylie 2020: 148). For Wylie, these aesthetic approaches demonstrate that Rivera recreated both the human and plant experience of rubber extraction “on their own terms,” and not as a mere projection of the human world, as occurs in traditional Western anthropomorphism. As a result, she concludes that La vorágine is “the culmination of the work’s vegetalinspired aesthetic, where the line between people and plants—between a materialist reading of jungle as commodity and a relational reading that draws out the interconnection between humans and nonhumans—is finally and irreversibly erased” (Wylie 2020: 152). Whether based in the novel’s reflection upon the sensorial and sonorous effects of the jungle; the dialectic of the rubber boom; rubber as an actor that articulates the relationship between the human and non-human worlds; or transculturation with Amerindian ontologies, all of these readings highlight La vorágine’s capacity to imagine the jungle as a conglomeration of the worlds of beings who have interiority and the capacity to communicate, and who suffer and resist the material violence of extractive neocolonialism.

Uhiri or the Jungle as cosmopoliteia Studies like Wylie’s that avow the influence of ceremonial plants such as yage and indigenous ontologies and cosmologies in La vorágine owe a debt to Lucía Sá’s Rainforest Literatures (2004), which shows how narratives of indigenous Amazonian peoples, collected by different missionaries and anthropologists across centuries, have influenced literature written in Spanish and Portuguese about the Amazon rainforest over the last 150 years. Although Sá does not focus on La vorágine, she demonstrates, for example, how the concept of the Caribbean origin of “canaima” was fundamental in the titular novel by Rómulo Gallegos (1935); how texts and characters of tupí-guaraní origin influenced the imagining of the jungle present in Mario de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928) or in the short story “Meu tio o Iauretê” (1967) by João Guimarães Rosa; or how Machiguenga indigenous narratives played a significant role in El hablador (1987) by Mario Vargas Llosa. Over the last ten years, literary and cultural criticism on Amazonia has increasingly studied not only processes of transculturation between the Western and indigenous imaginaries—processes that tend to occur in unequal dynamics that privilege the Western viewpoint—but also representations of the Amazon rainforest from the indigenous blalantly underpresented point of view. The testimonial book The Falling

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Sky (2010), by Yanomami indigenous activist and shaman Davi Kopenawa, coauthored with the anthropologist Bruce Albert, has been foundational both in providing a firsthand narrative of Amerindian cosmologies about the forest, which previously could only be accessed via anthropological works, and also because of its divergance from the Western, literary lineage of La vorágine. Kopenawa’s testimony highlights the difference between what Westerners consider to be “nature” in the forest and what it is for the Yanomami people. As he states, shamans know that trees and mountains belong to the xapiri; that is, the spirits of beings that, in different temporalities and metamorphoses of creation, populate the jungle or “uhiri.” For the Yanomami, then, the jungle is, in Jens Andermann’s words, an “interface or a crystallization of temporal layers, a mnemonic ecology” (Andermann 2021: 2), composed of spiritual and cosmological beings that, furthermore, all share the same “human” essence. In this sense, he states, following the approach of Viveiros de Castro, the jungle is above all a “cosmopoliteia” or “international arena,” in which human beings, through shamans, can negotiate with different “societies” of spiritual beings in order to survive in the forest. In this context, white settlers and their extractive projects appear as “land eaters who would destroy everything” (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 262) by extracting harmful elements from the jungle that unleash dangerous epidemics or, in Kopenawa’s words: The things that white people work so hard to extract from the depths of the earth, minerals, and oil, are not foods. These are evil and dangerous things, saturated with coughs and fevers. [. . .] The forest is the flesh and skin of our earth, which is the back of the old sky Hutukara that fell in the beginning of time [. . .]. Yet they did not seem to realize that these fragments of the old sky were dangerous! They did not know that the thick yellowish fumes emanated from them are a powerful epidemic smoke that thrusts like a weapon to kill those who come near and breathe it (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 282–283, my emphasis).

This vision of extractivism, which associates it with the epidemics that have been spread to the indigenous Yanomami population over the years—just as recently occurred with COVID-19 across the rest of the globe—does not produce a “representation” from an “animistic” perspective of a forest ecosystem under the attack of extractive industries. It offers itself instead, as Andermann argues, as a form of “cultural translation” (Andermann 2021: 7), which not only involves the negotiation of “equivalences” between languages and cultures, but also Kopenawa’s training as a shaman and his relationship with the jungle’s spiritual cosmological beings. In other words, Andermann argues, the act of cultural translation that Kopenawa carries out is also a singular form of “narrative transculturation,” where instead of a disjunctive synthesis—as in the case of the transculturation through which Rama reads regionalism—there would be a space of enunciation open to the expression of cosmological beings via shamanic mediation (Andermann 2021: 9). The polyphonic jungle which Molloy detected in La vorágine, and which Jennifer French, Héctor Hoyos, and Lesley Wylie saw as evidence of the rubber boom’s neocolonial,

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transculturating, and material dialectic, acquires new, more radical meanings for Latin American posthuman ecocritical studies in Kopenawa and Albert’s The Falling Sky. On the one hand, this ultimately eliminates the separation, hierarchy, and centrality of history and the Western-human point of view of the jungle—a point of view which has insisted upon seeing the forest as a domain of raw material and merchandise opposed to an entanglement of human and non-human natures and cultures—and, on the other, imagines the jungle as a space of encounter and interaction for multiple worlds, agencies, corporealities, and spiritualities, which includes indigenous peoples as mediating agents. Although La vorágine is the most emblematic novel for Latin American posthuman and ecocritical studies about the forest and The Falling Sky one of the most recent texts that has entered into this field of study, readings of these two works demonstrate that Latin American posthuman and ecocritical studies have decentered their interest not only in the exclusive representation of “human” affairs against a “natural” background of symbolic and discursive character, but also in Western literary texts as the privileged objects of study of literary, cultural and ecocritical studies. Today, Latin American environmental humanities are interested in artefacts and approaches beyond both the human and Western culture, that articulate different territories and ecosystems, including the forest, as a “pluriverse” (Escobar 2018: 15–16) of distinct human, non-human, spiritual, and cosmological groups and societies, which cohabit and represent themselves in different forms of struggle against the “sole world” created by Western, colonial, modern, and capitalist “civilization.”

Works Cited Alonso, Carlos J. The Spanish American Regional Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Andermann, Jens. Tierras en trance: Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje. Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados, 2018. ——. “Memories of Extractivism: Slow Violence, Terror, and Matter.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 29. 4 (2021): 537–554. Beckman, Ericka. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin American Export Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Bello, Andrés. “La agricultura de la zona tórrida,” www.cervantesvirtual.com. Biblioteca Cervantes Virtual. (1826) May, 28 2023. Bernucci, Leopoldo M. Un paraíso sospechoso: “La vorágine” de José Eustasio Rivera: novela e historia. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2020. Danowski, Déborah, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. The Ends of the World. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016. Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Franco, Jean. “Imagen y experiencia en La vorágine.” La vorágine: textos críticos. Ed. Montserrat Ordoñez. Bogotá: Alianza Editorial Colombiana, 1987. 135–148. French, Jennifer. Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2005.

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Fuentes, Carlos. La nueva novela hispanoamericana. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1969. Gallegos, Rómulo. Canaima. Madrid: Colección Archivos, 1991 [1935]. Harrison, Robert. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hoyos, Héctor. Things with a History. Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Kopenawa, Davi, and Albert, Bruce. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Martínez-Pinzón, Felipe. Una cultura de invernadero: trópico y civilización en Colombia (1808–1928). Madrid and Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2016. Molloy, Sylvia. “Contagio narrativo y gesticulación retórica en La vorágine.” Revista Iberoamericana 53.141 (1987): 745–766. Moriceau, Jean-Marc. “The Wolf Threat in France from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century.” Hal Open Science (June 25, 2014). hal-01011915. Oviedo, José Miguel. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2001. Ortiz, María Mercedes. “Limpiar la sabana de serpientes, tigres e indios: la frontera llanera en La vorágine de José Eustasio Rivera.” Palimpsestvs, 5 (jan. 2005). Pineda Camacho, Roberto. Holocausto en el Amazonas: una historia social de la Casa Arana. Bogotá: Planeta Editorial, 2000. ——. “La Casa Arana en el Putumayo.” Revista Credencial 160 (2017). https://www.banrepcultural.org/biblio teca-virtual/credencial-historia/numero-160/la-casa-arana-en-el-putumayo (April 12, 20023). Pizarro, Ana. Amazonía. El río tiene voces. La Habana: Fondo Editorial Casa de las Américas, 2011. Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye-view of the World. New York: Random House, 2002. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Rama, Ángel. Transculturación narrativa en América Latina [1984]. 2nd ed. Buenos Aires: Ediciones El Andariego, 2008. Rogers, Charlotte. Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012. ——. Mourning El Dorado: Literature and Extractivism in the Contemporary American Tropics. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Rivera, José Eustasio. La vorágine [1924]. Bogotá: Universidad Javeriana, 2009. ——. The Vortex: A Novel. Trans. John Charles Chasteen. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Sá, Lúcia. Rainforest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Saramago, Victoria. Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Shimose, Pedro. Historia de la literatura latinoamericana. Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1993. Uriarte, Javier. “Euclides da Cunha en la Amazonía: pensar el desplazamiento, controlar los espacios, anunciar la Guerra.” Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana 45.90 (2019): 15–28. ——. “Corpos, trabalho e meio ambiente na literatura de Alberto Rangel.” Revista Landa 10.2 (2022): 220–241. Vargas Llosa, Mario. El pez en el agua: memorias. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1993. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Perspectivismo e multinaturalismo na América indígena. São Paulo: Ubu Editora, 2018. Wylie, Lesley. Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks: Rewriting the Tropics in the Novela de la Selva. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. ——. Colombia’s Forgotten Frontier: A Literary Geography of the Putumayo. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. ——. The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.

Jorge Quintana Navarrete

Geology When meteorologist Paul Crutzen proposed the Anthropocene concept at the turn of the twenty-first century, he ignited a productive discussion across natural, social, and humanistic disciplines on the interpenetration between geology and humanity. Crutzen suggested that at some point in the recent past human beings have become a “major geologic force” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 18) whose impact on Earth’s geological strata is clearly discernible, thus inaugurating a new geological epoch named the Anthropocene. This has had wide-ranging repercussions not only for geology’s own understanding of the history of the Earth, but also more generally for social and humanistic conceptions of the interrelation between human societies (their socioeconomic, political, and cultural components) and geology. In the scientific community, verification of the Anthropocene hypothesis has involved a cluster of difficulties such as agreement on dating or boundary markers which had been less controversial in the designation of other geological epochs or periods. The fact that the Anthropocene is an epoch still in process that allegedly began barely centuries or even decades ago contrasts starkly with all previous geological epochs, which took place hundreds of thousands or millions of years in the past. In effect, the scientific community still debates whether there is any reliable marker in the Earth’s stratigraphic record that unequivocally shows evidence of global processes of physical, chemical, and biological changes driven by human activities, and whether those changes happened simultaneously at a specific point in time. Furthermore, there are still ongoing debates concerning the possibility that the Anthropocene has effectively triggered the so–called “sixth extinction” (Kolbert 2014: 3): a massive extinction of biological species that could be added to the five extinctions that occurred in the geological past according to evidence provided by the fossil record. Even if the Anthropocene has not yet been accepted as an official geological epoch by the International Union of Geological Sciences—the largest scientific organization devoted to the field—, the debates over Crutzen’s concept have had a particularly significant influence on the social and humanistic disciplines, which have frequently centered their attention on the overlooked political implications of the Anthropocene concept. For instance, environmental historian Jason Moore (2017: 595–596) has argued that the capitalist mode of organizing and appropriating nature—and not “humanity” as a whole—is responsible for launching the new geological epoch which should be more aptly named Capitalocene. Postcolonial geographer Kathryn Yusoff (2018: 24–25), on the other hand, has shown that every suggested dating of the Anthropocene takes for granted and ends up invisibilizing the fundamental role played in the historical development of anthropogenic climate change by processes of dispossession and violence suffered by people of color around the world. More generally, the debates on Crutzen’s concept have prompted a broad engagement among social and humanistic scholars https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-012

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with the geological, understood both as a series of earthly processes and as a particular scientific framing and knowledge of the Earth. In addition to Yusoff’s work on geology as a “technology of matter” closely related to racialization and oppression in the Western world (Yusoff 2018: 14), one could also mention critical theorist Elizabeth Povinelli’s examination of how governmentality functions in late settler societies by policing the “geontological” division of being between life and nonlife (Povinelli 2016: 4–5). In the field of cultural analysis, feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz has theorized art as a direct engagement with and prolongation of Earth’s always excessive forces (Grosz 2020: 10–11),while media theorist Jussi Parikka has drawn attention to the usually dismissed mineralogical materiality of new technologies and their equally geological afterlives as waste (Parikka 2015: 3–4). Taken together, all these research projects illustrate the recent explosion of interest in the geological which, building on the pioneering work of thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987: 39–74), Manuel De Landa (1997: 27–99) and Édouard Glissant (1997: 146–157), has intensified in the wake of the Anthropocene debate and the current ecological crisis. In consonance with all these theoretical efforts, the field of Latin American studies has also recently approached the interrelation of the geological with Latin America’s socioeconomic, political, and cultural structures both in their current late capitalist configurations and in their past developments throughout history, emphasizing the interpenetration of the region’s history of colonialism and the global circuits of mineral extraction.1 Contributing to this framework, this chapter explores how the geological and the political coalesced in the figure of the catastrophe in Mexican scientific writings during the course of the long nineteenth century, a crucial period of formation both for modern geological science and for Mexico as a recently independent nation. In writings by authors such as Mariano Bárcena, Juan Nepomuceno Adorno, and Manuel Miranda Marrón, Mexico was construed as a territory threatened by catastrophes in three interconnected ways: first, during bygone geological eras the territory of Mexico must have been shaped by catastrophic events that left an imprint in the geological strata; secondly, recent disasters caused by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes supported the idea that Mexico was still under threat from the powers of the Earth; lastly, the catastrophist understanding of geology was mobilized to comprehend the political events— such as foreign invasions or socialist mobilizations—that undermined the stability of the country in the nineteenth century. In this way, the interrelation of these three senses of catastrophe led to the idea that the Mexican land, inasmuch as it was continuously under threat from catastrophes, had to be safeguarded and ultimately controlled by the state and science. The joint action of scientific knowledge and political power would allegedly turn the essential unpredictability and brutality of catastrophes into predictable and manageable events that no longer represent a real danger to the

 To give only a few examples, see Jorge Quintana Navarrete (2022), Nancy Applebaum (2016), and Ricardo Duarte Filho (2022).

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community. However, the deterritorializing forces both at the level of the geological and the political appear in these scientific texts as an unstable, dynamic ground that could potentially overturn seemingly sound structures.

Geological Catastrophism During the first half of the nineteenth century, as has been extensively shown by historian of Earth sciences Martin Rudwick, it was becoming increasingly clear to the eyes of early geologists that the Earth’s history was inconceivably long and full of “revolutions” or drastic transformations that had completely altered the face of the planet and its flora and fauna.2 Geological and paleontological methods—two nascent disciplines at the turn of the nineteenth century—were proving it difficult to deny the fact that throughout extended periods of time natural processes had radically changed global climate; periods of glaciation had alternated with warmer climates; sea level and the positions of land masses had also been altered drastically; marine ecosystems had given way to tropical forests; whole species of flora and fauna—in some cases radically different from those that exist today—had become extinct, to name only a few cases from Earth’s eventful history. As Andrés Manuel del Río puts it in Manual de geología (1841), the first book on geology published in Mexico: Está pues la arcilla de bosques debajo del sistema cretáceo que es marítimo, y encima de los miembros superiores del oolítico, que es también marino, lo que indica las grandes revoluciones antiguas en la posición del mar y la tierra (Del Río 1841: 27). [Thus, there is clay of forests below the Cretaceous system, which is maritime, and above the upper echelons of the oolitic, which is also marine, indicating the great ancient revolutions in sea and land positions.]

Early geologists in Europe and the Americas set off then to “read” the Earth’s history like a book or an archive that had successively accumulated the physical remains of each distinct iteration of the planet’s geological and biological profile.3 These distinct periods, which were often defined by drastic transformations that signaled the start and end of each one, became the basis for the designation of the geological eras and epochs that still remain in use today. But if scientists generally agreed on this broad image of Earth’s history, there were still some critical questions that needed to be addressed. In particular, the issue of how these radical transformations came about was especially pressing:

 Rudwick has published two volumes (Rudwick 2004; 2008) that provide a deep understanding of how the basic features of Earth’s history were deduced by early geologists. Additionally, Rudwick also published a more accessible introduction to this topic (Rudwick 2014).  On the idea of archive in the geological sciences, see David Sepkoski (2017).

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should these “revolutions” be framed as the product of slow, gradual changes such as erosion or sedimentation—still seen at work in nature today—that accumulated over lengthy periods of time to create massive alterations, or should these drastic changes instead be thought of as the result of sudden, fulminant events that varied in magnitude— but not in kind—to the natural processes occurring today, such as earthquakes, volcanism or floods? In 1832, English geologist William Whewell coined two terms—uniformitarianism and catastrophism—to refer respectively to these opposing views. Throughout the nineteenth century, diverse catastrophist theories were espoused by Georges Curvier, Elie de Beaumont, and William Buckland to account for some of the Earth’s drastic alterations, while Charles Lyell—building on the previous work of James Hutton—emerged as the leading proponent of the uniformitarian perspective, which crucially informed Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. By the second half of the nineteenth century, uniformitarianism was steadily establishing itself in Europe and the US as the accepted scientific framework for understanding the Earth’s successive epochs, as Lyell’s efforts to delegitimize catastrophism and illustrate the work of uniformitarian principles in nature proved greatly successful and influential.4 In Mexico, however, catastrophist theories had a stronger hold than in other countries’ scientific circles (Cañizares-Esguerra 2006: 161). As I will show, the reasons for this reality cannot be reduced to a lack of geological expertise by Mexican geologists or, for that matter, to a question of purely scientific arguments and evidence, since—as the debates on the Anthropocene clearly demonstrate—geological discussions are always intertwined with and informed by broader cultural and political issues and assumptions shaping societies as a whole. As David Sepkoski has recently argued, the alleged catastrophes of the deep past and their resulting extinction of biological species have been especially politically charged issues since the nineteenth century because they vividly bring forth accepted cultural and political attitudes towards the stability of the current society—and even of the human species at large— and its potential futures (Sepkoski 2020: 5). While one must be wary of posing a direct and seamless correlation between geological knowledge and political ideas, one can still suggest a broad, imperfect relationship between the scientific consensus and the political climate of a given historical context. As a case in point, Sepkoski contends that uniformitarianism and its accompanying view of extinction as a slow, gradual process enabling the appearance of fitter species was bound up in the broader Victorian perspectives and beliefs in the necessity and desirability of social progress

 For an analysis of how Lyell’s writings consolidated a stark contrast between “rational” uniformitarianism and “irrational” catastrophism, which was later reproduced by historians of Earth sciences, see Stephen Jay Gould (1987). Uniformitarianism and Lyell’s work had a vast influence in modern geology until the 1970s, when “new catastrophist” theories reemerged to account for Earth’s past transformations. The most famous case is Walter Alvarez’s 1980 hypothesis—now generally accepted— suggesting that the end of the Cretaceous event that famously resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by the impact of an asteroid on Earth.

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illustrated by the expansion of the British Empire (Sepkoski 2020: 46). In this historical context, it simply made more sense for Lyell and his successors to think of Earth’s past “revolutions” not as a result of arbitrary, sudden catastrophes, but as the product of gradual, intrinsically progressive changes that mirrored the equally progressive advancement of the British Empire throughout the world. In fact, explicit analogies between the extinction of biological species in the deep past and the demise of nonWestern human races were made by Lyell and Darwin—as well as by social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer, effectively providing a justification for European colonialism (Sepkoski 2020: 47–81; Yusoff 2018: 74–82). If uniformitarianism shaped—and was shaped by—the Victorian context in a conceivable interrelation, this geological framework did not seem to fit nearly as well in a recently independent nation like Mexico, which continued to suffer colonialist invasions by foreign powers such as the United States and France during the nineteenth century. Mexican geologists were certainly cognizant of uniformist principles and accepted them in a variety of geological processes,5 but they were not as inclined to do so in the crucial topic of Earth’s past “revolutions” and their unmistakable extinctions. For instance, in his Tratado de geología (1885), a treatise published by the Mexican government to be used as a textbook for students, Mariano Bárcena provided a broad picture of the Earth’s successive eras, as well as the natural causes that might have triggered their abruptly distinct geological and biological characteristics. One of the most recognizable of these drastic transformations was that which occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period, which provoked the demise of the dinosaurs—whose enormous fossilized bones were beginning to cause astonishment in museum exhibitions around the world—and launched the Cenozoic era marked by the predominance of mammals and the origins of the human species. The cause of the abrupt end of the dinosaurs in the paleontological record precisely at the end of the Cretaceous period had been the subject of speculation since the first dinosaur fossils were discovered. Throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, the question of what could have caused the sudden demise of such powerful and dominant reptiles received many answers, including a series of massive earthquakes, environmental changes caused by climate change, mammals’ greater capacities to adapt to new circumstances, or intrinsic decline of reptiles’ biological life cycle, among others. Whereas the uniformists supported the idea of gradual extinction of dinosaurs, Bárcena aligned himself with catastrophist theories such as that espoused by American geologist James Dana, who claimed that the end of the Cretaceous extinction event was triggered, as Bárcena puts it:

 For example, Andrés Manuel del Río cites Lyell’s work approvingly in his Manual de geología (1841), and recognizes that some geological transformations such as the formation of mountains are due to the cumulative effect of small, gradual changes.

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por un cambio súbito de clima; por un enfriamento considerable, venido sin duda por el levantamiento de las tierras hacia las altas latitudes (Bárcena 1885: 325). [by a sudden change of weather; due to a considerable cooling, undoubtedly caused by the elevation of the land towards the high latitudes.]

To Dana’s theory, the Mexican geologist added the hypothesis that intense volcanism —spreading across the Americas and causing in part the formation of distinctive mountain systems—might have contributed to this extinction event on account of its direct and indirect impacts on the Earth. Bárcena’s theory was grounded on his own observations of central Mexico’s geological features, which in his opinion betrayed the continued and extensive effects of volcanic processes from past geological eras up until the present. In fact, Bárcena attributes not only the end of the Cretaceous extinction to volcanism, but also the more recent extinction of Quaternary large mammals that—as nineteenth-century scientists were beginning to discover—coexisted with the first hominid species. As Bárcena points out, evidence of even more recent volcanic eruptions and their land-forming effects are found in the Valley of Mexico, particularly in the Pedregal de San Angel in the south of Mexico City. Finally, during historic times, there are historical records of several eruptions of the Popocatépetl Volcano since the sixteenth century and even the birth of the Jorullo at the end of the eighteenth century. I argue that Bárcena and other Mexican geologists were predisposed to attribute wide-ranging geological importance to volcanism not only by the sheer volume of volcanic eruptions in the country, but also by a cultural background which endowed central Mexico’s volcanoes with nationalist political significance. The fact that nineteenth–century intellectuals coded the Valley of Mexico as the historical and symbolical center of the country’s political power implied that its most distinguishing geological features—particularly the prominent Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes—were accordingly imbued with significance as geological witnesses and guardians of the successive historical events and civilizations—Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican—that culminated in Mexico as an independent nation. This cultural framing is perhaps best exemplified by José María Velasco’s landscape paintings of the Valley of Mexico, which visually associate natural features with specific periods of national history, creating a politically infused overview of Mexico’s natural setting (Ramírez 2015: 25–32). Far from being conceived of as signs of disrupting instability, volcanoes were thus coded as perennial custodians and symbols of enduring political power, which was presumably transferred uninterrupted across historical periods and civilizations. This background assuredly led geologists such as Bárcena to overemphasize the relevance of volcanism by stretching the alleged political importance of volcanoes back into geological deep time. Thus, one could argue that Bárcena implicitly provided a geological justification for the hegemony of central Mexico’s political and intellectual elites. More generally, Mexican geologists’ defense of catastrophism was shaped by the widespread reverberations of geological and political catastrophes that had recently

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shocked the country (Cañizares-Esguerra 2006:161). In their perspective, the view of Earth’s catastrophic past seemed to be reinforced by the recurrence of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, as well as civil wars and foreign invasions in Mexico’s recent history. During the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a handful of scientific texts were published discussing the still unknown causes of recent geological phenomena and how to reduce their devastating consequences.6 Significantly, as I will show next, these texts often compounded geological and political terminology in the same formulation, suggesting the structural interchangeability between the two kinds of catastrophic phenomena.

Political Catastrophes In 1908, Manuel Miranda Marrón published Las catástrofes de 1906, an encyclopedic account of all the natural cataclysms—including, among others, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, tsunamis, and wildfires—that took place around the world in 1906. Miranda Marrón had previously presented an earlier version of this work at a meeting— which included President Porfirio Díaz among the audience—of the major scientific organization of the time—the Sociedad Mexicana de Estadística y Geografía. The purpose of this work was twofold: first, to create an archive of recent catastrophes and describe their destructive effects on human societies based on first-hand testimonies, news articles and other information; and second, to provide a scientific theory for explaining the causes and suggest potential measures of prevention of their most disastrous consequences. Miranda Marrón emphasizes the simultaneity and interconnectedness of these geological phenomena, showing that, for example, volcanic eruptions trigger sweeping earthquakes or that submarine explosions provoke floods far away from the epicenter. He argues that the Earth is undergoing a tumultuous phase of convulsion which is jeopardizing the stability and progress of human societies. After examining different theories for explaining these cataclysmic geological processes, he ultimately ends up attributing them to cycles of solar activity, whose changing effects cause periods of upheaval on Earth. Throughout the book, Miranda Marrón describes the terrifying impacts of these natural phenomena through the use of vivid imagery such as naked people escaping from their homes during an earthquake or people being swallowed by the fissured ground. He also strives to provide an estimate of how many people died and how much damage was done to infrastructure, as a way of assessing the degree of destruction

 The list includes Memoria acerca de los terremotos en México (1864) and Memoria acerca de la hidrografía, meteorología, seguridad hidrogénica y salubridad higiénica del Valle y en especial de la capital del México (1865) by Juan Nepomuceno Adorno, as well as Los terremotos del mes de abril (1907) and Las catástrofes de 1906 (1908) by Manuel Miranda Marrón.

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caused by each catastrophe. By doing so, Miranda Marrón endeavors to create the idea that humanity is utterly vulnerable and defenseless in face of these catastrophic events, as is vividly argued in the introduction of the work: ¿Qué defensa tiene el hombre contra estos cataclismos de la naturaleza? Contra el hambre tenemos el abastecimiento de víveres por los medios actuales de transportes rápidos; contra la peste luchamos por medio de los sueros modernos, del aislamiento y la higiene; contra las invasiones armadas del territorio patrio, podemos luchar con el acero, los proyectiles y la diplomacia; contra el ataque de algunos elementos metereológicos, nos podemos proteger refugiándonos en nuestros hogares; pero en las erupciones volcánicas, en los terremotos, en las inundaciones, en los hundimientos de la costra terrestre, en los ciclones, nada hay más temible que las paredes y los techos, nada más peligroso que las ciudades; viéndose obligado el hombre civilizado a convertirse en salvaje, a huir despavorido a los bosques, a beber en cuatro pies el agua infecta de inmundas charcas, a treparse a los árboles para arrancar los frutos, a entrar en la lucha con las bestias feroces para arrancar de sus sanguinarios belfos una entraña palpitante (Miranda Marrón 1908: 6–7). [What defense does man have against these cataclysms of nature? Against hunger we have the supply of food through the current means of rapid transportation; against the plague we fight through modern serums, isolation and hygiene; against armed invasions of the homeland, we can fight with steel, missiles and diplomacy; against the attack of certain meteorological elements, we can protect ourselves by taking refuge in our homes; but in dealing with volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, the sinking of the earth’s crust, cyclones, there is nothing more fearsome than walls and ceilings, nothing more dangerous than cities; civilized man is forced to become a savage, to flee in terror to the forests, to drink standing on all fours the infected water of filthy ponds, to climb trees to pluck the fruits, to enter into fight with the ferocious beasts to pluck from their bloodthirsty snouts a palpitating gut.]

This quotation is significant because it draws an analogy between natural catastrophes and political events, particularly armed invasions of Mexico. The comparative terms of this analogy are far from being arbitrary, since they surely carried a particular sense of truth and meaning for Mexican intellectuals of the early twentieth century. During the preceding century, Mexico had suffered a series of devastating foreign invasions, most notably the U.S. intervention from 1846 to 1848, which resulted in the loss of the country’s northernmost territories, and the invasion by the French Empire, which led to the establishment of the Second Mexican Empire of Maximilian I (1864–1867). This historical background, in addition to the continued occurrence of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, provides an explanation as to why nineteenth-century Mexican scientists felt so attuned to studying natural catastrophes in the deep past and in their present. As Miranda Marrón suggests, there is a constitutive similarity between geological and political catastrophes: just as the foreign invasions brought the country to the brink of disappearance, the natural catastrophes threatened to annihilate societies and return humanity to a savage stage. Moreover, both kinds of catastrophic phenomena emerge suddenly and externally to overturn the foundations of the political community, seemingly leaving human society in a defenseless state.

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Miranda Marrón overstates the frequency of destructive natural catastrophes with an ultimate objective in mind: to maintain that only scientific knowledge can provide humanity with protection against catastrophes by studying, monitoring, and ultimately predicting them. As I mentioned above, he theorized that the magnitude and recurrence of natural catastrophes followed a cycle correlated with solar activity, and thus science was already showing capability to predict them and reduce their impact.7 Therefore, the vivid images of devastation and the suggestion that people would turn into savages as a result set the stage for affirming that science is powerful enough to prevent this unspeakable disgrace. This conviction reveals the positivist assumption that the scientific rationality is what essentially distinguishes modern from primitive societies, which by virtue of relying on animistic religious conceptions were allegedly at the mercy of nature’s catastrophic behavior. In the same way, Miranda Marrón’s positivist stance echoes current proposals which, in face of potentially catastrophic climate change, advocate an aggressive intervention in Earth systems by technological and political instruments. Miranda Marrón compares natural catastrophes not only with foreign invasions, but also with other kinds of political events. As he claims: Estos cataclismos de la naturaleza son los agentes socialistas por antonomasia, porque ponen al mismo nivel las condiciones de todos los ciudadanos, y obligan a huir asidos de trementes manos al noble y al pechero, al banquero y al mendigo, a la dama poco ha resplandeciente de alhajas, que abandona su palacio, y a la pordiosera apenas cubierta con harapos, que sale corriendo de la mísera pocilga (Miranda Marrón 1908: 7). [These cataclysms of nature are the socialist agents par excellence, because they put the conditions of all citizens on the same level, forcing the nobleman and the plebeian, the banker and the bum, the lady once resplendent with jewels, who leaves her palace, and the beggar barely covered in rags, who runs out of the miserable shanty, to flee holding hands.]

While Mexico suffered in the nineteenth century from imperialist wars conducted by foreign powers, it also received the influence of the socialist political and intellectual tradition that was thriving in Western countries at the time. As Carlos Illades has shown, during the second half of the century ideas and modes of organization associated with early utopian or anarchist forms of socialism played an important role in peasant and worker mobilizations, which were generally disparaged and suppressed by both liberal and conservative political factions (Illades 2008: 38–39). In particular, Miranda Marrón might be alluding to the recent rebellious efforts driven by anarchist organizations and publications—such as the Partido Liberal Mexicano and its official newspaper Regeneración, both founded by the Flores Magón brothers in the early

 Similarly, Juan Nepomuceno Adorno argued in his Memoria acerca de los terremotos en México (1864) that a scientific understanding of earthquakes can provide guidelines for reducing their most harmful consequences. In particular, he suggests that Mexico City’s buildings should incorporate new construction materials and architectural designs to limit the impact of earthquakes.

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twentieth century—which openly strove to overthrow the oligarchical regime of Porfirio Díaz. In the quotation above, Miranda Marrón draws a parallel between geological catastrophes and socialist mobilizations on the basis of their shared destabilization of established social and political structures. As with natural catastrophic events, socialist ideas and organizations disrupt social hierarchies that Miranda Marrón characterizes as fundamental and integral to modern societies. The image of the upper and lower social classes suddenly being equalized, undermining the intrinsic characteristics that allegedly set them apart in ordinary times, echoes the image of people being forced to turn into savages or animals to be able to survive. Both images suggest that geological and political catastrophes bring about the destruction of essential features of civilized societies, effectively reverting them to the proverbial state of nature. In modern political theory, as for instance in Thomas Hobbes’s work, the hypothesis of the state of nature as the chaotic and potentially violent condition of humanity before or without any political organization legitimized the imperative of fashioning laws, structures, and, in short, the political state to safeguard the stability of society. Thus, the primary purpose of the state in this view is to protect the political community from risks of an external (invasions, wars) or internal (civil wars, social unrest) nature that threaten to undermine it. Miranda Marrón seems to align with this view by intimating that in the face of potential geological and political catastrophes that would dismantle the political community, humanity must rely on the joint action of science and the state to prevent these dreadful menaces. Implicitly, thus, Miranda Marrón shows his support for the modernizing regime of Díaz and its efforts to control and defuse both socialist mobilizations and natural catastrophes. In nineteenth-century Latin America, natural catastrophes often symbolized the instability of the social ground and the destruction of political structures and even epistemological categories. For instance, as Carlos Fonseca has argued, intellectuals such as Simón Bolívar and Alexander von Humboldt articulated a discourse regarding earthquakes that served to comprehend and frame the Spanish American wars of independence that were spreading across the region at the turn of the nineteenth century. The figure of the earthquake provided them with a “philosophical metaphor for the political events that would end up shattering the historical ground and, with it, the tabula that had theretofore organized the cosmos of naturalists like Linnaeus” (Fonseca 2014: 165). But as shown by my analysis of Miranda Marrón’s work, natural catastrophes were also mobilized in the second half of the nineteenth century as frameworks for comprehending what were considered the main threats to the young Latin American nations: their political volatility seemed to leave them particularly exposed to the catastrophic effects of external imperialist wars and internal social mobilizations. In the case of Miranda Marrón and other Mexican intellectuals, this catastrophic framework often involved the accompanying suggestion that science and the state have the sovereignty to ultimately control and prevent the ominous impact of these deterritorializing geological and political events.

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Closing Remarks This chapter has explored the interpenetration between the geological and the political through an analysis of the figure of the catastrophe as conceptualized in the Mexican scientific community during the course of the long nineteenth century. I have argued that there was a political motivation behind the predilection of Mexican intellectuals— including geologists such as Bárcena and landscape artists such as Velasco—for catastrophist theories accounting for the drastic alterations both in the Earth’s deep past and the present times. They conceivably attributed disproportionate geological significance to catastrophes such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes because these intellectuals were embedded in a geosocial context in which the effects of geological and political catastrophic events were prominent and needed to be incorporated into a self-affirming narrative. This geosocial context surely had a bearing on both aesthetic trends such as landscape painting and scientific theories such as geological catastrophism. If the figure of the catastrophe mounted a radical and unpredictable destabilization both at the level of the geological and the political, the Mexican intellectual elite sought to neutralize its deterritorializing potential and incorporate it into a political narrative safeguarded by science and the state. Thus, the social construction of the Mexican territory continuously under threat from political and geological catastrophes enabled the assertion of the ultimate necessity and sovereignty of political structures guided by scientific knowledge. More specifically, this social construction endowed central Mexico’s political and scientific elites with the authority to command and contain both external and internal menacing forces for the alleged benefit of the Mexican people. At the same time, my analysis of nineteenth-century figurations of catastrophe shows that the interrelation between the geological and the political on display in the Anthropocene debates is a recurring feature of modern geological science. Since its development at the beginning of the nineteenth century, geological science has been shaped by fundamental debates that, far from being exclusively scientific discussions, betray the importance of political, socioeconomic, and cultural considerations as an implicit basis of deliberation. Geological concepts and framings are shaped by—and simultaneously reinforce or alter—particular political, economic, and symbolical appropriations of the Earth during a specific historical context. Therefore, studying the unspoken political motivations and implications of geological conceptualizations, as well as the geological foundation of political theorizations and systems, can provide us with analytical tools for approaching the unimaginable repercussions of anthropogenic global change. By the same token, examining the intertwining between the geological and the political is an essential first step for criticizing the merely constraining or extractive engagement with geological processes, paving the way for imagining novel ways of engaging with the powers of the Earth.

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Works Cited Applebaum, Nancy. Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Bárcena, Mariano. Tratado de geología. Elementos aplicables a la agricultura, a la ingeniería y a la industria. Mexico City: Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1885. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Nature, Empire, and Nation. Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The Anthropocene”. IGBP Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Swerve Editions, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Del Río, Andrés Manuel. Manuel de geología, extractado de la Lethaea Geognóstica de Bronn, con los animales y vegetales perdidos, o que ya no existen, más característicos y con algunas aplicaciones a los criaderos de este Republica. Mexico City: Imprenta de Ignacio Cumplido, 1841. Duarte Filho, Ricardo. “Drilled Mountains, Pulverised Bodies: Mining, Extractivism, and Racialisation in Brazil.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 30.3 (2022): 417–436. Fonseca, Carlos. “Shaky Grounds: Bolívar, Humboldt, and the Birth of Catastrophe Politics.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 67.2 (2014): 163–181. Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann. Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Illades, Carlos. Las otras ideas. El primer socialismo en México 1850–1935. Mexico City: Ediciones Era, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2008. Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Picador, Henry Holt and Company, 2015. Miranda Marrón, Manuel. Las catástrofes de 1906. Estudio presentado y dedicado a la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística. Mexico City: Imprenta y Fototipia de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1908. Moore, Jason W. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44.3 (2017): 594–630. Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Geontologies. A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Quintana Navarrete, Jorge. “Reading Race in Rocks: Political Geology in Nineteenth-Century Mexico.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 30.4 (2022): 525–543. Ramírez, Fausto. “Velasco y el Valle de México (1873–1908): momento narrativo y retórica visual.” Estética del paisaje en las Américas. Eds. Louise Noelle and David Wood. Mexico: UNAM/Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2015. 21–50. Rudwick, Martin. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of the Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ——.Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in an Age of Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. ——.Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Sepkoski, David. “The Earth as Archive: Contingency, Narrative, and the History of Life.” Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures. Ed. Lorraine Daston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. ——.Catastrophic Thinking. Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Jamille Pinheiro Dias

Indigeneity Sketching out theoretical and artistic itineraries related to indigeneity in the context of environmental aesthetics in Latin America involves taking into account the heterogeneity that characterizes the vast array of originary peoples inhabiting the region. This chapter takes the work of indigenous thinkers and creative practitioners who live in Brazil as a point of departure, without neglecting the fact that Indigenous cultural production calls into question the very possibility of being thought on the basis of any nation-state-based entity. Although it may not be possible to thoroughly trace the ecological concerns raised by the aesthetic practices of each specific Indigenous tradition, it is nonetheless possible to identify common matrixes and provide initial elements for a consideration of how the notion of Indigeneity connects to environmental aesthetics in ongoing debates. In order to pursue this goal, this chapter covers aesthetic manifestations that are coming into existence against the backdrop of the current climate crisis, as well as part of a significant historical moment in the achievement of protagonism by Indigenous artists and thinkers in Brazil. It draws attention to important ways in which present-day Indigenous environmental aesthetics is emerging, including a questioning of colonial nation-state-based conceptions of territory and a questioning of the division between nature and culture.

Refusing Generic Indigeneity An important step in the characterization of indigeneity has to do with the rejection of any generic approach, a frequent strategy in the creative and theoretical work presented by Indigenous artists and thinkers. As Daniel Munduruku—a well-known literary writer born in Belém, Pará, in 1964— said, “I am not an Indian; I am Munduruku” (Munduruku 2016), he stated in a lecture at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) held as part of the dissemination activities of the 32nd São Paulo Biennial. “Being Munduruku is different from being an Indian,” he continued, challenging the audience’s perception of his own indigeneity. “Being Munduruku is different from being Wapichana, Kaiapó, Xavante,

Note: This chapter arises in part out of the collaborative project “Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America” funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the United Kingdom through grant AH/ S004823/1. The project is based at the University of Manchester and runs from January 2020 to January 2023. It is directed by Peter Wade, with co-investigators Lucia Sá, Ignacio Aguiló, Mara Viveros Vigoya, Ezequiel Adamovsky, and Felipe Milanez; Research Associates, Ana Vivaldi, Carlos Correa Angulo and Jamille Pinheiro Dias; and Research Assistants, Arissana Pataxó, Lorena Cañuqueo, Pablo Cossio Vargas and Rossana Alarcón. The ideas expressed here are indebted to the conversations and exchanges of ideas with project team members. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-013

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Brazilian. It is different.” Opposing the assumption that there are Indians in Brazil, he argued, “what you are seeing, in fact, is an image that has been produced over time.” The wrong turn Portuguese colonizers took on their way to reach the Indies would end up determining that the originary inhabitants of the territory now known as Brazil would be called índios.1 In an analysis of Munduruku’s point, Viveiros de Castro (2017) highlighted that the invention of “Indian” as a generic category stems from the universalizing character of the State. The reduction of this multiplicity of peoples to a single frame, therefore, serves the interests of the White, colonial, nation-state in its will to define and control. Povinelli (2002) has put forth an analogous argument on the conditions for recognition of Indigenous peoples in the context of settler liberal multiculturalism in Australia: they would be expected to perform an impossible authentic, traditional self-identity in order to access state reparative legislation. Writing about Indigenous arts in Brazil, Librandi Rocha (2022: 784) insightfully affirms that these take place “beyond and beneath the nation-state and its temporal landmarks,2 its territorial fences and its genocidal policies,” unauthorizing or disavowing “Brazilian authorship”— against the State, one could add, echoing Pierre Clastres. Accordingly, artist Daira Tukano says “we are talking about something that is not Brazil because it is freer than any idea that Brazil might represent. It is not the kind of map drawing that you see in History books” (Machado 2022).

Critiques of Utilitarianism Before we address the conceptualization of indigeneity further, a brief examination of “environment” and “aesthetics” beyond the nature-culture divide may be helpful. As I have argued elsewhere (Pinheiro Dias 2022), a common understanding across many Indigenous peoples is that creativity is not strictly individual nor solely human. It is in the light of this framework that I address what Western conceptualizations typically refer to as “ecology”—a term that Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa sees as part of a discourse invented by White people who are concerned about the increasing temperatures of the planet (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 393; 396). Kopenawa also questions the notion of “meio-ambiente”, frequently mobilized in Portuguese as meaning both “milieu” and

 Munduruku is alluding to the idea that in 1500, Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral, who was seeking a westward route to India, arrived by accident on the coast of what would become Brazil.  Librandi is referring to the anti-Indigenous theory known as marco temporal or temporal landmark, a judicial attempt to limit Indigenous territorial rights enshrined in the Brazilian Federal Constitution. The marco temporal theory is based on the assumption that only Indigenous peoples who were living in their territory on 5 October 1988, the day the Constitution came into force, would be entitled to the lands they occupied. See Carneiro da Cunha et al. (2017) for more details on marco temporal.

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“half the environment,” since he sees it as “halving” the Earth between the white people’s world and a supposedly separate “natural” milieu. In contrast, Kopenawa presents the Yanomami concept of urihi a or “land-forest” (Kopenawa 2009), encompassing the Earth as a whole (mundo inteiro, urihi a pree or urihi a pata), as well as its power of fertility, impossible to cut down in “halves” or “meios” (Pinheiro Dias 2016; 2022). Living on urihi a implies that humans develop social relationships with plants, animals, rivers, mountains and their spirits, which cannot be merely understood as an inanimate landscape serving human needs and wants. Urihi a, therefore, is not a space for commercial exploitation. Extending this argument to Ailton Krenak’s critique of anthropocentric utilitarianism, it is not to be categorized as “natural resources”. The idea that “nature” is nothing more than raw material to be used for consumption or property is one of the key reasons why dominant culture maintains its conception of territory as serving the interests of profit, “progress”, and for establishing borders under its control (Krenak 2016; 2023).

Restoring Epistemic Health An inextricable intertwinement between art and life is also key to thinking about environmental aesthetics from Indigenous perspectives. In a conversation with artist and filmmaker Olinda Tupinambá, which researcher and artist Arissana Pataxó and I conducted on 12 October 2021 as part of our work for University of Manchester’s Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America project, we talked about concerns with the epistemic violence of schematic frameworks that systematize knowledge and aesthetics, and other traces left by the legacy of the Enlightenment. Olinda argued, “White people are obsessed with ‘boxes,’” i.e., categories. Arissana responded, “Why must we be confined to such small boxes? They create these enclosures and try to put us in them”. Olinda continued, “For Whites, even their house is a box. Every object is a box. It is absurd. They view their surroundings as a box, isolating themselves from everything”. Hence, she concludes: “This, I believe, is the distinction between Whites and us Indigenous people: our home is everything, including the river and the forest”.3 Indigenous aesthetic thinking and making are frequently devoted to healing this extended home, including regenerating degraded areas and wounded subjectivies. In Daiara Tukano’s words, these undertakings have to do with a restoration of epistemic health (Machado 2022). Complementary to this is Ailton Krenak’s thinking about borders and ancestrality in his book Futuro ancestral (Ancestral Future): “we are in Pacha Mama, which has no borders, so it doesn’t matter if we are above or below the Rio Grande; we are

 Tupinambá, Olinda; Pataxó, Arissana; Pinheiro Dias, Jamille, personal communication, October 12, 2021.

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everywhere, for our ancestors are in everything” (Krenak 2022: 11–12). This calls for an understanding of what Western conceptual frameworks categorize as “nature” not as resources, but as ancestors. From these points of view, art is not the production of something original, but rather the reactivation of something that has been damaged, or a way of listening to and cultivating new beginnings and ancestral forms of knowledge that are always present. This points to intersections between Indigenous arts and the reclaiming of traditional territories.4 These links are clear in the contemporary revival of the ritual feather cloaks of the Tupinambá people that were taken from them by Europeans in the colonial period.5 Glicéria Tupinambá’s research on reactivating cloakmaking alongside her community, which ran parallel to their struggle to recover the areas in which they traditionally lived,6 illustrates the entanglement between community engagement (including the assistance of their spiritual guides, the encantados), artistic practices and Indigenous territorial rights.7 This awareness also suggests that we contest the Romantic assumption that art originates from individual geniuses who possess exceptional talent and individual creative insight.

Before Borders “Territory” is a central dimension of how indigeneity and environmental aesthetics are articulated. The production of nationalized spaces throughout the course of colonial and post-Independence history is one of the ways “otherness” is established, borders are constructed, and exclusion is legitimized. Indigenous filmmaker Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy explains how, viewed through the lens of Mbyá-Guarani mobility practices,8 “before there were borders, everything was a one big village” (Yxapy in Pinheiro 2017: 20?).9 It is very telling that there are no words for “space” and “landscape” in MbyáGuarani. What makes sense for Mbyá-Guarani speakers instead is to talk about jaexa va’e—“everything we are able to see”, which is not limited to a physical or material dimension. “For us, Mbyá, there is no separation between space, territory, landscape, place, and region,” Yxapy explains. “For us, all of this is Yvy Rupá (the world, i.e., where

 See Pinheiro Dias (2021).  See Pinheiro Dias (2022) for an analysis of the reactivation of Tupinambá cloak-making techniques by Glicéria and her community.  See Alarcon (2019).  See Tupinambá (2021); Pinheiro Dias (2022).  Ferreira was born in the village of Kunhã Piru, in the province of Misiones, Argentina, in 1985. In 2000, she relocated to Koenju, a village 30 kilometers from São Miguel das Missões, in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.  By saying “before there were borders, everything was a one big village”, Yxapy is not implying that the notion of “village” is attached to a specific identity, but shedding light on a sense of planetary interconnectedness that cannot be subsumed by colonial border-making.

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the Earth is settled). Nor is there a separation between nature and humans” (Yxapy in Pinheiro 2017: 22?).10 Yxapy highlights how the expansion of cities produced individual spaces as private, profit-generating enclosures. She argues that this marks an obvious distinction between how the juruá kuery (white people) and Indigenous peoples engage with “space”. Before the juruá kuery invaded Indigenous lands, there was no delimitation of Yvy Rupá according to logics of possession or property.11 “According to MbyáGuarani cosmology, land cannot be owned or sold. ‘Space’ cannot be capitalized”, Yxapy observes. These are some of the reasons why the word “fronteira” (border) is not accurate to convey Mbyá-Guarani’s perceptions of movement across Yvy Rupá. For instance, for the Mbyá-Guarani, the appropriate term to refer to what the juruá kuery see as another country is ovaire (the other side). Mobility and interchange, processes integral to their traditional ways of living, are hampered by the bureaucracy involved in crossing the lines that were drawn up to separate Brazil and Argentina. “Things that are ordinary for us, such as traveling from Brazil to Argentina to obtain some plant, seeds, or material for handicrafts, have become complicated because we are frequently stopped at the border,” Yxapy says.

There is No Cartography in the World of Shamans Resonating with Yxapy’s considerations about “space”, Northwestern Amazonian artist Denilson Baniwa reminds us that his people, which is one of the twenty-three groups of the Rio Negro region, where he was born, live in what is known today as Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela;12 for the Baniwa, these “imaginary lines” or “borders” do not exist.13 In the 2020 intervention Não há cartografia no mundo dos pajés (Fig. 1, There is no cartography in the world of shamans), Baniwa critically appropriates a representation of the Amazon River made by the French royal cartographer Nicolas Sanson, entitled Le cours de la riviére des Amazones (The Course of the Amazon River), one of the first scientific maps of the region. Produced in 1656 and published in 1680, the map was based on an account by Cristobal de Acuña, a Spanish Jesuit who went down the river from Ecuador with the Portuguese explorer Pedro

 See Sophia Pinheiro’s important study on Patrícia Ferreira’s work (2017).  On his part, Denilson Baniwa constantly reminds us that the soil that we walk on is Indigenous territory. He also emphasizes that cities were built over Indigenous burial grounds as a strategy to erase Indigenous memory and spirituality (Poranduba 2019).  Denilson Baniwa was born on April 18, 1984, in the village of Darí, in the Rio Negro region, in the state of Amazonas, Brazil. He currently lives in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro.  Listen to Denilson Baniwa’s participation in the podcast Poranduba. “Poranduba 19 – Ativismo Indígena” (Poranduba 2019).

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Figure 1: Denilson Baniwa, Não há cartografia no mundo dos pajés (There is no cartography in the world of shamans), 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Teixeira in 1639 (Cintra and Oliveira 2014). By calling attention to the shamanic ability to travel the cosmos, Baniwa’s counter-mapping denaturalizes Western cartography methods, contributing to crafting an anti-hegemonic visual narrative of the Amazon. Baniwa refers to this kind of aesthetic intervention as “rasura” (defacement),14 a process that alters existing visual representations. The snake spanning the map makes us recall the Cobra Grande or snake-canoe, an entity that stands at the core of narratives prevalent all across the Amazon basin (Chernela 2004). The multiple peoples from the Rio Negro—among them the Baniwa, the Tukano, the Desana and many others—explain that the Cobra Grande or snake-canoe carried in its belly the ancestors of numerous Indigenous groups as it went up the rivers of the Amazon basin and the Rio Negro to their headwaters, having crisscrossed a huge region allocating populations in their respective lands. Therefore, it is not by chance that Baniwa chose a snake to intervene in Sanson’s map—it epitomizes an Amazonian counter-narrative to how the State disregards other approaches to space than those based on rigid border-making.15 He echoes insights from the field of critical cartography, that has contributed to place maps as discourses of “power/knowledge”16 that shape the world

 I am grateful to Lucia Sá for our conversations on the translation of Denilson Baniwa’s idea of “rasura”. It was her who suggested “defacement” as an approximate notion.  Sousa Nascimento (2019: 217).  Foucault (1980).

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and contribute to controlling territory and dominating its inhabitants, rather than merely conveying knowledge about the world.17

Monoculture and Agrocide Baniwa is one of the protagonists in the growing prominence of Indigenous creative and cultural production in Brazil, which stems from a long struggle by the country’s Indigenous peoples for recognition. His well-known Jaguar-Shaman performances, among which the most notorious was his “hacking” of the 33rd São Paulo Biennial in November 2018,18 are not limited to interventions in hegemonic art spaces or urbanized contexts. On 4 June 2021, Baniwa, Naine Terena, Flávio Fêo and I drove to a massive cornfield near Chapada dos Guimarães, in Mato Grosso,19 while conducting an artsbased research collaboration.20 We had been discussing the impacts of the unchecked expansion of agribusiness on socio-biodiversity along an ever-expanding agricultural frontier, which directly harms Indigenous communities. Horror movies are part of Baniwa’s body of references, and during our stay in Mato Grosso, he brought up some links with Fritz Kiersch’s 1984 film Children of the Corn.21 We watched it together at Terena’s house, and noticed resonances between the vast sea of monoculture cornfields in Mato Grosso and the tiny town of Gatlin, in Bible belt Nebraska, portrayed in the film, in which children form a religious fundamentalist cult that murders adults for dishonoring corn with their reckless farming practices. Terena, then, told us about a Cosmic Being called Kipaé—the great Rhea—who, as her people explain, oversees humans on Earth from the cosmos. Due to our poor relationship with the planet, once it becomes unsustainable, Kipaé will then descend, consume human eyeballs and restore ecosystems. Terena and I filmed and photographed the Jaguar-Shaman walking among the agrocidal cornrows. Amid the eerie rustling of the pesticide crops, we also found heaps of garbage containing clothing and plastic (Fig. 2). Some of the outputs of our time together in Mato Grosso are Baniwa’s 2022 short film and photographic essay Children of the Corn, which is available on the digital exhibition of the Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America. It urges us to wake up before the planet explodes like popcorn. It also

 Bellone et al. (2020: 18, 26).  Pinheiro Dias (2022).  According to data released in 2022 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), Mato Grosso is the largest national producer of grains, with a 30.3% share.  We also wish to thank the team of Festival Theaterformen, from Lower Saxony, Germany, for supporting our stay in Mato Grosso.  For Brazilian audiences, the film title was Colheita Maldita, which could literally be translated as “Cursed Harvest”. Adapted from the same-titled short story published by Stephen King in 1977, it became a prolific and well-known franchise.

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invites us to consider how the homogenizing nature of monoculture decreases biodiversity and makes species more prone to large-scale infestation, and what that represents in terms of epistemic loss. Again, the nature/culture divide looms large in the anthropocentric, agrocidal arrogance inherent in monoculture. The violent dynamics needed to sustain monoculture ends up on our plates and in our collective life. Consuming toxic food gives rise to social toxicity. In response to how our bodies and epistemes have been colonized by monoculture, Baniwa encourages us to value the ecological intelligence of Indigenous agrosociobiodiversity.

Figure 2: Denilson Baniwa dressed as a Jaguar-Shaman in a cornfield. Mato Grosso, Brazil, 4 June 2021. Photograph by Jamille Pinheiro Dias.

Physical-Material and Ethical-Aesthetic Demarcation The demarcation of ethical-aesthetic territories has consequences for the demarcation of physical-material territories. For Indigenous communities, both in artistic and political terms, taking center stage in deciding how they are represented is crucial. By

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choosing how they wish to define themselves, they deny the presumed passivity that has been historically associated with them by colonial modernity, and are no longer relegated to the background of art history. In present-day Brazil, a generation of Indigenous creators has been using self-representation as a strategic engagement to fight the invisibilization of Indigenous authorship in the country’s literary and artistic history, as well as to question forms of visibilization that tend to neutralize their singularity. In the Brazilian literary canon, consider 19th-century Indianist Romanticism, of which José de Alencar’s novels O Guarani (1857), Iracema (1865) e Ubirajara (1874) are emblematic. Even though it sought to disassociate Indigenous peoples from the detrimental conceptions that Europeans explorers had projected on them in their travel diaries, it often produced yet another kind of harm by crystalizing artificial and idealized perceptions of Indigenous individuals as it made indigeneity cater to the standards of non-Indigenous readerships.22 In this regard, an interesting instance is the work of Indigenous artist Yacunã Tuxá,23 who rejects the identification between Indigenous women and Iracema, the “honey-lipped virgin” imagined by Alencar that sacrifices herself for the sake of Brazilianness (Guzmán 2005). She invites us to reflect on the violent reduction of Indigenous women to passive stereotypes. “We are not Iracema”, one of her digital illustrations calls out. She portrays Indigenous women as autonomous (Fig. 3), powerful and diverse, in ways that could not be more different from their subservient, eroticized and inert depictions advanced by well-known variations of Brazilian Indianist romanticism.24 Tuxá’s artwork is accompanied by a text written by her: Indigenous women are real women who face real challenges. We do not come from the screens or from the pages of Romanticism. We do not fit into your standards, your stereotypes, nor are we the object of your fetishes. We are originary, millenia-old, holders and defenders of unique knowledge. We organize movements, defend our territories, and reclaim our lands. We are real and historical! Call me by my name!25

Even though literature and the arts play a vital role in making Indigenous lives visible, the question of the extent to which disruptive, dissimilar otherness is seen remains uncertain (Palumbo-Liu 2012). At first glance, visibilizing and/or invisibilizing indigeneity may be seen as antipodes. However, more often than not, these gestures tend to be two sides of the same coin. If visibilization is achieved through stereotyping, the outcome is exclusionary and reiterates epistemic violence. Donna Haraway’s awareness that visualizing practices are embodied, partial and marked, imbued with

 Obviously, Brazilian Romantic Indianism is not a monolith, and it also created spaces for contestation inside the bandeira- and slavery-based imperial nation-state. See Treece (2000).  Born in 1993 in Rodelas, Bahia, along the São Francisco river, Yacunã now lives in Salvador is an undergraduate student in Spanish at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).  See paintings Iracema (1884), by José Maria de Medeiros; Moema (1866), by Victor Meirelles; and Rodolfo Bernardelli’s sculpture Moema (1895).  Personal communication. I am very grateful to Yacunã Tuxá for generously sharing her images and text for this chapter.

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Figure 3: Yacunã Tuxá, Não somos Iracema (We are not Iracema). Digital illustration, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

a history of violence—epitomized in the ever poignant question “with whose blood were my eyes crafted?” (Haraway 1988, 585)—remains relevant here. The images we are able to see have been gradually obscured by the colonization of our “eye pupils”, as Denilson Baniwa puts it (2021: 195). Indigenous arts, then, become comparable to an “eyeball surgery”, he suggests.

On Humor and Handicrafts One of the common ways in which epistemic violence is reproduced and normalized in relation to Indigenous creators is the delimitation between arts and handicrafts. Naine Terena (2020: 22), in the introduction to the catalog of the exhibition Véxoa: We Know, curated by her at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, talks about the collective works produced by Gustavo Caboco,26 Lucilene Wapichana, Juliana Kerexu, Ricardo Werá,

 Gustavo Caboco is a Wapichana artist born in Curitiba, in Paraná, Southern Brazil, in 1989. He grew up listening to his mother Lucilene’s stories about their family and ancestral lands in the Amazonian State of Roraima.

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Camila Kamé Kanhgág and Dival Xetá for the show, which problematize the nonIndigenous imaginary of handicraft production and use humor to articulate a critique of non-Indigenous expectations about Indigenous handicrafts. Full of prejudices, this imaginary reduces the symbolic and economic value of such objects. Writing for Véxoa’s catalog, Caboco says: “There is a presumption that Indigenous people must always fit into a particular category, for instance, when a non-Indigenous buyer wants to purchase a ‘little sculpture’” (Caboco 2020: 154). Caboco and his group ironically displayed an orca whale and a giraffe in their “handicraft” or “artesanato.” Obviously, there are no orcas and giraffes in Indigenous territories located in Brazil. The artists’ goal was to subvert conventional notions of how and where Indigenous handicrafts and “true art” should appear—by questioning, for example, the assumption that Indigenous creators work exclusively with seeds and beads.

Indigenous Arts as Cosmopolitics Keeping this question in mind, it is worth lingering a while on the meaning of “Indigenous arts”. On September 16, 2021, Krenak and the late Jaider Esbell, a prominent figure in Brazil’s Indigenous artistic and intellectual scene who passed away in early November that year, spoke at the opening of the Moquém_Surarî: arte indígena contemporânea exhibition, which was shown at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM). Esbell points out in their conversation that Indigenous arts go beyond questions of identity, having more to do with “fighting for a good life” not only for humans, but also for “ants, frogs, jaguars, visible and invisible spirits” (Esbell and Krenak 2021). He adds that the term “ecology” is a “worn-out one” but still useful, in his view, to challenge the Anthropocene and fight for a “good life”. Krenak then responds by characterizing Indigenous arts as “cosmopolitical”.27 They are “cosmopolitical,”28 for Krenak, because they engage a constellation of beings so vast that it does not fit into the definitions set out by the West. As a form of “cosmopolitics”, Indigenous arts are thus less a gesture of including nonhumans in artistic practices, and more of an awareness that nonhumans, for Indigenous peoples, have always taken part in them: We looked at the system of art as if we were looking at a strange body. We, of course, didn’t see ourselves in it. It is totally unreasonable to think that people who read mountains, who like talking to rivers, experiencing the rapids and the songs that the rapids make, would see themselves as part of the system of arts. For the many peoples that are perceived by others as “Indians” or

 The term “cosmopolitics” brings to mind Isabelle Stengers’s cosmopolitical proposal (2005), which encourages us to take into account the minoritarian and divergent dimension of practices.  See also Librandi (2022).

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“Indigenous”, all of this is left outside of the vocabulary, outside of the grammar of what the West calls art (Esbell and Krenak 2021).

In conclusion, it can be argued that many Indigenous artists in Brazil are putting a critique of anthropocentrism and speciesism at the front of their agenda, and explicitly naming it as such. Even when they address concerns with structural inequalities that have to do with anti-Indigenous racism (Sa and Milanez 2020; Terena and Campanilli 2022), they emphatically foreground the need to account for interspecies relationality, reminding us there is always more at stake. To theorize Indigenous arts pushes us to consider non-anthropocentric conceptions of making, so linking creative processes to factors emerging beyond one’s control or authority. After all, art is also in the making in the “stones that sleep at the feet of mountains, dreaming of landscapes to come” (Krenak 2021). Where some see resources for extraction, others may see ancestral futures.

Works Cited Alarcon, Daniela. O retorno da terra: As retomadas na aldeia Tupinambá da Serra do Padeiro, Sul da Bahia. São Paulo: Elefante, 2019. Baniwa, Denilson. “Petroglifos pra um antigo-futuro”. Concinnitas 22.42 (2021). ——. “Children of the Corn”. Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America, 2022. https://www.digitalexhibitions. manchester.ac.uk/s/carla-en/page/denilson-baniwa (18 June 2022). Bellone, Tamara, et al. “Mapping as Tacit Representations of the Colonial Gaze.” Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping. Ed. Doug Specht. London: University of London Press, 2020. 17–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv14rms6g.9. Caboco, Gustavo. “O ser humano se reconhece como ser humano?”. Véxoa: Nós sabemos. São Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado, 2020. Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela, et al. “Indigenous peoples boxed in by Brazil’s political crisis”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7.2 (2017): 403–426. “Censo 2010: população indígena é de 896,9 mil, tem 305 etnias e fala 274 idiomas”. IBGE | Censo 2010. censo2010.ibge.gov.br/noticias–censo?busca=1&id=3&idnoticia=2194&view=noticia (10 June 2022). Cintra, Jorge Pimentel, and Rafael Henrique de Oliveira. “Nicolas Sanson e seu mapa: o curso do rio Amazonas”. Acta Amazonica 44.3 (2014): 353–366. Chernela, Janet. “Constructing a supernatural landscape through talk: Creation and recreation in the Central Amazon of Brazil”. Journal of Latin American Lore 22.1 (2004): 83–106. Ferreira, Patrícia. “Fronteira, espaço e paisagem”. Xadalu Movimento Urbano. Eds. Adauany Zimovzki, Carla Joner, and Dione Martins. Porto Alegre: Joner Produções, 2017: 1–6. Guzmán, Tracy Devine. “‘Diacuí Killed Iracema’: Indigenism, Nationalism and the Struggle for Brazilianness”. Bulletin of Latin American Research 24.1 (2005): 92–122. Haraway, Donna J. “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” Feminist studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599. Kopenawa, Davi, and Bruce Albert. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.

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Kopenawa, Davi. “Urihi A” Urihi A: A terra-floresta Yanomami. Eds. Bruce Albert and William Milliken. With the collaboration of Gale Goodwin Gomez. São Paulo: Instituto Socioambiental, 2009. Krenak, Ailton. “Depoimento de Ailton Krenak.” ISA, Povos Indígenas no Brasil: 2011–2016. São Paulo: Instituto Socioambiental, 2016. ——. “Tudo o que o olho vê”. Moquém Surari: arte indígena contemporânea. Ed. Jaider Esbell. São Paulo: MAM Editora, 2021. ——. Futuro Ancestral. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022. ——. Life is Not Useful. Trans. Alex Brostoff and Jamille Pinheiro Dias. London: Polity, 2023. Krenak, Ailton, et al. “Apresentação da exposição Moquém_Surarî: arte indígena contemporânea. MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo”. YouTube, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zT5q2zID2Ac (10 July 2022). Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Trans. C. Gordon. New York: Random House, 1980. “IBGE estima safra de 261,4 milhões de toneladas em 2022.” Agência Brasil, 7 July 2022. https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/economia/noticia/2022-07/ibge-estima-safra-de-2614-milhoes-detoneladas-em-2022 (10 July 2022). Librandi, Marília. “Jaider Esbell, Makunaimã Manifesto e a cosmopolítica da arte indígena contemporânea”. Modernismos 1922–2022. Ed. Gênese Andrade. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022. 779–807. Machado, Ricardo. “Nem modernista, nem anti-modernista, a arte indígena contemporânea (e cosmopolítica) na vanguarda de um Brasil que jamais foi moderno. Entrevista coletiva com Daiara Tukano, Denilson Baniwa, Gustavo Caboco e Marília Librandi”. IHU Online, 9 May 2022. https://www.ihuonline.unisinos.br/artigo/7811-nem-modernista-nem-anti-modernista-a-arteindigena-contemporanea-e-cosmopolitica-na-vanguarda-de-um-brasil-que-jamais-foi-moderno (April 12, 2023). Munduruku, Daniel. “O ato indígena de educar(se), uma conversa com Daniel Munduruku”. 2016. http://www.bienal.org.br/post/3364 (18 March 2022). Pinheiro, Sophia. A imagem como arma: a trajetória da cineasta indígena Patrícia Ferreira Para Yxapy. Dissertação (Mestrado de Antropologia Social). Goiânia: Faculdade de Ciências Sociais, Universidade Federal de Goiás, 2017. Palumbo–Liu, David. The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Pinheiro Dias, Jamille. “Artistas indígenas reativam a vida em meio aos escombros da modernidade colonial.” Suplemento Pernambuco: Jornal Literário da Companhia Editora de Pernambuco, Recife, 19 March 2021. http://www.bienal.org.br/post/3364 (10 December 2021). ——. “Environmental Thinking and Indigenous Arts in Brazil Today”. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 31.1 (2022): 141–157. Poranduba. “Poranduba 19 – Ativismo Indígena”. Poranduba, 26 September 2019. https://open.spotify. com/episode/4Ur0E3R77pQPWsDDxYVQRN?si=nyqn_FjzS_uVIUrvwPaVOw. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Sá, Lucia, and Felipe Milanez. “Painting racism: Protest art by contemporary Indigenous artists”. Living (Il) legalities in Brazil: Practices, Narratives and Institutions in a Country on the Edge. Eds. Sara Brandellero, Derek Pardue, and Georg Wink. London: Routledge, 2020. Sousa Nascimento, Luiz Augusto. “No rastro da cobra-grande: cosmologias e territorialidades no Médio Rio Negro”. Aceno – Revista de Antropologia do Centro–Oeste 5 (2019): 22–242. Stengers, Isabelle. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2005. 994–1003.

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Stengers, Isabelle. “Including Nonhumans in Political Theory: Opening the Pandora’s Box?”. Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life. Eds. Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 3–33. Terena, Naine. “Véxoa: Nós sabemos”. Véxoa: Nós sabemos. São Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado, 2020. Terena, Naine, and Laura Campanilli. “A arte como contranarrativa ao racismo estrutural que afeta os indígenas no Brasil.” Conexão Planeta, 7 June 2022. https://conexaoplaneta.com.br/blog/naineterena-arte-como-contranarrativa-ao-racismo-estrutural-que-afeta-os-indigenas-no–brasil/ (10 June 2022). Terena, Naine, Fêo, and Flávio Justino. “Plataformas digitais e as manifestações estéticas indígenas: para recolher ao longo do caminho”. Urdimento – Revista de Estudos em Artes Cênicas 1.43 (2022): 1–10. Treece, David. Exiles, Allies, Rebels: Brazil’s Indianist Movement, Indigenist Politics, and the Imperial NationState. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press,, 2000. Tupinambá, Glicéria. “A visão do manto.” Revista ZUM (2021). https://revistazum.com.br/revista-zum-21/avisao-do-manto/?autor=Glic%C3%A9ria±Tupinamb%C3%A1 (10 December 2021). Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Involuntários da pátria. São Paulo: N-1 Edições, 2018.

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson

Infrastructure Infrastructures of Modernity Fernando Birri’s seminal film Tire Dié (1958) turns on the relationship between the railroad that runs through the city of Santa Fe in Argentina and an informal settlement that grows by the tracks. Although the title is taken from the words of the children who run along the track and ask the passengers for a coin, the film is staged from the point of view of the modernizing infrastructure that is the train. The opening shot frames the location from an aerial perspective paired with a voice-over that recalls Santa Fe’s founding imperative as “one must open doorways to the land.” The city is first presented to us via an impersonal sociological discourse and a series of statistics: so many churches, newspapers, hairdressers, amount of white chalk used, number of cows killed in the slaughterhouse. Although the informal settlement cannot be measured and calculated in the same way, the voice-over, together with the voices of the inhabitants themselves, are organized around the incorporation (or not) into a developing Argentine society: whether or not the kids go to school, the difficulty in obtaining money (the universal mediator), the capacity to accumulate, their abandonment by the government. The logic of the film suggests an association whereby these serialized practices and institutions (schools, churches, economic practices) are as infrastructural to a desired modernity as the railroad tracks. But the film knows this is aspirational. The spectacle of the children agilely running by the train and begging for coins exposes the disjunction between the community and the physical and social mobility represented by the train: the children shadow the train, producing a disjointed and secondary mobility that responds to it. By contrast, Margot Benacerraf’s poetic documentary Araya, filmed one year later, opens instead with scenes of a community initially marked by apparent immobility: the arduous daily labors of the fishermen and salt workers in the peninsula of Araya, Venezuela. If gathering fish is intended largely for the physical sustenance of the coastal communities, an extraction that fuels the energy regime (the bodily labor) that in turn makes the salt extraction possible, the salt itself is oriented to the global market. The ruins of a sixteenth-century fortress speak to the connection of this salt economy to a longer history of colonialism and a larger global market, but as the film begins the fortress is precisely in ruins and the community and its work are framed as if subject to a rhythm and to methods that have changed little in four hundred

Note: I want to acknowledge, with gratitude, that my work here builds on collective thinking with Dan Nemser in the joint edition and introduction to a special issue on Infrastructure in Social Text (2023). His book Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico stands as an example of the innovative extension of infrastructure as a critical concept. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-014

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years. The links to the outside are tenuous: a water truck that brings the daily rations of water, the boats that slowly bear the sacks of salt away, day after day. The cyclical tableau is punctured at the end of the film with the sudden incursion of trucks, machines and other forms of mechanized labor that alight in the region like a frenzied swarm of locusts to multiply new means of extraction. If Tire Dié foregrounds the train that is the condition of possibility of the film itself, casting its glance at the communities that accrete around the tracks and its promises of mobility, in Araya the emphasis is instead on witnessing a rhythm of life and labor that are suddenly torn asunder and destructured by the new pathways of connection. Both films can be read in retrospect as responses to the poetics of infrastructure. Infra denotes that which is beneath, within or prior. The term first emerged in late nineteenth-century French civil engineering projects and was adopted into English in the early twentieth century to refer to organizational work such as embankments or bridges that had to take place before railroad tracks could be laid (Carse 2016: 27). As Ashley Carse points out, the term infrastructure, like network, is a plural noun, implying a series of integrated parts. Like the latter term, infrastructure is also multifarious and open-ended, but its common referents carry with it a stronger sense of materiality. Unlike network, however, infrastructure implies something other than horizontal relations across a surface: it connotes depth, a substrate, hierarchy. Like foundations, infrastructures bear something else or enable something else to happen but originally this “something else” was related to mobility or connection. In its most telegraphic reduction (and in its materialist variants), infrastructure has been parsed as “matter that enable[s] the movement of other matter” (Larkin 2013: 329). Deeply imbricated with modernity, the construction of what we now call infrastructures, like railroads, were central both to the material expansion of capitalism as well as to Enlightenment visions of progress, to the construction of a cultural landscape characterized by the dominance of pathways over settlements.1 After its beginnings in civil engineering, the term took on new meanings during the World Wars that expanded the ways of conceiving of this “something else.” On the one hand it was used to designate the strategic conditions of possibility, the various subordinate parts (such as airfields) that might enable certain military maneuvers. On the other hand, projected onto the enemy, the concept allowed for the identification of targets that were vital to the maintenance (or destruction) of enemy life and society: “armament factories, electricity stations, sewage plants, coal mines and workers’ housing, all interlinked by such essential arteries as telephone exchanges, railways, canals and bridges” (Duffield 2011: 6). Seen through the lens of war, infrastructure agglutinated the critical places,

 In “Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large Technical Systems,” Rosalind Williams argues that “the outstanding feature of the modern cultural landscape is the dominance of pathways over settlements. . . . Outside the city, the dominant element of organization is the roadway— whether actual roads such as ‘strips’ or interstate highways, or other transportation and communication networks such as railway lines and electric power lines” (Williams 1993: 381).

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pathways and connections that knotted together and thus sustained a particular form of life. Its further use and spread in international development discourse in the twentieth century, also charted by Carse, continued to harbor a future-oriented teleology under the name of development and was explicitly concerned with engineering the social, economic and political configurations necessary for a certain way of life. Rather than positing a pre-existing ground, infrastructures are forms of “groundworking” (Liu 2013). To understand the railroad in Tire Dié or the road and machines in Araya not just as stand-alone structures or engineering projects but through the greater abstraction of the term infrastructures is thus to frame them as internal to or part of a secondorder system; it is to pay attention to the way they bear something else on their backs. To deploy infrastructure as an analytic implies, as Paul Edwards argues, a multiscalar approach: if theories of modernity typically function with a mesoscale perspective and user-oriented scales operate at the microlevel, infrastructures appear on the macroscale (Edwards 2003: 221). From this macroscale, material infrastructures come into view as managing and ordering space in the service of a territorializing project. At a certain historical moment this meant stitching together the great territorial containers which were the modern nation-state, and within those containers, to more firmly bind and order their urban centers. This earth-writing in the service of the modern nation-state is implicit in narratives of the extensive build up and expansion of physical infrastructures in Latin America that took place between 1870 and 1930 (Summerhill 2006: 296).2 Raquel Velho and Sebastián Ureta quip that “Latin American states were co-produced with infrastructures,” “the most extreme case being Panama, a country purposely set-up to house a canal” (Velho and Ureta 2019: 3). Most studies of infrastructures in Latin America, they write, thus tend to focus on connections between constructions of infrastructures such as roads and dams and joint processes of state formation and modernization (Velho and Ureta 2019: 3). Indeed, Velho and Ureto also make the point that until the late 1970s, state, colonial, and corporate power in Latin America was synonymous with “infrastructural power” in the most concrete sense of the term (Velho and Ureta 2019: 3). As the Panama Canal also exemplifies, these infrastructures were intended as material pathways for an economic development organized around the extraction and export of materials, a configuration poetically summed up by Eduardo Galeano as “the open veins of Latin America.” Colonial commercial centers had been organized around the export of certain goods like sugar, silver and indigo but until the nineteenth century travel across land was largely undertaken by wagons, porters or mules and existing roads followed “pre-contact indigenous routes of movement”  I borrow the term “earth-writing” from Karen Yusoff who describes the planetary analytic of the Anthropocene as failing to “do the work to properly identify its own histories of colonial earthwriting, to name the masters of broken earths and to redress the legacy of racialized subjects that geology leaves in its wake” (Yusoff 2018: 13).

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(Summerhill 2006: 296). From the perspective of an economic history, mountains and deserts presented barriers to mobility and connection and most areas with “strong economic potential did not possess extensive arrays of roads, networks of canals, or even interlocking systems of natural inland waterways on the eve of the railway age” (Summerhill 2006: 296). Although navigable rivers were abundant in some regions (particularly along the Magdalena River in Colombia, the Orinoco River in Venezuela and the Amazon river basin as well as the Paraná-Paraguay and Rio de la Plata system in the south) they were virtually absent from others, such as in interior Mexico. It was only after 1870 that the construction of rail networks began in earnest, with the greatest expansion taking place in Brazil and Argentina. A boom in port construction followed to resolve the bottlenecks resulting from an increased quantity of materials to be exported. When European-led investment in railway expansion slowed with the onset of World War I, roadway construction followed. The worldwide extension of infrastructure and the movement from piecemeal and fragmented networked infrastructures to more centralized and standardized systems that took place roughly between 1850 and 1960 was regulated by what urbanists Steve Graham and Simon Marvin term the “modern infrastructural ideal.” According to this ideal, infrastructures were imagined as connective tissues knitting together people, places, social institutions, and the natural environment (Graham and Marvin 2001: 43). Domingo Sarmiento’s words at an inaugural conference for the installation of the first railroads in Concordia, Entre Rios in 1874, are exemplary of this imaginary: The railways, linking together cities and provinces; the telegraph transforming the whole of the Republic into a neighborhood, where neighbors can talk to each other and reach each other’s homes—this is the Nation; there you have Government as demanded by the current interest of the people. . . . And I wonder if it is not to bring us closer to set these iron chains, not over men, but over things, distances and time; chaining nature so that the will may work more freely? (qtd. Bottaro 2014: 427)

At the urban level, Haussmann’s Paris was the archetype for such integrative projects through infrastructure and his reforms were copied in so many capital cities throughout Latin America: To Haussmann the road networks were the city’s circulatory system; the rationally engineered sewer and cemetery systems were the waste disposal ‘organs’ of the metropolis; and green spaces were the city’s ‘respiratory’ system. The street system, in fact, was the physical framework for the ‘bundling’ of buried water networks, lighting, drains and sewers—a situation so familiar today that we take it for granted (Graham and Marvin 2001: 55).

The organic metaphors cited here transmit the subordinate yet critical relation of these systems to what is imagined as a whole: a functioning machine or organism. Such metaphors proliferated widely. For example, in an 1882 newspaper article on the need for new water infrastructures in Mexico City, José Cuellar commented that rather than relying on water-carriers to deliver water to homes, a network of pipes

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would better manage the supply, describing this network as a “its own motor, just like the arterial and venous system of the human body” (Cuellar 1999, 678). Mexico City, overlaid on the Aztec city of Tenochitlan, and thus located on what was originally an island surrounded by a vast lake system, parts of which had been drained by the colonial/creole administration, had suffered since colonial times of either too much or too little water. Cuellar’s vision of a smoothly functioning and interconnected network of water delivery was also organized by the grammar of hygiene and public health. Central to the infrastructural ideal then was the assumption that such systems provisioned public goods (water, electricity, gas, waste disposal) in the interest of a public good. The fantasy borne by the railways, water systems or telegraphs exemplify Brian Larkin’s point that infrastructures are not only functional objects but also “concrete semiotic and aesthetic vehicles oriented to addressees” (Larkin 2013: 329). Some twenty-five years after Sarmiento, Euclides da Cunha couldn’t help but note the speculative and aspirational dimensions of such fictions of a national cohesion knotted together through telegraphs and railroad lines. In a brief vignette within Os Sertões (1902), he describes railroads and telegraph lines as, precisely, “marks of progress””— that is, as inscriptions and symbols of progress, signs of the desire for development— but that had thus far proved “meaningless” in the Brazilian backlands as they did not “alter the genuinely rustic character of the place”: “One alights from the train, walks a few hundred yards between rows of squat houses, and forthwith finds himself at the edge of the village square—in the backlands./ For this is in reality the point where two societies meet, each one wholly alien to the other. The leather-clad vaqueiro will emerge from the caatinga, make his way into the ugly-looking settlement, and halt his nag besides the rails where natives of the seaboard pass, unaware of his existence” (Da Cunha 1944: 405). This mini-scene figures the fundamental partition in space and temporality amplified by the construction of tracks and telegraph, a disjunction at the heart of Da Cunha’s analysis of the Canudos War. For the vaqueiro, railroads and the telegraph are not promissory notes for a desired (or contested) modernity but mute objects, just as the natives of the seaboard who travel the train cannot see but an “ugly-looking settlement.” On the other hand, as we saw, the train in Tire Dié, in 1958 in Santa Fe, Argentina, does interpellate those who dwell alongside it, even as it cuts through the land, generating the separation the film frames between itself and the settlement: the children are not the intended users of the train-infrastructure but still they run alongside it, calling to the travelers who occasionally gaze out at the anthropological spectacle of the children, or turn back to their newspapers, ignoring them. Still, the appearance of this disjunction in both Os Sertões and Tire Díe is a sign that their poetics sits askance the infrastructures of modernity. The Latin American cultural archive of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus brims with examples registering the laying down of new pathways that could transport people, resources or goods to new spaces at new speeds and in presumably regular ways, reconfiguring spatial, social, economic and political relations in the process. Not only were these new phenomena charged with meaning (promises

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of modernity or futurity) but they also unsettled forms of perception, sense and realism. The arrival of cars, electricity and roads, and the building of dams, were aesthetic events, noted in so many poems, novels, essays and even films. They were also generators of new aesthetics. Early accounts of motorized travel might constitute, suggests Jens Andermann, the “origin scene of Latin American abstractionism” (Andermann 2023: 79); the juxtaposition of non-simultaneous spaces and times experienced by urban-based populations as they ventured out on newly built roads to explore previously remote parts of their national territories has its counterpart in Latin American avant-garde aesthetics.3 Brazilian Modernist poet Oswald de Andrade’s well-known “Pobre alimária” (Poor brute) stages precisely a juxtaposition where two modes of transportation intersect, one residual (the horse-drawn cart), one emergent (the tram). The horse and the cart Were stuck in the Tramline And as the driver Was getting impatient Because he was taking the lawyers To their offices They extricated the vehicle And the animal bolted But the light-footed carter Jumped onto his seat And punished the harnessed fugitive With a fearsome whip (qtd. Schwarz 1992: 112).

For a brief moment the horse-drawn cart is stuck on the tracks, literally blocking the newer mode of transportation. The impatience of the tram driver marks the distance between his projected task—both single-minded and linear, defined in terms of the rhythms and demands of waged-work insofar as he needs to take the lawyers to their office—and the reality of the cart blocking his way. The driver of the cart on the other hand, as Roberto Schwarz points out, is figured through language choice as representing an archaic deep time, something like a Greek charioteer (Schwarz 1992: 113). But it is the third figure in the scene, the horse, that marks the fundamental difference between both modes of transportation. The animal’s life and energy are infrastructural to the cart but is also unruly and the cart-driver, in response, recurs to his whip to wrest obedience out of the horse. There is no such corresponding figure for the tram-driver: the power propelling his vehicle is life-less and automatic. The horse is a reminder that infrastructures

 See “Accidental Journeys: Automobility and the Avant-Garde” in Andermann’s Entranced Earth for a rich reading of the impact of a new machinic complex (composed of railroads, roads and cars) on the avant-gardes of the 1920s. (Andermann 2023: 72–86).

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are also fundamentally about stabilizing nature or generating a second–order nature in which irregularity and variability has been erased or at least controlled, enchaining nature rather than men so that, in Sarmiento’s words, “the will may work more freely.” Just as fiction, film, poetry, essays, and photography registered the arrival of trams, roads, dams, electricity, so too have historiography, literary studies and cultural criticism. There is a rich archive of commentary and analysis precisely on how Latin American societies and cultural forms registered, transmitted, and contested technological changes, particularly in the early twentieth century. But to concatenate this archive under the sign of infrastructure, and to confront it to the contemporary moment, is to raise new questions. That critical corpus is oriented around the disruptions in sense provoked by the inaugural moment of new technologies or systems, but a central debate in infrastructure studies today concerns instead the aftermath of infrastructures, when they have sedimented and become simply the substrate to “what is.” The question, in other words, is not so much “what” infrastructure is but “when”: something becomes infrastructural when it has fallen into background or context (Carse and Kneas 2019: 13).4 So it is that the Invisible Committee declares that infrastructure is “mute” and as such cannot be contested politically but only “blocked” (like the tram); that is, contested physically or materially (Invisible Committee 2014: 31–32). Although this analysis misses all the ways in which infrastructures continue to constitute forms of address and semiotic vehicles, nonetheless it correctly picks up on infrastructure’s projected trajectory to recede and become simply that which organizes reality. This transition is captured in a changing relation to roads depicted in José Maria Arguedas’s Yawar Fiesta (1941). A memorable early scene in the novel is the building of the first road between Nazca and Puquio by four ayllus from the Andean highlands. The undertaking is described in heroic terms (180 kilometers are constructed in only 28 days) and the result as agentive, a life-form of sorts: the highway is a “broad blacking serpent” that leaves the base of the mountains and snakes across the sands. Once the national government takes up the initiative to build roads, however, the enterprise is leached of all life: it becomes automatic, and the labor involved is no longer heroic but compulsory: “From then on road building was a business. And the people from the towns worked as day laborers or because they were forced to do so” (Arguedas 2002: 67). The roads no longer matter as such, fading into the background of the novel and existing only as the condition of possibility for a mass migratory movement: “Once again, after 600 years, perhaps after 1,000 years, Andean people were going down to the coast in multitudes” (Arguedas 2002: 68). The term “infrastructure” intends a distinction from superstructure. Even as it configures worlds, infrastructure is ultimately meant to establish itself beyond the

 Carse and Kneas cite work by Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder (1996) in proposing this formulation, particularly their essay, “Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces”.

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reach of culture or politics. This depoliticization is, of course, part of its politics. Historian Patrick Joyce makes the point that the construction and management of infrastructure was a key technology of governmentality and central to the performance of liberalism: “While privileging the circulation of people and things, infrastructures also served to permit states to separate politics from nature, the technical from the political, and the human from the nonhuman. Thus depoliticized, the management of infrastructures as a technical problem formed the grounds on which subjects were “freed” to participate in civil society and produce economic life” (qtd. Appel et al. 2018: 4). The successful conclusion of infrastructure’s trajectory would be for it to fall out of signification and contestation, to become the “invisible background, the substrate or support, the technocultural/natural environment, of modernity”; infrastructures, in this case, would not be material objects so much as “act like laws” (Edwards 2003: 191). Put in literary terms, although infrastructures are speculative at the outset, once they are settled, they speak the language of realism. They seek to occupy the position of the barometer in Flaubert’s story, the seemingly futile, unremarkable detail left out of the analysis of narrative but which, for Roland Barthes, is there to produce the “reality effect”.

Infrastructures of the Anthropocene As noted earlier, infrastructure has been available as a term for over one hundred years, but it has more recently been taken up as an object of study and as a theoryconcept, prompting a so-called “infrastructural turn” in the past few decades particularly in the field of anthropology in academic institutions of the Global North. One can hypothesize that its visibility, its emergence as a field of problematization (in Michel Foucault’s language), is at least partly related to the changing function and form of material infrastructures in the late twentieth century, in particular the decline of the modern infrastructural ideal and the emergence in its stead of infrastructures that splinter social and spatial relations. Under neoliberal globalization archipelagos of bunker-like formations and enclaves connected by high-speed paths have proliferated, even as disconnected or excluded spaces and people have spread around them (Graham and Marvin 2001: 196–197). Spaces are rendered discontinuous or torn rather than knotted together by toll-roads, gated communities, or shopping malls. The security, mobility and access of valued communities are secured to the detriment of all those considered unworthy or disposable in the mode of the spatial apartheid of colonial spaces. What is left of a promise of wider integration is sometimes displaced onto media circuits or borne by the cellphone. The changed configuration and purpose of these new infrastructural developments accompany the reduction of direct state investment and the spread of forms of privatization under neoliberalism that have taken place in Latin America as elsewhere. An important marker of a fundamentally

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changed relationship to infrastructure is the fact that even when populist left-wing governments in Latin America attempted to “relocate the state as a provider of goods & services, impelling a new infrastructural moment fueled by the commodity booms of the 2000s, social movements in the region emerged in reaction and opposition to such large-scale projects as the HidroAysén in Chile or the Supervía in Mexico” (Velho and Ureta 2019: 5). Such widespread opposition speak to the broken spell of infrastructure’s promises amidst both the failures of so many modernization projects as well as the social and environmental destruction wrought by successful infrastructures: in his 1975 Viaje al centro de México, Fernando Benítez writes that “the automobiles that used to provoke admiration now produce colossal traffic jams in streets designed for the passage of horses and carts. The mountains and the snow-capped volcanoes have disappeared under a dense veil of smog” (My translation, qtd. Sabau 2019: 52). The use of infrastructure as an analytic has been taken up in Latin American studies largely thanks to anthropologists.5 In this new vein of study, infrastructure is not used merely as a term with concrete material referents although there is excellent work produced along these lines such as Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox’s Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise on the Iquitos-Nauta highway in Peru and the interoceanic highway under construction between Brazil and Peru. But infrastructure is also being deployed as a theoretical tactic for thinking about relationality, for thinking about different scales of analysis, for thinking about how something like context (or ground) is determined, and how certain phenomena or processes are offshored or black-boxed.6 Key to much of this work is the collapse of the nature/culture distinction that might have once held apart infrastructure from environment, particularly in the wake of discussions around the Anthropocene, a term that names a twoway entanglement of the human and the more-than-human as well as a newly perceived rift that has destabilized the grounds of that relationship. For Jason Moore— who prefers the alternate term Capitalocene— the concept does not go far enough because, among other things, it still harbors a nature/society dualism at its core and continues to conceptually privilege substances over relations. Moore argues that the boundary—setting that produced Nature (capitalized) as an abstraction and as external was a fundamental condition of capital accumulation: “an ontologically separate ‘base’ upon which the ‘superstructure’ of Society develops” (Moore 2015: 27). Capitalism, he argues, is precisely a way of organizing nature and putting it to work, and appropriating unpaid work (“natural fertility” in the form of minerals, soil, water) from outside the commodity system into the circuit of capital in order to transform its

 One recent publication that follows in the vein of Michael Rubenstien’s Public Words: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism and the Postcolonial is Nicole Fadellin’s “Infrastructure Studies and Literature in Latin America and the Caribbean” in Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms.  Kregg Hetherington ties infrastructural critique to the crisis of the Anthropocene: “if humans have become a geological force, how does one differentiate ground from action?” (Hetherington 2019: 5).

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work/energy into value. Moore proposes a schema of a double internality whereby capitalism is understood as having always already internalized planetary life and processes even as the biosphere in turn has internalized capitalism7 (Moore 2015: 16–27). Much of the conceptual expansion of infrastructure travels in the same direction as Moore. Where nature might have previously been understood to precede infrastructure, and to be controlled or chained through the production of a second nature, Kregg Hetherington’s statement that carbon is now “the infrastructure of the infrastructure of carbon” (Hetherington 2019: 6) expresses the double internality that Moore strives to narrate in his work. On the one hand, technological systems consume carbon but rely on nature to cycle it out of the atmosphere and back into the soil. On the other, “[f]ear of global warming represents the permanent imbrication of industrial infrastructures within the planetary carbon metabolism” (Edwards 2003: 196). An infrastructural perspective can frame the (anthropocenic) environment as output rather than input, even as it can also point to nature as put to work as infrastructure: “forests, wetlands, reefs, and other landscapes, if appropriately organized, deliver services (water storage, purification, and conveyance; flood alleviation; improved air quality; climate regulation; and so on) that facilitate economic activity and development” (Carse 2012: 540). This is the argument that drives Ashley Carse’s work on the efforts to maintain the watersheds in Panama insofar as they are effectively infrastructural for the Panama Canal. Likewise, Stephanie Graeter in “Infrastructural Incorporations” analyzes how the bodies of low-income residents in a port area of Lima have become unwitting vessels storing heavy metals such as lead and thereby constituting a valuable, cost-saving human infrastructure of toxic storage for contemporary extractive capitalism. In turn, Gaston Gordillo in “The Metropolis: The Infrastructure of the Anthropocene” approaches soy production in Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina as part of a hyper-object that he calls the “metropolis”: the circuit of soy becomes one thread into the “materiality of the continuum that moves matter from one continent to another in order to reproduce and expand the metabolisms of the largest urban agglomerations on Earth” (Gordillo 2019: 69). There is no corresponding pre-constituted cultural archive that ascribes to itself an infrastructural analytic of the contemporary moment, no counterpart to a language and aesthetics that rode on the back of the infrastructures of modernity. A corpus needs to be formed, works gathered together that speak (or contest) the idiom of the infrastructures that make neoliberalism possible, even when these don’t cleave unabashedly to a

 For an overview of Moore’s argument, see his introductory chapter “The Double Internality” in Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Whereas Moore criticizes the Anthropocene for its implications that a collective and undifferentiated human subject is responsible for climate change, Kathryn Yusofff pluralizes the concept in A Billion Black Anthropocenes, aguing that “[i]mperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence” (Yusoff 2018: xiii).

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structure of promises, accomplishing instead functions left unspoken.8 The challenge, however, is not unlike the one identified by Amitav Ghosh in his analysis of the glaring absence of mainstream and serious modern fiction that addresses climate change: namely, that the inherited grid of forms and genres, and assumptions such as those concerning setting and plausibility in the realist novel, have shown themselves to be radically incapable of addressing uncanny and improbable realities. In other words, climate change, though real, does not seem realistic. Similarly then, what works might be said to give shape to the regime of sensibility laid down by the infrastructures that ushered in the Anthropocene, even if these are hidden in plain sight? What works can be read (perhaps in hindsight) as having participated in the realist discourse aspired to by certain infrastructural projects? Or alternately, what works engage with the poetics of infrastructure, unsettling its claims of realism? What works show not just the facts of environmental crises, the ruins of globalization, but also the drag of the relations that have configured them thus?9 One example is Surire (2015) by Bettina Peru and Iván Osnovikoff, a documentary on the Surire Salt Flats in the Chilean Andes that might be read as a late counterpart to Araya. Both films are named for places shaped by modes of extraction but what is filmed as a deep metabolic and cohesive relation in Araya between the salt, saltworkers, the various communities and their environment becomes a fractured place that barely hangs together in Surire. The film features several wide-angle shots in which the same frame concatenates old Aymaran llama herders, flamingos, dogs,

 One might name for example the road movie which flourished as a genre following the boom in cinematic production in the region after the 1990s, and in which roads (when present) underwrite the mobility and movement that shape the plotline. And yet one of the characteristics of the Latin American road movie is that in fact neither cars nor roads are an invariant feature in them as they are in more traditional iterations of the genre: not only are collective modes of transportation (buses, trucks, taxis, hitchhiking) often the only means of mobility available to the characters but so are nonmotorized modes as well: canoes, donkeys, walking. Examples include: El viaje (1992), Guantanamera (1995), Central do Brasil (1998), Y tu Mamá también (2002), Sin nombre (2009), Yvy Marae (2013), Diarios de motocicleta (2004), Bye Bye Brasil (1980), Familia rodante (2004), Historias mínimas (2002), Los muertos (2004), El abrazo de la serpiente (2015), Cochochi (2009), Pacha (2009), and Liverpool (2008). See Nadie Lie (2017).  There is a growing body of work in different media on ecological devastation including documentaries, novels such as Samantha Schweblin’s Distancia de Rescate, and eco-art such as Gilberto Esparza’s Plantas Nómadas, (a mobile biorobotic hyprid capable of cleaning polluted rivers), and Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves’s mixed-media installation, The Return of a Lake/El regreso de un lago (2012), on the resurgence of waters that had been drained on the eastern edge of Mexico City. There is also a notable and growing corpus of ecocriticism. See, for example, Jorge Marcone’s “Filming the Emergence of Popular Environmentalism in Latin America: Postcolonialism and Buen Vivir” (2015); Mark Anderson’s and Zélia Bora’s edited volume Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film and Literature (2016); Carolyn Fornoff’s and Gisela Heffes’s edited volume Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (2021); and Victoria Saramago’s Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America (2021).

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llamas, a guard house that accompanies the designation of the space as a national park, and a truckflow that passes in and out transporting the lithium mined below the surface. The splintered reality held together within the camera’s framing is in part produced by the mining-infrastructure that dis-places the land: without it, one might see simply “nature” or the beauty of a “landscape”. One gets a sense of a damaged and dying world; the old Aymara herder, in particular, constantly struggles with the materiality of the world: she heaves and huffs; her body almost creaks; a fire breaks out; she can barely lift the llama to skin it. And yet people are not the center of the film. As Andermann puts it, the middle ground is vacated in a film that veers from microscopic to panoramic shots and what goes on there is “out of reach for human action and its cinematic grammar, the shot/reverse shot” (Andermann 2023: 192). The human activity that constitutes the mining infrastructure is also displaced. In some of the most memorable—and much commented—shots of the film, the foreground is taken up with the flamingos and llamas and it is only far away in the back that we discern what we realize are a long line of trucks waiting to pick up and carry off the lithium. Foreground and background are reversed in an echo of infrastructural inversion: one might expect the environment or the flamingoes to figure simply as the backdrop to the movement of the trucks that embody capitalist extraction and thus dynamism, history and change (or destruction as in Araya). Instead, the flamingoes and llamas are foregrounded as manifestations of a lively aggregate which seems indifferent to the trucks or which, perhaps more precisely, includes the trucks. Taken out of a story of becoming, the trucks are relegated to a background element, becoming part of the picture, one more thing in a strange world, droning steadily back and forth like alien creatures. None of them—trucks, flamingos, llamas seem to be going anywhere in particular (unlike the human figures). It is an uncanny and curiously suspended reality, one that is seemingly detached from a legible time-line: no futuricity is projected, but neither are we presented ultimately with a story of mourning or loss. The strange or uncertain status of the trucks invites us to imagine them as the conditions of possibility of a newly configured and defamiliarized world. Nature is not the infrastructure to a world scripted by human mastery; instead human activity is infrastructural to a new post-human assemblage that is hard to discern. Indeed, the relationship between scale and the act of seeing is central in the film’s methods and to its problematization of sight: the light on the salt flats shimmers thickly with mirages; the vast panoramic shots of the landscape take place at so great a distance that they seem to be stills (containing no movement at all); the extreme close ups “atomize observable objects into texture” like the bubbling of water.10 The scale of the infrastructural relations of what Gordillo called the metropolis cannot be made visible, but only glimpsed through some of its effects, obliquely. And the vast distance between its

 My gratitude to PhD student Nastasya Koygina in writings for a graduate seminar on infrastructure for this lovely formulation.

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component parts is ciphered in a long radio conversation in which a national park officer patiently transmits a list of needed supplies, including food. The thread of aural communication is tenuous—the sound cuts in and out, and the message is often garbled – as if the infrastructures that subtend his life on the outpost have nothing to do with the roads and mobility that power the everpresent truckflow in the background. As an analytic, infrastructure draws attention to processes of world-formation and to the interplay between what is perceptible or not about the forms that inform our present. To name something as infrastructural is, like Surire, to shift the relations of perception and our perceptions of relationality.

Works Cited Andermann, Jens. Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism and the End of Landscape. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2023. Anderson, Mark, and Zélia Bora, eds. Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film and Literature. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. Araya. Dir. Margot Benacerraff. Venezuela, 1959. 90 mins. Arguedas, José María. Yawar Fiesta. Trans. Frances Horning Barraclough. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 2002. Appel, Hannah, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta. “Temporality, Politics and the Promise of Infrastructure.” The Promise of Infrastructure. Ed. Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 1–38. Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. 141–48. Bottaro, Mayra. “Wiring the Body, Wiring the World: Accelerated Times and Telegraphic Obsessions in Nineteenth-Century Latin America.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36.5 (2014): 421–440. Carse, Ashley. “Nature as infrastructure: Making and Managing the Panama Canal Watershed.” Social Studies of Science 42.4 (2012): 539–563. ——. “Keyword: Infrastructure: How a Humble French Engineering Term Shaped the Modern World.” Infrastructure and Social Complexity: A Companion. Ed. P. Harvey, C. Bruun Jensen, and A. Morita. London: Routledge, 2016. 27–39. Carse, Ashley, and David Kneas. “Unbuilt and Unfinished: The Temporalities of Infrastructure.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 10 (2019): 9–28. Cuéllar, José T. de. “El aguador.” Los Imprescindibles: José T. de Cuéllar. Ed. Belem Clark de Lara. Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1999. 623–628. Da Cunha, Euclides. Rebellion in the Backlands. Trans. Samuel Putnam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944. Duffield, Mark. “Environmental Terror: Uncertainty, Resilience and the Bunker.” School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Working Paper 06–11 (2011): 1–28. Edwards, Paul. “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems.” Modernity and Technology. Ed. Thomas Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Freenberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 185–22.

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Fadellin, Nicole. “Infrastructure Studies and Literature in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms Ed. Guillermina De Ferrari and Mariano Siskind. London: Routledge, 2023, 294–301. Foucault, Michel. “The Concern for Truth.” Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 1988. 255–270. Fornoff, Carolyn, and Gisela Heffes. Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema. Buffalo: SUNY Press, 2021. Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of the Continent. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997. Graham, Steve, and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge, 2001. Gordillo, Gaston. “The Metropolis: The Infrastructure of the Anthropocene.” Infrastructure, Environment and Life in the Anthropocene. Ed. Kregg Hetherington. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019, 66–95. Graeter, Stefanie. “Infrastructural Incorporations: Toxic Storage, Corporate Indemnity, and Ethical Deferral in Peru’s Neoextractive Era.” American Anthropologist 122.1 (2020): 21–36. Harvey, Penny, and Hannah Knox. Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. Hetherington, Kregg. “Keywords of the Anthropocene.” Infrastructure, Environment and Life in the Anthropocene. Ed. Kregg Hetherington. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 1–13. The Invisible Committee. To Our Friends. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext[e], 2014. Larkin, Brian. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–343. Lie, Nadie. The Latin American (Counter-)Road Movie and Ambivalent Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2017. Liu, Alan. “Toward Critical Infrastructure Studies: Digital Humanities, New Media Studies, and the Culture of Infrastructure.” Keynote address, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Feb. 23, 2013, revised 2018. https://cistudies.org/wp-content/uploads/Toward-Critical-Infrastructure–Studies.pdf (17 Apr 2020). Marcone, Jorge. “Filming the Emergence of Popular Environmentalism in Latin America: Postcolonialism and Buen Vivir.” Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches. Ed. Elizabeth Deloughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan. New York: Routledge, 2015. 207–255. Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso, 2015. Nemser, Daniel. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Rubenstein, Michael. Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism and the Postcolonial. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Sabau, Ana. “The Perils of Ownership: Property and Literature in Nineteenth-Century Mexico.” Mexican Literature in Theory. Ed. Ignacio Sánchez-Prado. London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2017, 33–54. ——. “Visiones micrológicas: la crónica como legado del 68.” Hacia un nuevo siglo (1968–2012): tensiones, territorios y formas de un campo literario en movimiento. Ed. Miguel G. Rodríguez Lozano and Roberto Cruz Arzabal. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2019. 51–66. Saramago, Victoria. Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Schwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. Ed. John Gledson. London: Verso, 1992. Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. “Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces.” Information Systems Research 7 (1996): 111–134.

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Summerhill, William. “The Development of Infrastructure.” The Long Twentieth Century. The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, vol. 2. Ed. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, John Coatsworth, and Roberto Cortes-Conde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 293–326. Surire. Dir. Iván Osnovikoff and Bettina Perut. Chile, 2015. 80 mins. Tire Dié. Dir. Fernando Birri. Argentina, 1958. 33 mins. Velho, Raquel, and Sebastián Ureta. “Frail Modernities: Latin American Infrastructures between Repair and Ruination.” Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 2.1 (2019): 428–441. Williams, Rosalind. “Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large Technical Systems.” Science in Context 6.2 (1993): 377–403. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Michel Nieva

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Figure 1: Colectivo Lamarencoche, La familia obrera (The working-class family), 2000.

Reinterpreting La familia obrera, Oscar del Bony’s iconic performance, Colectivo Lamarencoche zeroes in on the collapse of traditional understandings of labor that sustained developmentalist imaginaries throughout Latin America (Fig. 1). The original performance, presented at the Instituto Di Tella in 1968, had staged a sort of “Argentine dream”: the fantasy of a typical heteronormative working family that, thanks to the social policies of the welfare state, manages to ascend socially. Leading the podium, the providing father or breadwinner (impersonated by Luis Ricardo Rodríguez, matricero de profesión, a male industrial waged worker) looks proudly and complacently at his son. The boy is a diligent student who, thanks to public education, will be a professional (probably a doctor or an engineer) who will socially promote the family into the middle class. One step down from the father is his spouse. Her name is unknown, since her only function is to perform the reproductive work that cares for and nurtures the present and the future, father and son. The woman also looks attentively at her son, in an oedipal tension that reflects the social ascent awaiting her family, because she appears to desire the future engineer more than the modest toolmaker who happens to be her husband. (Daniel Santoro, in fact, painted a remake of this performance unfolding the conflict between the working-class father and the prospective professional descendant, called Drama edípico en tres actos). This dramatic and archetypal character that constitutes a “familia obrera” both for popular imaginaries and for developmentalist narratives is what Oscar del Bony shows

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-015

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is already a performatic device before being staged. That is why a sign below the original performance stated: Luis Ricardo Rodríguez percibe el doble de lo que gana en su oficio por permanecer en exhibición con su mujer y su hijo durante la muestra. [Luis Ricardo Rodríguez earns double what he pockets in his job for being on display with his wife and son during the exhibition.]

The presence of the “happy” family in a stage is already marked as a biopolitical fiction by the information that they are performing in an art show, because they earn more this way than what the father makes through his “actual” work. Thus it disguises the real power relations that, on the contrary, are made present in the relation between the (bourgeois) exhibition viewer and “objetified/reified” self-performing family. This biopolitical fiction of proletarian hope, forged by industrial development policies, is what sustained the narratives of the welfare state during the first half of the twentieth century. However, it is what collapsed in Argentina after the 2001 crisis, which was the culmination of a neoliberal transition of several decades that financialized the economy and destroyed traditional industrial labor. The stickers produced by Colectivo Lamarencoche, pasted around Plaza de Mayo during the protests against the government’s austerity policies, ostensibly reflect this contrast, between a past of formal employment and a present without future when precarity and uncertainty dominate the scene. This is no longer the work of a worker but “Obra del desempleo” (The work of unemployment), the complete erasure of industry and working-class prosperity by neoliberal policies, which the original performance had still projected into a future it was warning against. Since then, a new paradigm of precarization has emerged. Without a living wage assured by the welfare state (“este es el salario que percibe” or “this is the salary received,” describes the epigraph to an empty space), the traditional distinction between productive and reproductive, paid and unpaid, labor vanishes together with the Oedipal cast that had performed it in its earlier iteration. It could be said that the anonymous female of Bony’s performance and all that was historically considered “natural” in her unpaid labor (the production and reproduction of life, gender, race) takes up the entire space of this vanishing act. Against the hyper-visibility and massive reproduction of the male breadwinner during the twentieth century, these “naturalized” bodies, typically unseen and their labor erased as non-labor, emerge from the ruins of a fractured representation. On this reading, the vanishing shadow of the male breadwinner gives rise to what Jason Moore calls “Cheap Nature” (Moore 2015): the unpaid everyday (re)production of human life, mostly performed by feminized bodies, and the unpaid activity of racialized bodies and colonized territories considered “natural” resources. In this chapter, I will trace how these unpaid bodies and territories, previously erased from developmentalist representations of labor, reappear in contemporary Latin American aesthetics. The understanding of neoliberal and extractive logics upon work and energy as a new modulation of colonial, racial and patriarchal violence is the

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political vector that puts into discussion by many of these artworks and theories. The play Petróleo (2018), by the Piel de Lava collective, and the art installation Pornopetróleo (2015), by Pao Lunch will guide my reflections. Among their political and aesthetic wagers, these two pieces find possible ways to disobey the capitalist “(re)productive mandate” in Indigenous struggles and sexual dissidence. On the one hand, the eco-Marxist tradition (namely, Moore and Bellamy Foster) that historically finds in the unpaid appropriation of colonial lands and human and extra-human (re)productive force the capitalist origin of “Cheap Nature” that enables global commodity production. On the other, feminist readings that consider women’s economic and sexual indistinction in the realm of Nature what makes extractive violence against territories and feminized bodies converge, are theoretical debates that will strongly nourish this essay. In the empty space forged by neoliberal destruction of formal industrial labor, precariousness reduces difference and makes bodies and territories equal as extractable matter. Economic and ecological precarity destroys the ontological hierarchy of male waged worker above passive and reproductive “nature” (racialized, feminized, dehumanized beings, and nonbiological entities such as chemicals and minerals). Rising automatization, genetically-modified, and technological inputs in factory farms, monoculture, mining, and oil drilling render human and nonhuman ways of producing value indistinguishable. The “labor” of a river, whose flow mobilizes electricity in a dam, or the labor of an outsourced employee who sprays glyphosate in a soy plantation, become equal in their condition of cheap energy exposed to toxicity. As the labor historian Sarah Besky states, “the strict conceptual division of the world into active working subjects [human] and passive worked-upon objects [nonhuman]” (Besky 2019: 2) disappears. Besky coins the expression “troubled ecologies” to address the instability of neoextractive ventures, which require being exhausted and overworked “to remain economically viable” (Besky 2019: 7). According to her, “these are spaces that ‘trouble’ foundational analytic categories such as work and nature” (Besky 2019: 7). Likewise, Moore asserts that the production of value “encompasses not only wagework but also the mobilization of uncapitalized natures—soils, women’s work, peasant re/production” (Moore 2015: 90). This “uncapitalized” or “Cheap” Nature depends on the accelerated advance of the extractive frontier over geographies previously considered unproductive to release “new sources of free or low-cost human and extrahuman natures for capital unpaid work/energy” (Moore 2015: 85). Although for Moore the violent capitalist appropriation and exploitation of work as “Cheap Nature” starts in the “long sixteenth century” (namely, with the conquest of America), in hindsight, our current ecological crisis reveals how extraction of human and extra-human unpaid energies is a precondition of capitalism in all its historical modulations. In Latin America, this blurring of the binaries that sustained 20th-century developmentalist projects (human/nonhuman, male/female, productive/reproductive) responds to a specific sociopolitical context after 2001: the collapse of first-wave, financialized neoliberalism was followed by what Maristella Svampa calls the “commodities consensus” (Svampa 2019: 12), a process favored by high international prices for primary

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products, which intensified the orientation of Latin American economies toward extractive mega-projects with enormous ecological impact. Against this background, violent extraction – as the ecological and economical suction of resources – appears as the specific mark that blurs the very distinction between productive and reproductive, subject and object, human and nonhuman, paid and unpaid. Karl Marx’s famous political critique of suction (“Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (Marx 2001: 163), as the legendary sentence from the tenth chapter of Capital puts it) takes on unexpected relevance in this context, and new figures and approaches arise to account for such violent and vampiric extraction. The parasite that, according to Michel Serres is a dehumanized relationship of pure abuse (Serres 1995: 2), or Justin McBrien’s diagnosis of the contemporary epoch as a “Necrocene,” an era when capital necrotizes the living and the non-living and “seeks to render them indistinguishable” (McBrien 2016: 117), seem more appropriate concepts to account for this uncontrolled sucking of cheap territories and bodies. In Argentina in particular, the so-called reprimarization of the economy in recent decades towards monoculture, fracking, and surface mining has put this type of precarious and unpaid labor and the violent way in which it is being sucked from bodies and land at the center of the scene. Vaca Muerta, a semi-arid, desert plateau located in Neuquén, the Argentine part of Patagonia, is one of the places that magnetized this new imaginary and can provide a good example of how contemporary extractive ventures have reordered the map of labor in Latin America. In 2010, geologists discovered that Vaca Muerta holds one of the world’s largest shale oil and gas reservoirs in the world. Since then, politicians from across the political spectrum have stated that the future of the country depends on this geological formation, whose name (“dead cow”) embodies the shift in historical imaginaries of Argentine “natural” wealth, from the beef industry to fossil fuel extraction. Former president Mauricio Macri insisted in 2018 that what was occurring at Vaca Muerta was nothing short of an “energy revolution” that would turn the country into a sort of new Saudi Arabia of the Americas. Many types of violent suction occur in Vaca Muerta. Given that this region is populated by the Indigenous Mapuche Nation, military aggression against them has mushroomed. Since 2015, starting under the Macri government, cases of homicides and disappearances of Mapuche people have increased at alarming rates, at the same time that oil ventures have seized Mapuche lands. With the complicity of provincial laws designed to favor foreign investment, the oil industry is extracting vast quantities of water from Mapuche territories. The aftermath of extractivism in these lands is an enormous ecological hazard, which includes the contamination of subsurface water with hundreds of thousands of liters of chemicals, as well as earthquakes and air contamination caused by drill leaks and oil fires. On the other hand, as oil drilling is an industry mainly of men relocated from their homes with high paying jobs, fracking fields also elicit the proliferation of sex

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work in very precarious conditions, which has grown disproportionately in recent years. Such hyper-exploitative sexual relations lead to an increase in violence, as evinced by the fact that Vaca Muerta, since the ventures began, heads the list of places with the greatest number of femicides in Argentina (Gálvez 2019). This indistinction between the violent suction of territories and of feminized and racialized bodies is also at the forefront of Pornopetróleo, an installation by Neuquinx artist Pao Lunch.

Figure 2: Pao Lunch, Pornopetróleo, 2016, installation sample.

Figure 3: Pao Lunch, Pornopetróleo, 2016, installation sample.

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Figure 4: Pao Lunch, Pornopetróleo, 2016, installation sample.

Figure 5: Pao Lunch, Pornopetróleo, 2016, installation sample.

The emplacement of small flasks (Figs. 2, 3, 4 and 5), which in parodic allusion to the tourist attractions of Patagonia are advertised as “Recuerdos neuquinos” (Souvenirs from Neuquén), resemble the laboratory samples used in oil research. However, as the installation shows, when the fracking industry sucks oil, it also sets in motion the suction of sex work and indigenous territories. The signs describe the content of the oil flasks: “muestra de territorio comunidad Gelay Ko que será frackinado” (sample of

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Mapuche Gelay Ko community’s territory that will be subjected to fracking), “Uñas de trabajadoras sexuales de ‘El cerezo’” (Nail clippings of sex workers at ‘El cerezo,’ which is an illegal brothel ran by police officers in Vaca Muerta, which prostituted minors). All these different materialities, the artwork seems to suggest, are made exchangeable in their character as cheap energy, which the oil business needs to suck indistinctly in order to prosper, and which the flasks give expression to by indistinctly bottling lands, bodily remains, and accessories. This is the necrotic, saprophytic, and parasitic capacity of capitalism: to transmute bodies and territories, life and nonlife, into the same viscous fluid. As McBrien states, “[f]rom the standpoint of the Necrocene, capital appears as a species, an opportunistic detritus feeder” (McBrien 2016: 117) that equally decomposes the corporeal and geological for its own growth and multiplication. Pao Lunch’s installation continues with a polyptych of paintings that emphasize this idea (Fig. 6). Nine portraits of the anuses of sex workers, portraying them as oil wells, linking oilfields and sexual labor as identically extractable matter. The technical information of these paintings explains that they are not painted with traditional pigments, but with oil, blood, and saliva, that is, with the fluids that the companies extract from the soil, as well as from bodies.

Figure 6: Pao Lunch, “El pozo” (The hole/The well), 2016. 30 × 40 cm. One of the nine paintings made with oil, blood and saliva from Pao Lunch’s installation.

El pozo, the title of the series of paintings, is a Spanish word that means both hole and oilfield, a homonym that emphasizes the flattening of difference between the exploited body and the exploited territory, between oil, blood, and saliva, as equivalently suckable energies. This denunciation of how fracking ventures operate (submitting fleshly and territorial bodies to the same, fracturing and sucking violence) evokes a recurrent slogan in

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feminist demonstrations that have been denouncing the proliferation of femicides where extractive mega-projects are taking place: “ni las mujeres ni la tierra somos territorios de conquista” (neither women nor the earth are territories of conquest). Verónica Gago condensed this slogan into the concept cuerpo-territorio. This term has a rich constellation of feminist predecessors, such that proposed by Lorena Cabnal, a Xinca indigenous activist, with the compound cuerpo-tierra (body-earth), in which colonial dispossession operates with a racial, patriarchal, and misogynistic violence that makes the defense of the ancestral territory and the defense of the Indigenous women rights the same fight (Cabnal 2019). Furthermore, Doreen Massey’s idea of gender-shaped geography and spatial separation of feminine/masculine, home/workplace, domestic/public (Massey 1994: 179) and Val Plumwood’s foundational ecofeminist proposal that “women’s inclusion in the sphere of nature has been a major tool in their oppression” (Plumwood 1993: 21) resonate with Gago’s cuerpo-territorio. Likewise, Silvia Federici’s feminist Marxist historization of capitalist development as a gendered separation of production and reproduction, waged and unwaged labor where the body has been for women “what the factory has been for male waged workers: the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance” (Federici 2004: 16) strongly echoes and nourishes Gago’s contribution. But the novelty of Verónica Gago is that she reappropriates these major precedents of feminist theory that link space and women’s bodily experience with an anti-extractivist turn. With cuerpo-territorio, Verónica Gago attempts to repolitize the logic that converts lands and feminized bodies into equally suckable matter. If extractive violence merges body and territory as cheap energies subject to privatization and commoditization, conversely, Gago affirms that cuerpo-territorio is an alternative conflation of body and land/earth with the same collective and feminist practices that constitute the common use of the land. The author states that the concept cuerpo-territorio “de-liberalizes the notion of the body as individual property and specifies a political, productive, and epistemological continuity, of the body as territory. The body is thus revealed as a composition of affects, resources, and possibilities that are not ‘individual’ but are made unique because they pass through the body of each person to the extent that no body is ever only ‘one’ but always with others, and also with other nonhuman forces” (Gago 2020: 82–83). This means, Gago suggests, that the rights of the body can only be defended with a claim of the collective character of the territory. The influence of the concept of cuerpo-territorio is enormous in many contemporary artworks and “artivisms” focused on promoting communitarian and horizontal forms of labor in connection with ecological practices, in opposition to the violence of extractive ventures. One example can be found in Mónica Giron’s Guantes de la Patagonia (1995), a series of gloves that aggregate manual labor and land in a compost of human and nonhuman temporalities present in the mud. Monica Girón is an artist from Patagonia who works with earth collected from different parts of her native region, and uses this organic matter as an archive to trace the histories of Indigenous communities and the way in which they inhabited their territory. Along the same line, the work of Seba Calfuqueo, a Mapuche artist, activist and performer, denounces the (neo)colonial dispossession and

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theft of resources from the Mapuche community. Their recent works, similar to Ana Mendieta’s earth-body art, fuses their body with environmental materialities (lichen, moss, rocks and soil) as a way to imagine ecosystems where human and nonhuman intermingle in a symbiotic sphere in which labor (human and nonhuman, productive and reproductive) is collaboratively performed by all participants. Moving on to other registers of environmental aesthetics that address the sphere of labor, I want to turn to Petróleo, a theater play written, directed and staged by the collective Piel de Lava, composed of Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes. This play, about a group of four outsourced workers in a non-specified oil venture that alludes to Vaca Muerta, stages, on the one hand, the collapse of the traditional understanding of labor discussed earlier in relation to Colectivo Lamarencoche’s sticker versions of Oscar Bony’s performance, at the same time as it puts forth an entangled refusal of bodies and territories against extractive logics. This representation of labor at the edge of collapse is suggested by the fact that the play takes place in a nocturnal Patagonia, in the cold shadows of hibernal night that do not allow the spectator to distinguish any of the figures from the black background. In the middle of this desolate landscape, dark as oil, under gloomy and dim lights, the claustrophobic trailer where the four employees spend the icy night can be discerned. Before stepping forward, it is necessary to clarify that in Argentina, as in many other Latin American countries, state oil companies, in this case YPF, embodied developmentalist imaginaries of the welfare state as well as traditional male industrial labor. In Vaca Muerta, nonetheless, as this play evinces, the workers are outsourced employees of a private company, subcontracted by a large international oil corporation. The exploitation of the workers at the well is presented immediately at the beginning by a voice-over CEO with an accent from Spain (alluding directly to Repsol, the Spanish multinational energy and petrochemical company that owned YPF) that informs: “here the employees work uninterruptedly, for fourteen days, with shifts of twelve hours a day and without returning home.” The same time of uninterrupted suction that extractive capitalism imposes on the territory is what the company also demands of its workers, who continuously work fourteen days in a row, without rest, leave, or holidays. While the voice-over speaks, the employees, inside the precarious shed in the middle of nowhere, relax and undress at the end of a long day. In this flimsy chalet, the workers share their intimacy and distribute the cleaning and cooking tasks. Without women around to carry out these unpaid reproductive activities, the group of men experience a certain de-stabilization of their masculinity and begin to overact it while they iron or cook (the performative effect is that the workers are played by actresses, who exaggerate their masculine gestures). The problem that these men face, and that puts their jobs at risk (as the audience finds out by their conversation), is that the well has stopped producing oil. No matter how hard they dig, in the phallic analogy proposed by the dialogues, the well does not ejaculate a single drop. “It’s like jerking off a dead man,” concludes El Carli, the oldest of the four workers, and a kind of alpha male of the group. While extractive capitalism puts in motion violent suction that siphons bodies and territories, the

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well refuses to be sucked. Therefore, the company’s stubborn mandate to the workers is that they continue penetrating and drilling (even when they go to the trailer to sleep, they leave the machines running) without any success. But what happens to workers, to labor, when the territory to which they are attached declines to produce? What this play clearly stages is the strong link between capitalism’s mandate for productivity and a consistent performance of masculinity in relation to the former. Because when the well does not ejaculate, the workers’ identities begin to crumble: unproductiveness deactivates the divisions between male and female, productive and reproductive. Thus, while the machines drill the well, a sort of replica of it invokes its destabilizing effects in the trailer. It is the bag of El Palla, the new worker, from which he extracts clothing considered to be feminine (nail polish, leather coats, high-heeled shoes and sequined dresses) that begins to generate ambivalent desires in the workers. And it is once again Carli, the group’s boss (and the same one who urges everyone to let themselves be exploited without saying a word) who sees to the gender mandate being fulfilled, reprimanding any behavior that calls it into question. And if gender, as Butler affirms, becomes in its performative excess a parody of itself (Butler 1993: 231), El Carli’s meticulous concern to appear virile is what produces this effect of parodic ambiguity. His comments, which seek to mock behaviors that violate the gender mandate, deny the masculinity they seek to reaffirm: “I can’t wait to eat an otter,” he declares, when the others praise the softness of El Palla’s otter fur coat; or “[i]f you don’t have it all inside, you don’t feel anything,” when he dismisses the emotion felt by the rest at the news that his wife is pregnant. But in overacting the excess of masculinity, as Giorgi points out, it is revealed that the ideal and idealized figure of the male worker “was always a performance, it was always a representation that now vanishes before our eyes” (Giorgi 2018: 3). In the political imaginaries of the last century, this ideal of the male worker sustained the utopian horizon of a “Hombre Nuevo” (New Man), the main character of any possible revolution or insubordination. But Petróleo’s wager is that it is only in reverse, by de-configuring gender, that it is possible to dismantle the extractive logic that hierarchically structures bodies and territories as cheap energies. In the middle of the freezing night, due to the precarious conditions in which the company makes them live, the trailer’s electric generator breaks down, and, with temperatures below zero, the workers are faced with the dilemma of freezing to death or disconnecting the generator from the well and plugging it into the trailer for heating (with the consequent millions in loss that this would entail for the company). The workers, at that point, have to choose between their own survival or the productivity of the well. Life or the well, the disjunction that for the company does not admit discussion (because oil is worth infinitely more than the lives of four, or a thousand, or a million workers), is quickly revealed as a fallacious dilemma. Because if the well refuses to produce—or, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, would prefer not to—then it too had already engaged in insubordination against the temporality of extractive capitalism, thus in fact opening the way for the workers themselves to also follow it into

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rebellion. What the play shows is that this insubordination cannot be done except at the cost of renouncing the very distinction between productive and reproductive, male and female, human and non-human, body and territory. The well, like the intelligent ocean in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, begins to summon geological and non-human forces, which dismantle the logic of intensive extraction. The well pumps and pumps and does not produce oil, but the specter of an anarchist from rebellious Patagonia emerges; it pumps and pumps and nothing comes out, just some inexplicable grunting of ancestral spirits. The workers ask themselves: Is the well alive? What does it say, what does it ask for, what does it want? If, as Spinoza would say, we do not even know what a body is capable of, much less do we know what a well is capable of. Because it is thanks to this unproductive spectrality that the workers find the key to the closet and to their revolt. The well, subverting the norm of extraction, becomes queer. Against the reproductive and extractive mandate, becoming queer here acquires an anti-extractivist potency, as it is the rejection of the well to be capitalized into resources. Because the strategic alliance of bodies and territories turns sexual dissidence into political and economic opposition to (re)production. The well, then, accompanies the insubordination of the workers with their steadfast refusal to (re)produce. “I always fantasize that at the bottom of the well a party is set up,” says Formosa, one of the workers. Thus, it is interesting that the workers’ rebellion is activated not only through the disarticulation of the mandates of extraction and gender, but through a new, non-destructive relationship with the territory, which does not adhere to the violent logic of sucking, but ushers in a different logic, that of the party, which is a logic of pure expense, gift, and waste. If capital, as McBrien and Serres affirm, is a parasite that “routinely confuses use and abuse” (Serres 1995: 2), this collective entanglement of body and territory, conversely, has the parasitic property of symbiosis, a relationship that is mutually beneficial to bodies and territories. The play culminates with this symbiotic logic when the workers connect the monumental power generator from the well to the precarious and tiny trailer where they sleep. This generates such disproportionate heat that, despite the fact that it is below freezing outside, they must walk in underwear and with the refrigerator door and windows open to tolerate the temperature, in a clear satire of the cynical reproaches of the Argentine president of that moment, Mauricio Macri, who justified gas bill increases of more than 600% with the claim that citizens were not sufficiently austere, and prone to walking around in winter wearing shorts and T-shirts, and leaving their windows open. If extractive logics link body and territory as identically suckable matter, this violence can only be broken, Petróleo suggests, by associating the corporeal with the geological, and the refusal of both to produce. Thus The Right to Be Lazy, Paul Lafargue’s classic anarchist pamphlet against working and productivity extends its frontiers to the alliance with non-human agencies. As Verónica Gago suggests, the parasitism of capital can only be denied by way of a collective symbiosis of the body as a territory that is not private and individual, but de-liberalized in collective and community practices. In a similar manner, Petróleo riffs on the cuerpo-territorio conjunction as

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an alliance of communitarian and disobedient inproductivity that overturns the likewise devalued and cheapened labor of humans and land that directs Latin American contemporary extractive economies. This tentative constellation of contemporary artworks intended to illustrate how the economic and ecological precarization of labor, the intersection of neoliberal and extractive logics of production of value, is one of the primary and most urgent topics guiding environmental aesthetics and politics, as well as its theoretical and activist debates. Current popular demands in some Latin American countries for a “Salario Básico Universal” (Universal basic income—a financial grant paid by the Government by taxing the richest part of society to meet the basic needs of the sector living under the poverty line) is one of the most interest directions where this pressing discussion is heading, as a way to start compensating the unpaid labor of communities historically capitalized as “Cheap Nature,” and that is also opening new directions and mutations for Latin American aesthetics.

Works Cited Besky, Sarah, and Alex Blanchette, eds. How Nature Works Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993. Cabnal, Lorena. “El relato de las violencias desde mi territorio cuerpo-tierra.” En tiempos de muerte: cuerpos, rebeldías, resistencias. Buenos Aires and San Cristóbal de las Casas: Clacso, 2019. 113–123. Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Chico, AK Press: 2004. Gago, Verónica. Feminist International. How to Change Everything. London: Verso, 2020. Gálvez, Andrea Ana. “Las vidas perforadas de Vaca Muerta: territorios masculinizados y Fracking”. Ctxt, 10 December 2019. https://ctxt.es/es/20191204/Politica/29581/vaca-muerta-fracking-feminicidiosargentina-andrea-ana-galvez.htm (11/23/2021). Giorgi, Gabriel. “En la frontera del mundo, el suelo en movimiento.” Conference dictated on 2 November 2018, University of San Andrés. Marx, Karl. “Chapter 10: The Working-Day.” Capital, vol. 1. Electric Book Co. 2001.Pages: 216–268. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. “Mauricio Macri: ‘Vaca Muerta es una revolución energética para la Argentina.’” La Nación [Buenos Aires, Argentina], 28 August 2018. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/macri-vaca-muerta-nid2166463/ (Date of last access: 11/05/2022). McBrien, Justin. “Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene.” Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Ed. Jason Moore. Oakland: PM Press, 2016. Pages: 116–137 Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life. Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso, 2015. Piel de Lava. Petróleo. Unpublished manuscript of the play premiered in August 2018 in the Teatro Sarmiento, Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1993. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Svampa, Maristella. Neo-extractivism in Latin America. Socio-environmental Conflicts, the Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Ricardo Duarte Filho

Land/Body One of the first visual representations of the territory known today as Brazil already conflates Indigenous bodies and the native flora. Produced in 1519 by the Portuguese cartographers Lopo Homem, Pedro Reinel, and Jorge Reinel, and illustrated by António de Holanda, the Miller Atlas depicts the Brazilian territory through an illustration that highlights two of its first commodities: Pau-brasil, or brazilwood, and Indigenous labor (Fig. 1). While the map showcases many of the recurring tropes of the early colonial period, enticing the European audience through its focus on native and exotic animals, plants, and people, it also reveals a fascinating particularity when counterposed with other representations of America. Instead of a cornucopia of exotic tropical plants, as seen in so many early visual and written narratives regarding the tropics, the Miller Atlas obsessively multiplies brazilwood throughout the whole territory, as if this specific tree thoroughly dominated the land. While this might appear as a particular artistic choice, authors such as Mary Louise Pratt (1992), José Rabasa (1993), and Jill H. Casid (2005) have already brought to our attention that colonial cartography must be understood and analyzed not only as an official tool to represent and lay claim to newly conquered territories but also as a vehicle to actively imagine their future potentiality by visualizing them as exploitable lands. Through this striking repetition, the Miller Atlas visually converts the territory into a giant monoculture, foretelling the centrality that the plantation economy would assume during the forthcoming years. By attempting to highlight the possible profitability of the colonial enterprise, this early modern cartographic representation of the land constructs a particular imagery that will shape future settler-colonial understanding of the land. The form that the map portrays Indigenous people deviates from the early trope of the cannibal Indian, present in Diego Gutiérrez’s map “Americae” (1562), or the later scientific myth of Native idleness. In The Miller Atlas, nearly all the Indigenous people are actively cutting down brazilwood trees—a far call from the reclining female nude that talks to Amerigo Vespucci from her hammock in Allegory of America, the famous late 16th-century engraving by Jan Van der Straet. The map positions Indigenous labor as a constitutional part of this early colonial moment, highlighting how Indigenous bodies have become attached to extractivist practices since one of its earliest visual representations. Even though The Miller Atlas was the first visual rendition depicting the newly claimed Brazilian territory through the association of Indigenous people and brazilwood extraction, it was not the only one. In an essay examining the visual representations of deforestation in European art from the mid15th to mid-16th century, André Reyes Novaes and Pedro Urano (2020) point out that images depicting Indigenous people cutting down and carrying brazilwood became a recurring trope in early modern maps and artistic depictions of the region. Although the authors analyze these illustrations to showcase the surge of images depicting https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-016

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Figure 1: Lopo Homem and Antonio de Holanda, “Terra Brasilis” (1519), from the Miller Atlas. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

deforestation in early modern European art, I would argue that these maps also visually associate Indigenous bodies and labor with the natural resources of the claimed land. Indigenous people become materially linked to commodities that depend on their bodies and lands to be successfully exploited, a move that converts these bodies into drainable material resources, as I will further develop in the following pages. This reiterative imagery not only visually transforms the depicted territory into a

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settler colonial landscape but also inscribes the color line as a central component of its geography of extraction. In this essay, I examine how extractivism in Brazil is historically yoked to colonial racialization processes through the conflation of land, Indigenous bodies and nonhuman beings. Turning to the Miller Atlas and a later hydrographic chart, I argue that extractivism constitutes colonial racializing processes by transforming racialized bodies into extractable and fungible matter. As the two maps showcase, this conflation is part of a colonial grammar that sets the stage for many social and political discussions regarding Indigenous land and natural resources. Through the visual representation and naming of lands and people within a colonial logic of extraction and Indigenous displacement, these maps also establish new configurations of space, in what Mishuana R. Goeman (2014: 236) calls the “settler-colonial grammar of place.” In the following pages, I will examine how variations of this imaginary demand an examination of extractivism when discussing racialization and colonialism. Ensuing, I analyze the contemporary artwork Fome de Resistência, a collaborative piece produced by the Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade and a group of Kayapó-Menkragnoti painters. This artwork engages with some visual tropes from the two settler maps examined in this essay, turning them against their founding extractivist logic by advancing a Kayapó understanding of the land. Even though land assumes a central role in this essay, it is not an easy task to define it while avoiding the pitfalls of resorting to the settler-colonial grammar of space. Addressing a similar difficulty, Max Liboiron declares that “defining Land makes it sound like a noun. But Land is a verb” (Liboiron 2021: 43). Authors such as Vine Deloria Jr. (1973), Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (2013), Arturo Escobar (2014: 101–118), and Marisol de la Cadena (2015: 43–45) highlight that land is not a fixed space that can be owned but a place established through the relations between many different beings, both living and non-living. Offering a definition that attends to these sets of relationships, Liboiron writes that land “never settles. It is about relations between the material aspects some people might think of as landscapes—water, soil, air, plants, stars—and histories, spirits, events, kinships, accountabilities, and other people that aren’t human” (Liboiron 2021: 43). Following this definition, I argue that Fome de Resistência aesthetically underscores an Indigenous understanding of the land that moves beyond the settler-colonial grammar and its visual codes. It thus proposes a remapping of the settler space by visually presenting land as constituted by the relationship between human and nonhuman beings.1 Before we delve further into Fome de Resistência, let us turn to another settlercolonial map, a military hydrographic chart from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais produced in 1800 by Antonio Pires da Silva Pontes. This chart dates from the late  I use the term remapping inspired by Goeman’s conceptualization of an Indigenous (re)mapping, that “is not just about regaining that which was lost and returning to an original and pure point in history, but instead understanding the processes that have defined our current spatialities in order to sustain vibrant Native futures” (Goeman 2013: 3).

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stage of the Brazilian gold rush, when mining and the hinterland settlement marked a break from the earlier occupation of the coastal area and the centrality of sugar plantations. In the face of these unexplored territories, regional survey and mapping became essential colonial tools for settling and exploring potentially profitable lands. One notices how this map performs this function by attending to the scattered warnings along the shores of the charted Rio Doce: “territory infested by Botocudos.”2 The usage of “infested” to mark the presence of Indigenous people resonates with the Miller Atlas for how it sheds light on the ongoing intersection of extractivism and racialization. By resisting settler occupation, these Indigenous nations were perceived as occupying potentially profitable territory for the expanding Brazilian settlement. While the map admits that Indigenous people occupy these territories, it simultaneously positions them as a threat to the proper usage of the charted land, understood here as a pure potentiality of extraction. Following a long tradition of settler colonialism, the map posits the “Botocudos” as a backward force that thwarts the progress of the nation. This intersection of extractivism and racialization comes into starker relief once we realize that a Carta Regia (Royal Letter) from 1808 had declared war against these Indigenous nations precisely by claiming that they foiled further river usage for plantations and mining. The letter was signed by John VI, Prince-Regent of Portugal, who states that these land and fields, “regados por infinito rios” (irrigated by infinite rivers), can be better harnessed for “a cultura de trigos, cevadas, milhos e de todas as plantas cereaes e de pastos para gados” (the cultivation of wheat, barley, maize and all cereal plants and pastures for livestock). The monarch also highlights the presence of “muitas minas de metaes preciosos e de outros não menos interessantes” (many mines of precious metals and others no less interesting). Thus, these “Indios infestadores do meu território” (Indians that infest my territory), declares the monarch, echoing the aforementioned hydrographic map, must be countered by “Uma guerra offensiva que continuará sempre em todos os annos nas estações seccas e que não terá fim, senão quando [. . .] possam vir a ser vassallos uteis” (an offensive war that will always continue every year in the dry seasons and that will have no end, unless [. . .] they become useful vassals). The royal letter also stated that settlers could employ Indigenous prisoners as forced labor in the surrounding plantations and mines “for as long as their ferocity lasts.” Once again, we witness the establishment of a colonial grammar that conflates Indigenous people and land with natural resources. Like the Miller Atlas, the hydrographic map perceives the land and nonhuman agents as extractable matter directly tied to Indigenous people. Here they are seen as, first and foremost, a foil to correctly use these resources, rather than as docile, extractible bodies through forced labor.

 Botocudos is the colonial nomination for the Aimoré nation. However, as pointed out by Stuart B. Schwartz, this name eventually came to define any hostile Indigenous nation to the settlers (Schwartz 1985: 32).

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This move is in tandem with Manuela Carneiro da Cunha’s assertion that the 19th century marks a switch in focus in discussions and policies regarding the “Indigenous question” from mão-de-obra (labor) to land (Carneiro da Cunha 1998: 133). This change is directly linked to the increasing centrality of the enslaved Black labor force in the country.3 While this distinction is essential for a nuanced account of different racialization processes, as pointed out by Patrick Wolfe (2016: 3), I argue that attending to the intersections allows us to perceive the continuities of colonial violence. By associating Indigenous people and natural resources, either as being part of them or as obstacles to their most efficient use, both maps posit the Indigenous body as a potential force that must be adequately harnessed and employed by the settler-colonial state to further its extractivist project, be it through forced labor or land dispossession and genocide. I open this essay with these two maps to showcase how one must attend to the enmeshment of different agents for a conceptualization of extractivism that does not sideline colonialism and racialization processes. The political scientist Alberto Acosta offers an operational definition of extractivism by characterizing it as “activities that remove large volumes of non-processed natural resources (or resources that are limited in quantity), particularly for export, to cover the demand in central countries” (Acosta 2017: 80). While this definition offers a precise summary of extractivism’s most visible aspect of the commodification of nature into raw materials, it does not fully account for how it establishes and maintains racial hierarchies based on human/nonhuman cleavages.4 The philosopher Achille Mbembe traces a brilliant link between colonial extractivism and the transformation of racialized bodies into extractable matter. For Mbembe, “the noun ‘Black’ is in this way the name given to the product of a process that transforms people of African origin into living ore from which metal is extracted. This is its double dimension, at once metaphorical and economic” (Mbembe 2017: 40). Hence, the dependency on slavery for colonial extractivism transforms the enslaved into a sign of potentiality, yoking Blackness to an extractivist logic that perceives some beings as drainable material resources. While Mbembe focuses on Black racialization, I argue that these visual repetitions of Indigenous people involved in extractivist practices bring into stark relief how

 In this essay, I focus on how the establishment of the settler-colonial grammar transforms Indigeneity into pure potentiality while also establishing a separation between Indigenous bodies and lands through genocide, extractivism, and dispossession. While I briefly discuss the intersections between these processes and those of Black racialization, a more extensive analysis must include a more comprehensive discussion. For a more in-depth analysis of the confluence of Blackness, extractivism, and colonialism, see Mbembe (2017), Yusoff (2018), and King (2019).  Sylvia Wynter draws attention to how the expansion of colonialism and Western modernity hierarchically rearranged the social through a biocentric logic based on a “rational/irrational organizing principle and master code” (Wynter 2003: 300) that establishes an ontological division between the rational (European) human and the irrational nonhuman others. Elizabeth Povinelli (2016) contributes to this dialogue through her concept of geontopower, which emphasizes how a binary cleavage between life and nonlife also shapes how settler colonialism manages its subjected bodies.

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Indigenous racialization also contributed to furthering the notion of Indigeneity as a resource that could be extracted and channeled for the development of the settlercolonial state. In an important book that aims to bridge the gaps between Black and Indigenous Studies, The Black Shoals (2019), Tiffany Lethabo King puts forward a critique of what she calls “white settler colonial studies” that underscores the consequent limitations of analyzing colonialism majorly through “humanist conceptual and theoretical frames.” For King, “the concepts of fungibility, genocide and conquest are better suited to account for how Native and Black death is the central tenet that ensures White settler life and self-actualization” (King 2019: 21). Following King, I claim that marking a stark break between land and labor as the two central axes of different racializing processes, Indigenous and Black, respectively, risks glossing over the fact that this separation is also the result of a colonial worldview that eclipses Black and Indigenous epistemologies. While agreeing with King that genocide and fungibility are the primary forms of settler-colonialism self-actualization, I would argue for the urgency of examining how these are interwoven with extractivism, as demonstrated by the aforementioned maps. This connection and its concrete consequences are essential to Michael Taussig’s nightmarish description of the Amazon during the rubber boom period. According to Taussig, rubber was not, paradoxically, the scarcest and most disputed resource during the Amazon Rubber Boom––Indigenous labor was (Taussig 1987: 53). However, as emphasized by the author, while Native labor was the most precious commodity of the trade, Indigenous laborers were systematically tortured and killed. Taussig underscores that many international commentators of the rubber trade would constantly emphasize the dreadful impression left by the treatment of Indigenous workers and then passionately assert the necessity to protect them. However, as pointed out by the author, even these proposed protectionist politics had the most profitable usage of Indigenous labor and bodies as their final goals. Thus, even though the British academic and jurist Viscount Bryce denounced the dire treatment of Indigenous people during the rubber boom in the foreword of Joseph Woodroffe’s book, with the suggestive title The Rubber Industry of the Amazon: And How its Supremacy Can be Maintained (1915), he did so by highlighting their importance to the world economy through their association to raw materials. For him, it is the unjust oppression practiced by so many of the whites which has turned these tribes against us, the European races, kept them at a low level, and made their work of no benefit except when given under compulsion [. . .] However uncertain and unsatisfactory the Brazilian native laborer may be, if Latin America is to be of permanent value as a producer of foodstuffs and raw materials to herself, to ourselves [Europe], and to others, steps must be taken at once, not only to stop the atrocious policy of cruelty and decimation [. . .] but also to enable the number of natives to increase (Woodroffe 1915: vi).

This quote underscores how this protectionist logic is connected to extractivist reasoning that positions the Indigenous body as an endangered extractable matter crucial for maintaining the world market. This conflation becomes even more explicit in

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another passage from Woodroffe’s book, which directly compares the genocide of Black and Indigenous people to the burning of colonial crops. The author positions Black and Indigenous people as “the most valuable of all the tropical ‘products’,” whose destruction would affect the rest of humanity since it “removes for all time that which we can never replace. To replant the forests may be costly, but it is comparatively easily done, but to replace an exterminated race is beyond our powers, at any rate up to the present” (Woodroffe 1915: xii). Through their claims that Indigenous people must be “protected” not through land restitution but reproduction and preservation, these authors echo the same logic applied to the conservation of natural resources, which the state must conserve to better harness them. These arguments bring into stark relief that even the liberal discourses of well-intentioned Europeans are part of a settler-colonial grammar that yokes Indigenous people to natural resources, in which their value is assessed through their extractive potential. From the early modern depiction of Indigenous people among a fantastical Brazilwood plantation to contemporary arguments from the agribusiness elite about the need for Indigenous land to foster the nation’s further development, we witness how settler-colonialism converts Indigenous bodies and lands into placeholders of potentiality and extractable material resource. However, when historicizing the visual construction of this settler-colonial grammar and its extractivist logic, one must be careful not to reify this objectifying frame imposed on the Indigenous people by not attending to how they actively countered the imposition of this colonial grammar. We witness this ongoing struggle from the guerrilla warfare practiced by many Indigenous nations during the early colonial period, such as the marked “Botocudos” in the hydrographic chart, to the recent and burgeoning Indigenous activism that plays a central role in the Brazilian political sphere—such as the highly publicized Altamira Gathering of 1989, organized by the Kayapó nation to oppose the construction of a hydroelectric facility near their territory. Considering this ongoing resistance to conquest by Indigenous people, I dedicate the last pages of this essay to an analysis of a contemporary artwork that subverts the visual construction of an extractivist understanding of territory by counterposing it through its visual representation of an Indigenous relationality to the land. Fome de Resistência – Fundamento Kayapó Menkragnoti (2019–2020) is a collaborative artwork by Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade and the Kayapó painters Bekwyikai, Bekwyiket, Bekwyiky, Bekwyitexo, Djapa, Ireranti, Iretynh, Kakjana, Kokowati, Negreinome, Ngreiboi, Ngreidje, Ngreiê, Ngreipangri, Ngreita, Nhako, Papoi, Pykwyiky, and Rika. Its central piece is a large collage of official military covered by traditional Kayapó painting motifs (Fig. 2). Each settler map was overpainted with a specific pattern and assembled in a single piece, forming what de Andrade calls a Kayapó flag.5

 Source: https://agentetransforma.org.br/projetos/projeto-menire/fome-de-resistencia-jonathas-de-an drade/.

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Figure 2: Fome de Resistência – Fundamento Kayapó Menkragnoti. Collective artwork, 2019–2020. Courtesy of the artists.

Amidst the assembled maps, a drawn red line demarcates the official borders of the Kayapó Indigenous Territory, one of the most extensive protected Indigenous territories in Latin America. As we can perceive through the centrality of maps, the land question is central to Fome de Resistência, in tandem with many discussions produced by contemporary Indigenous art and scholarship.6 De Andrade highlights its decolonial

 Considering that, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) underscore in their homonymous groundbreaking essay, “decolonization is not a metaphor,” the concrete repatriation of Indigenous land must be the focus of any discourse on decolonization.

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dimension stating that by exceeding and traversing the borders of the demarcated territory, the Indigenous drawings claim a Kayapó sovereignty that questions how the settler-colonial state understands land. By disrespecting the official boundaries and expanding beyond them, the piece also questions the protectionist logic of the Brazilian settler-colonial state, showcasing that the whole territory is, in fact, Indigenous, not just the smaller portions of land recognized by the Brazilian government. While governmentrecognized lands are an essential tool for Indigenous political fights, it still functions within a settler-colonial logic that utilizes non-Indigenous epistemologies when declaring Indigenous sovereignty. To better explore the epistemological dimension of the artwork, it is crucial to underline how aesthetic elements such as bodypainting, headdresses, wristbands, beads, and feathers have a much deeper meaning in many Indigenous cosmovisions than a Western understanding of decorative purposes. When analyzed through this frame, the artwork’s motifs allow us to comprehend how its representation of land goes beyond the reclamation of territory under a settler-colonial comprehension of land (Fig. 3). The anthropologist Laura Zanotti (2016) claims that body painting is a central element of Kayapó’s daily life and ceremonies, an important social activity that establishes relationships between different community members. It also assumes a vital role in recent Indigenous activism. Its proud display showcases the endurance of Indigenous cultures and epistemologies in the face of a genocidal settler state. Body paint, like other adornments, is ubiquitous in Indigenous protests and public political struggles and usually generates mediatic attention.7 Among other reasons, the use of Indigenous aesthetics reclaims the validity of their epistemological codes in the face of a settler-colonial state that has hitherto adopted assimilationist politics. Hence, the Kayapó painting in Fome de Resistência is part of a broader movement that reclaims Indigenous epistemologies to counterpose a settler-colonial grammar that denies their validity while denying their rights to land restitution. Zanotti underscores this importance, remarking that “painting is continuous, deeply rooted, and fundamentally tied to Kayapó conceptions of being whole, human, and beautiful in this world” (Zanotti 2016: 119). Painting, thus, assumes a crucial performative role in the social formation of the Kayapó sense of being, which one can better understand when highlighting its centrality and importance in rituals and ceremonies.

 We can recall the famous picture from the 1988 Altamira protest that shows the Kayapó activist Tuíre holding a machete close to the face of the lead engineer of the hydroelectric dam they were protesting against; or the emblematic speech by Ailton Krenak for the National Congress of Brazil, during which he painted his face while proclaiming a poignant address to the senators. I evoke these moments from recent political struggles to underscore how aesthetics plays a vital role in Indigenous activism and political struggles.

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Figure 3: Painting of Fome de Resistência – Fundamento Kayapó Menkragnoti, 2019–2020. Courtesy of the artists.

In an essay about Kayapó bodypainting, Lux Vidal (1981) writes that there are specific painting motifs for every important ritual, such as the birth of a couple’s firstborn and the naming ceremony. The latter is one of the most important ceremonies for the Kayapó. It represents the moment when children are officially bestowed with their names in front of the whole village, an essential step for socially recognizing these names and the lineages and histories associated with them. Each member involved in the ceremony must be painted and adorned accordingly, highlighting the central role of aesthetics in Kayapó social life. This centrality leads Vidal to conclude that among this nation, “to be, or better to make sense, is in a large measure to appear in a culturally appropriate manner. Body painting and body ornamentation as a whole must be seen as a code itself internally patterned and itself a part of a larger patterned universe” (Vidal 1981: 170). Inasmuch as painting is a central part of the multifaceted process of making sense of oneself through active social rituals, the motifs displayed on Fome de Resistência underscore a dynamic and multiparty system that dynamites the logic underpinning the settler maps covered by Kayapó motifs. Considering that these motifs are traditionally painted over human bodies, changing their material support emphasizes the imbrication of these two dimensions: body and land. This interplay is the central tenet of the decolonial Indigenous feminist concept of cuerpo-territorio, which emphasizes “the inseparable ontological relationship between body and territory” (Zaragocin and Carreta 2021: 1504). Discussing how this

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concept also emerges as an essential decolonial feminist praxis, Veronica Gago emphasizes that it eschews a separation between individual and collective bodies, setting forth a collective corporeality that encompasses human and nonhuman beings (Gago 2019: 97).8 Fome de Resistência shows this interplay and its collective dimension through the transference of highly symbolic Kayapó motifs from human skin to the maps. This aesthetic choice reclaims a spatial dimension that visually showcases how the land is not stable and easily charted but as an active becoming formed through the multiplicity of critters sharing a milieu. Underscoring the epistemological dimensions of Kayapó bodypainting and its pictorial motifs, the artwork establishes a relationship to the land that emphasizes the dynamic forces of multifaceted agents that actively constitute it through their interactions. The motifs covering the maps produced by the settler-state advance a Kayapó understanding of the land that undermines the extractivist logic of the early colonial maps. Ignoring the fictional borders established by the Brazilian state, the painted motifs suggest a Kayapó cartography that establishes the importance of understanding Indigenous forms of spatiality when thinking of decolonial futures. Whilst the artwork highlights the urgency of land reparation for Indigenous nations, it also refuses to do so within a settler-colonial grammar, which appears represented in the artwork as the maps covered by Kayapó motifs. The deep black brushstrokes of these highly detailed motifs composing the final collage almost wholly overshadow the original maps, which the viewers can only glimpse behind the imposing black lines.9 The motifs, thus, effectively erase the maps produced by the settler-colonial state while still having them as their immediate material support. This gesture emphasizes the possibility of imagining forms of Indigenous cartography that can lead to a different relationship to the land while dislodging the extractivist logic that turns nonhuman beings and racialized humans into natural resources. Fome de Resistência enacts a critique of this settlercolonial grammar by reclaiming a divergent relationship and understanding of the land through its speculative cartography, one that claims the necessity of dismantling the settler nation-state for the flourishing of Indigenous futures. Juxtaposing the visual code proposed by Fome de Resistência to the ones expressed by the two maps that have opened the essay, I contend that the motifs in the former disavow how the settler visual code perceives and constructs racialized human and nonhuman beings as fungible and potentially profitable resources. As previously argued, The Miller Atlas and the military hydrographic chart draw plants, animals, and rivers as beings that can be detached from their milieu to be better administered by the

 Cynthia Francica develops a more in-depth analysis of the concept of “cuerpo-território” in her essay in this volume.  The critique of the colonial archive through visual intervations is also a recurring trope in artworks produced by other contemporary Indigenous and Black artists, such as Jaider Esbel (Cartas ao Velho Mundo), Jaime Lauriano (trabalho) Denilson Baniwa (Manto Tupinambá), and Gê Viana (Para estratégia de sobrevivência).

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settler state. This extractive grammar erodes many Indigenous lifeworlds by converting situated beings, essential agents of land-shaping relationships, into fungible resources. Fome de Resistência goes against this extractivist axis by visually composing a chart whose integrity is contingent on the gathering of a collective of beings that materially constitute the final piece. The artwork paints the land as the continuous result of the relations between a multiplicity of beings, such as the individually painted motifs resulting in a Kayapó map arranged together. Hence, it highlights that these beings are not fungible entities that can be extracted from the land because they and their relations are its foundation and condition. While the maps that open the essay perceive these beings as profitable potentialities or obstacles to the maximum usage of the territory and its natural resources, Fome de Resistência and its Kayapó cartography show that there is no land without the vibrant and multifaceted relationships between these critters. It materially builds up from the visual code of settler territoriality to propose an Indigenous cartography that indicates the possibility of Indigenous futures beyond the restrictive limitations of a settler colonial grammar predicated on genocide and extraction.

Works Cited Acosta, Alberto. “Post-Extractivism: From Discourse to Practice – Reflections for Action.” International Development Policy 9.1 (2017): 77–101. Andrade, Jonatas de. Fome de Resistância – Fundamento Kayapó Menkragnoti (from series Infindável Mapa da Fome), 2019. https://agentetransforma.org.br/projetos/projeto-menire/fome-de-resistenciajonathas-de-andrade/ (7 April 2023). “Carta Régia de 13 de maio de 1808.” Coleção de Leis do Império do Brasil – 1808, vol. 1. 37. https://www2. camara.leg.br/legin/fed/carreg_sn/anterioresa1824/cartaregia-40169-13-maio-1808-572129publicacaooriginal-95256-pe.html. (7 April 2023). Carvalho, Pedro Urano, and Andre Reyes Novaes. “Imagem e desmatamento: paisagem, perspectiva e expansão colonial.” Revista Eco-Pós 23.2 (2020): 127–162. De la Cadena, Marisol. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela. História dos Índios no Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992. Casid, Jill H. Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Deloria, Vine, Jr. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1973. Escobar, Arturo. Sentipensar con la tierra. Nueve lecturas sobre desarrollo, territorio y diferencia. Colombia: Ediciones Unaula, 2014. Gago, Verónica. La potencia feminista. O el deseo de cambiarlo todo. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2019. Goeman, Mishuana. “Disrupting a Settler-Colonial Grammar of Place: The Visual Memoir of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie.” Theorizing Native Studies. Eds. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Goeman, Mishuana. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

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Kopenawa, Davi and Albert, Bruce. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2013. Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. London: Routledge, 1992. Rabasa, José. Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Taussig, Michael. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society 1.1 (2012): 1–40. Vidal, Lux. “Contribution to the Concept of Person and Self in Lowland South American Societies: Body Painting Among the Kayapo-Xikrin.” Dispositio 6.17 (1981): 169–81. Wolfe, Patrick. Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race. London: Verso, 2016. Woodroffe, Joseph Froude. The Rubber Industry of the Amazon: And How its Supremacy Can be Maintained. London: John Bale, 1915. Zanotti, Laura. Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó’s Fight for Just Livelihoods. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. Zaragocin, Sofia, and Martina Angela Caretta. “Cuerpo-Territorio: A Decolonial Feminist Geographical Method for the Study of Embodiment.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111.5 (2020): 1503–1518.

Gabriel Rudas Burgos

Landscape Introduction Sitting on a mountain, from a high elevation, a man observes the horizon with an overwhelmed gaze, overtaken by the territory; he points to a place with his index finger and directs his vision toward the woman holding her child in her arms. He has an ax in his hand and behind him goods or products of a harvest can be seen. His gaze is receptive and, at the same time, prospective: attempting to encompass a place with the hope that he will be able to build his future there. Beyond the Christian nationalist motif, of the idealization between the romantic and costumbrist, or the reference to a specific historical moment of the colonization of the country’s internal frontier, Horizontes (1913) by the Colombian painter Francisco José Cano (Figure 1), is notable because of what the characters are doing: they are creating a landscape. Especially the man, who points to the land that will be his, that they will transform into cropland with the ax; now nature is imposed on him, but he will turn it into civilization. His gaze is not only that of a settler, it is that of the nation. In the background we can barely glimpse some mountains and do not see what he is pointing to, but we can imagine it. The force of this gesture lies in what the painting does not represent, but whose power we presuppose. The painter assumes a viewer who is so aware of the convention that it does not need to be represented. That it is not necessary to paint a landscape in order for its imaginative power to dominate the painting is testament to the strength of that aesthetic form at the beginning of the century. Perhaps unintentionally, Cano created a representation, in negative, of the inclusions and exclusions that constitute Latin American landscapes, as well as the aesthetic principles underlying them. By assuming a landscape that lies beyond the frame and, instead, making explicit what is usually taken for granted (the subject that looks at it), it allows us to understand this notion and its ideological and historical becoming. In 1925, a few years after Cano’s painting, American scholar Carl Sauer, postulated the canonical coordinates for Geography’s concept of landscape. According to Sauer, the term “landscape” and its German equivalent (Landschaft), referred to a delimited area (“land shape”), but, more specifically, to an area whose shape is defined by the interactions among its constitutive elements: first, natural elements, and, later, what he would call cultural landscapes, through the interventions that humans make in a natural area (Sauer 2008: 100–101). Thus, the geographic notion of landscape is intimately connected to the relation between Nature and Culture in a space. However, Sauer’s approach and his use of this etymological explanation leave out the aesthetic origin of the term. As Denis Cosgrove has pointed out, beyond its etymology, the use of the term “landscape” [Translated by Liz Mason–Deese] https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-017

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Figure 1: Francisco Antonio Cano, Horizontes. Oil on canvas. Photography by Carlos Tobón. Museum of Antioquia, 1913. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Horizonte,_Francisco_Antonio_Cano,_1913.jpg. (11 April 2023)

to refer to a pictorial way of representing a place is implicit in geographic notions of landscape, and, furthermore, it allows for understanding its ideological dimension. From its origins in fifteenth-century Flemish painting, the European notion of pictorial landscape was possible due to the development of perspective, which is intimately linked to Renaissance humanism, as its development was part of systems for measuring and controlling space that were created in the era in association with projects of conquest and possession. The geometric projection of space on a fixed observation point was sustained by the same notion of man as the center of perception. Thus, the perspective that enables the landscape is that of the subject that mathematically and aesthetically projects a unique point of view. According to Cosgrove, with this ideology of perspective, landscape becomes a type of art that creates an illusion of external possession of space, and thus, of a property-owning, in other words, bourgeois, subject (Cosgrove 1985: 45–52; Cosgrove 1998: 12–33). That is to say that the technique and aesthetic presuppositions of landscape originate from a class that possesses and seeks to dominate, at the same time as they also produce that domination and that subject, to the extent that they enable their vision of space that they commodify. For his part, W. J. T. Mitchell argues that landscape, besides representing the value of commodified nature, is the medium for expressing meaning: “landscape is a medium not only for expressing value but also for expressing meaning, for communication between persons—most radically, for communication between the Human and the non Human” (Mitchell 2002: 15). This means that landscape mediates the interactions between subjects, as well as the way in which relationships occur between humans and what we refer to as nature. In this sense, the historical notion of landscape is inseparably linked to what has been called the “great partition” of

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Nature/Culture of European modernity (Descola 2014; Viveiros de Castro 2014). The idea of the landscape as a representation of a fragment of the natural is only one part of these mediations and communications between human beings and between humans and non-humans that are being shaped. Building on these perspectives, I propose that landscape is not an image of a fragment of nature (or the writing that evokes that image), but rather an apparatus that produces a subject (Agamben 2014: 14): by mediating between human and non-human subjects, it produces a subject by regulating its relationship with the space of nature. These approaches enable us to think in terms of two axes that constitute the idea of landscape, and that can also be found in the term in Romance languages (país/paisaje, pays/paysage, paese/paesaggio, etc.): the double articulation in visu/in situ, in other words, an image of nature and the act of modifying it (Roger 2017: 17–19). The landscape is the product of a subject and, at the same time, it creates that subject, whether implicit in the mimesis of natural space or, upon inhabiting it, seeking to transform and dominate it. In its mimetic dimension, it is what makes possible the representation of a domesticated territory; in its dimension of space, it is what enables its ordering. Each landscape originates from a way of seeing and, at the same time, contributes to reaffirming and constructing that gaze. This domination in the gaze or in inhabiting, depends on a subject that conceives of themselves as separate from the natural that they seek to encompass or control. Like the settler in Horizontes, the subject converts a space into a landscape through a gaze and an interaction with the natural from which he separates himself in order to be able to point to it, but, unlike the settler (and here lies the ideological complexity of Cano’s painting), the subject of the landscape cannot be part of what is represented, but must be removed from the terrain. The implicit subject of the landscape is not the settler but the conquistador, and, later, the governing intellectual who delegates, both to the settler and previously to the forced labor of enslaved Indigenous and Black peoples, the transformation of the territory.

Landscape and Imperialism Landscape is not only a product and producer of the bourgeois subject, but also, specifically, of the imperial subject and its constantly expansive gaze over territories (Mitchell 2002: 17–18). This means that, as Ximena Briceño points out, drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2012), landscape is one of the European imperial notions that must be provincialized (Briceño 2019: 13). If Latin America is a central space in the configuration of modernity and global imperial systems, the landscape itself is a notion that is configured based on the way in which imperial powers looked at dominated territories, including Latin America. In the encounter with that other, Europeans created themselves as an empire and constructed a way of seeing

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(Pratt, 2010: 12–16; Nouzeilles 2002: 19). But the landscape in the empire was not only a way of seeing, but also an operation of territorial transformation. As Jill Casid (2005) explores in the case of the British West Indies, through transplanting plants from different latitudes and the use of forced labor of enslaved peoples (who were also “transplanted” and forcefully integrated into a new space), empires modified territories to create productive plantations. At the same time they also created idyllic spaces that they presented as natural, spaces that, along with pictorial and literary representations, concealed or idealized the forced labor behind them (Casid 2005: 14–15). These idealizations even became operations that transformed spaces to commodify a notion of idyllic nature for consumption, as in the twentieth century with the photographs used in processes of creating tourist landscapes in places like Jamaica (Thompson 2009: 30). The landscape in visu and in situ operate as part of the same process of ordering and control whose origin can be traced to colonialism. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Spanish Crown, which controlled Flanders, had pushed the influence of Flemish painting from which European landscape painting originated. Thus, although the word “landscape” was still not used, the aesthetic notion was present at the moment of the conquest and colonization. Along with maps, the Crown used paintings of the terrain “as a technique to record countries [that is, local terrains] and cities that were part of the lands that it dominated” (Fernández Christlieb 2014: 60–63). The first landscapes properly speaking were made at the beginning of the seventeenth century, during Dutch’s brief colonial period in Brazil, when governor Johann Maurits, as part of his attempt to control slave plantations for the sugar trade, led a scientific, intellectual, and artistic commission to identify the territory, which included landscape artists Albert Eeckhoudt and Frans Post (Brienen 2006: 12–14; Oliver 2013: 202–204; Schmidt 2020: 256–260). Although Maurits’s committee had a more scientific character, the visual representation of the Latin American colonial era was generally guided by the Christian territorial ordering project. It was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the relationship between landscape and territorial domination intensified, and also changed its sign: the transcendent Christian dualism gives way to a gaze dominated by a scientific point of view. This shaped a particular way of framing and abstracting space through landscape (Briceño 2019: 13–14). To understand how this apparatus of the gaze was configured, we must examine the role of one of the central figures of nineteenth-century landscape art: Alexander von Humboldt. If the naturalism of his predecessor Linneo saw nature as an accessible and categorizable reality, Humboldt creates an American nature that is presented as a sublime totality in which the human is dwarfed until almost disappearing (Pratt 2010: 118–21). Humboldt’s multifaceted and multidisciplinary landscape gaze, in which narrative, pictorial aesthetic, science and technology come together, was instrumental in the formation of European consciousness about the natural. This consciousness was possible due to the encounter with non-European nature that overflowed existing systems of thought (Lubrich 2018: 84–85). In other words, the modern European notion of landscape was possible due to the configuration of a subject of knowledge that

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is constructed as a totalizing entity but erased in the encounter with the perceived immeasurable otherness of the American natural. One of the most representative images of this is his landscape of Mount Chimborazo. If the botanical map of the volcano that Humboldt published in 1807 defined his vision of ecology as the interconnection of scientific disciplines (Lubrich 2018: 87), the plate of Views of the cordilleras (1810) is a total landscape in which we found the conquistador gaze, the teleological gaze of immeasurable landscape in the face of a diminished subject (that, nonetheless, generates an all-encompassing point of view), and the desire for scientific understanding of space (Lubrich 2018:104–106).

Figure 2: “Le Chimborazo vu depuis le Plateau de Tapia. Dessiné par Thibaut, d’après une esquisse de M.r de Humboldt. Gravé par Bouquet. De l’Imprimerie de Langlois” [color]. Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique. Paris: F. Schoell, 1810 [–1813]. Plate 25.

In the engraving, made from a drawing by Humboldt (Figure 2), people appear alongside the mountain, the plants, and the animals. But they are separated from the implicit subject that observes like the mountain itself. In Humboldt’s landscapes, the territories’ inhabitants do not appear as knowing subjects, but as objects of study. It is as if upon representing the population, the space is depopulated by making them part of a strange nature—in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, a “paysage dépayse” (Nancy 2005: 61)—;it renders invisible their work on the land and even their role as guides and assistants,

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who made possible the existence of the studies and drawings themselves (Briceño 2019: 15–16). But, furthermore, the usual characterization of the German naturalist’s work tends to ignore his enormous intellectual debt with the American literary elites who welcomed him, who were already working on the ideas that would later be attributed to him (Thurner and Cañizares-Esguerra 2020: 202). In any case, the dominance of Humboldt’s figure was fundamental for shaping the vision that the republican elites had of themselves and of the American space. On the other hand, they peceived the territories they wanted to control as a threatening fragmented space, on wich they immagined building an extension of Europe --which was avid otf the raw materials the Americas could provide (Martínez-Pinzón 2016: 15). So, through landscapes they found a way of founding a symbolic American space and its territorial and economic ordering that would integrate it into the global order. On the other hand, they aimed to find the unique character of their nations, for which they sought an aesthetic vision that would also appeal to an exoticizing romanticism that encoded a key to American originality in nature (Montaldo 1994: 67). In the second half of the nineteenth century, as Ericka Beckman has shown in regard to literature, the gaze of a subject separated from the commodified natural would be consolidated as a symbolic system in which the nation itself would be thought in terms of commodities to be exported to integrate nations into a global liberal system in the making (Beckman 2013: x-xxi). The double relation of nature as irreducible to the global, but integrated into the world as a commodity would be maintained until the twentieth century. This will be shown in at least two ways: hegemonic visual representations (for example, touristic photography) and constructions of the American natural as a place of critique and confrontation with capital (Nouzeilles 2002: 23–27). Thus, if the landscape as a form of representation consolidated both the apparatus that created nature and the non-natural subject that observes it, one of the mediations that marks a limit of the expansion of the capitalist subject can also be found in its relation to the natural.

Resistances and the End of Landscape In the Latin American construction of landscape by the elites there is a tension between ways of seeing that shape the point of view of domination and forms of resistance to that gaze. Returning to Cornejo Polar’s concept of a conflictive totality in Latin American identity as a product of its colonial history, in what he called the heterogeneity of American subjects (Cornejo Polar 2016), Ximena Briceño proposes analyzing Andean landscape in particular (and the Latin American landscape in general) as part of that heterogeneity. Briceño argues that the heterogeneity of Latin American modernity is manifested in the hegemonic imperial landscapes and the literate elite, but also in forms of representation of space by marginalized peoples. In both types of representations, interstices complicate

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the implicit hierarchies in the notion of landscape. Ways of seeing appear there that destabilize both the social hierarchies as well as those of the beings that make up the space of the natural (Briceño 2019: 24–25). With colonization, the European notion of landscape came into contact with the views that native peoples had of the territory and its representation. If “landscape” is a segment of the local territory controlled by humans, Indigenous equivalents (“atlepetl” in Nauatl, “ayllu” in Quechua, “hatta” in Aymara, etc.) link the earth, non-human beings, gods, history, governors, and the supernatural. This perspective could be opposed to that of the conquistadors, but it was also incorporated into their representation practices since, due to the lack of a labor force, it was often Indigenous people themselves who were commissioned to paint the landscapes. In Mesoamerica, for example, Indigenous scribes were commissioned with painting the land appealing to their prior knowledge of the place, which gave way to syncretic representations of the territories (Fernández-Christlieb 2014: 64–70). Something similar occurred with certain pictorial representations of local territories in the sixteenth century in the Andes, such as the Coricancha temple in Cuzco drawn by Juan de Pachacuti Yamqui, which, although part of a Christianized and anti-polytheistic version of the Incan (Duvois 1997: 115–123), represents the territory as an imbrication between the natural, the social, and the supernatural (Figure 3). In these cases, we find a tense confluence between the Christian and Indigenous cosmovisions. Furthermore, a version of space emerges that is not shaped by an absent observing subjectivity in relation to a controlled natural space, but by an assemblage of human and non-human (terrestrial and supernatural) beings and historical condensations manifest in those beings. These visions of spaces, as Marisol de la Cadena has shown, continue to be fundamental for the way in which Quechua culture articulates history and territory today. Politics and history shape places in a dynamic intervention of institutions, people, and nonhuman beings (De la Cadena 2015: 37). The possibility of a vision of the natural (and thus of spaces and their representation) that does not operate based on a radical division between nature and culture, resonates with what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls “Amerindian perspectivism.” Based on his work in the Amazon, he has found that, instead of a sharp division between humanity and nature, in the cultures with which he works, there is a complex system of relationships between species in which degrees of interaction are established: certain species are considered social actors with subjectivity and it is assumed that they perceive of themselves as people. Potentially, all species could come to be considered social actors, since, from their point of view, they are persons (Viveiros de Castro 2014: 56–57). In spite of the challenges in comparing the ways of understanding the relationships between beings in Andean and Amazonian cultures (Kohn 2009: 141), it can be affirmed that this heterogeneity of visions of space allow for understanding notions of landscape that participate in what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls countervisualities (Mirzoeff 2011: 24), in the sense that, more than simply proposing alternative representations of space, they displace the underlying assumptions of the imperial

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Figure 3: Pachacuti Yamqui, Juan de Santa Cruz. Drawing of the Corichancha temple. “Relacion de antigüedades deste reyno del Pirú” (1613). Tres relaciones de antigüedades peruanas. Ed. Marcos Jimenez de la Espada, printing and casting by M. Tello, 1879. 257.

notion of landscape that I have described. If the imperial landscape is an apparatus of subjectivity and territorial control, the subjects that at first formed part of the landscape (that is, the productive space to be controlled) have challenged it with ways of seeing that destabilize the distinctions, hierarchies, and concealment of the subject that operate in the hegemonic gaze. In de la Cadena’s work, these ways of conceiving spaces are linked to political struggles against national and global powers that seek to control and dispossess territories to impose a capitalist development model. Although she does not specifically address artistic works, she helps us to understand the intersections between these

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visions and political struggles in contemporary Indigenous audiovisual productions. For example, the artistic collective of the Shuar ethnic group Etsa Natu/Cámara works with audiovisual recreations of mythical stories in which, in their framing and audiovisual presentation, they seek to generate perspectives in which the human gaze is articulated with non-human points of view. This collective work’s not only points to ways of challenging the hegemonic view of nature, but is also connected to their other works in which the audiovisual plays a role in activist projects that are part of concrete political processes in which the community confronts extractivist projects that are destroying their territory in Ecuador (Vanegas 2021: 92). But it is not only Indigenous art that has questioned the hegemonic landscape. As Jens Andermann has indicated, the instability of the notion of landscape has, since its beginnings, but especially with the arrival of modernism and the avant-gardes, allowed for aesthetic manifestations that, to a greater or lesser degree, dismantle the apparatus of landscape. For example, with Armando Reverón in Paisaje blanco (1940) or in César Vallejo’s early poems, “we already find a shared drive to collapse the chasm between the (verbal or pictorial) sign and the material spacetime this sign no longer beholds and contains but rather opens up to” (Andermann 2018: 12). This will be seen with greater intensity in works such as Siluetas by Ana Mendieta (1977–1980). By registering the traces and marks left on her body by nature, Mendieta challenges the notion of a point of view that is distant from the landscape. Mendieta’s performances and her multimedia record are based on an inscription of the body in nature, and later in representation, not of a nature that is controlled and understood from a distance, but rather a trace of a bodily event with life and consciousness of the materiality of its surroundings (Zuleta 2020: 138–142). More recently, other artists have conflated bodies, representation, and the inhabiting of nature, highlighting the political character of this interaction with natural space. For example, when Allora & Calzadilla engraved protest messages from activists, with whom they crossed the United States Navy Bombing Range in Vieques, Puerto Rico, on the soles of shoes to make Land Mark (Foot Prints) (2001–2002), it was an aesthetic-political intervention that reclaimed a land usurped by colonialism. The activists and artists reclaimed it with the inscription of footprints, but also through the very event that generates them (Bobrow-Strain 2015: 129). In this example and that of Mendieta, the politicization of the relation in situ with the space is connected to a questioning of the observational distance. From a different aesthetic proposal, something similar happened in Brazil with Hélio Oiticica in his foundational installation Tropicália (1967). According to Andermann, the objects that Oiticica used in his installation, created a “second-order jungle” in which the viewer, on being immersed in the forest of objects, loses the objectivizing distance of the landscape: by thus removing its image-objectifying exteriority from the landscape, what emerges is an environment that is transformed into an assemblage thanks to the self-immersion by an audience that, on being denied the option of contemplative distance, must recover (or invent) a multi-

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sensory skill, entering into practical relations of use and interaction with the environment (Andermann 2008: 4).

It is important to emphasize the environment as an assemblage, as Andermann indicates, since, besides dismantling the distant view of the hegemonic landscape, it makes us think about a relational dimension of beings. If the landscape apparatus is based on nature presented as a totality that is radically separate from the observing human, these examples build spaces that appear to be configured as human/non-human assemblages. In contemporary artistic expressions (such as those of Eduardo Kac, Loise Ganz, or Amndrea Juan), this exploration has been taken to new limits, in what has been called bioart: art that does not represent nature, nor does it assume it as a canvas for the expression of the subject, but rather is shaped in relational networks of living and technological beings, while also critiquing the underlying ideology of technology control of contemporary life (Andermann 2018: 399–416). Also, as Joanna Page has shown in the works of artists such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Claudia Müller, and MichelleMarie Letelier, among others, there is a Latin American art that defies traditional notions of representation, as well as the material’s relationship with its audience, to respond to the planetary crisis by problematizing human agency and perspective. Among the aesthetic strategies that they turn to, we can find work with unstable materials that resist the control of the artist or the audience, the design of forms of aesthetic interaction that question the subject’s agency in planetary transformation, and the creation of aesthetic apparatuses that refer to scales of time and space that overwhelm the human point of view—what Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects (Morton 2021: 13). On the other hand, according to Page, one of the sites of enunciation of that articulation between local politics and planetary perspective for thinking about the Anthropocene is art concerned with conflicts related to extractivism, and imperialist practices with geological impacts that has Latin America as one of its epicenters (Page 2020: 275–289). In this regard, sociologist Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017) has studied how, in the present, we see an opposition between extractivism, which destroys territories from a distance to convert them into raw materials to satisfy the logics of the global market (Gudynas 2015: 12) and this relational vision between humans and non-humans, especially arising from marginalized communities and groups that stand up to the projects that destroy their territories (Gómez-Barris 2017: 5–8). In addition to peasant and Indigenous thought and acts of resistance, Gómez-Barris refers to works of contemporary white and mestizo artists, such as the Colombian Carolina Caycedo. In Dammed Landscapes (2012), Caycedo prints, on concrete blocks, satellite images of the different stages of the construction of a dam (and the environmental destruction that it causes) on the Magdalena River in Colombia. For Gómez-Barris, the use of satellite, added to the succession of images, allows her to invert the dominant point of view and point out the dispossession that the discourse of extractivism hides (Gómez-Barris 2017: 91–97). On the other hand, in Yuma: Land of Friends (2014), a video montage, Caycedo

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poses a representation of the dam from a panoramic perspective, but also from the position of the activists who oppose it and of human and non-human (including a fish) inhabitants. These points of view, explicitly, as well as in the way in which they are presented, question the official developmentalist vision and discourse that justifies the devastation and dispossession generated by the project. Thus, space is understood as a network of perspectives (in the sense proposed by Viveiros de Castro) and of friendships between human and non-human agents that resist the extractivist point of view (Gómez-Barris 2017: 101–105). Like Caycedo, several of the aforementioned artists are part of both global and Latin American tendencies in contemporary art, in which they not only represent political environmental conflicts, but also integrate art into popular and environmental activism. Unlike artists whose work denounces specific phenomena of social-natural destruction by capital, these artists do not approach these conflicts as local phenomenon, but rather from a planetary perspective that goes beyond the human point of view (Demos 2016: 117–120). Are we witnessing the emergence of a new definition of the landscape apparatus, or are we approaching its end? On the one hand, we can think about an art that no longer functions based on the logic of landscape. When landscape appears, it is because it is invoked by artists as the mark of a past that must be problematized, or to put it up against new aesthetic forms built on relationships between material, organic, and social agents (Andermann 2018: 376–377; 420–421). From this point of view, we would be witnessing an aesthetic after landscape. However, Another way of addressing this question would be to ask if the notion of landscape continues being useful, but as a category that has been transfigured by the transformations of perception of space and time in the Anthropocene. From this point of view, the landscape is a tool to understand and situate the inscriptions of the history of transformation and destruction. These inscriptions, “ghosts” in the present of political processes that have transformed the planet, can be aesthetically analyzed based on a notion of landscape understood as a comprehension that is both situated and planetary, made up of assemblages of species and beings that allow for thinking the chronotope of the Anthropocene from a planetary and geological scale (Tsing et al. 2017: G56; Pratt 2017: G170–71). To exemplify this twofold possibility of understanding contemporary art based on a transformed notion of landscape or based on a notion of art after landscape, I would like to focus in on Caycedo’s Damned Landscapes. On the one hand, the environmental destruction of the river is revealed as a catastrophe when shown from a satellite. It is a fragment of the local land and, at the same time, a view that, potentially, is that of the whole planet. Caycedo is thus constructing a representation of a natural/cultural space from this distant point of view. However, she then evokes a type of subject that is no longer that of the Humboldtian enlightened man or the settler of Horizontes; it is not even that subjects created in visu or in situ, immersed in a nature-culture assemblage. Caycedo is partially pointing to a scale of environmental disaster that goes beyond human experience, creating a posthuman landscape.

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At the same time, the fact that the photographs are printed on concrete, on the same material with which the dam is built, form part of the confluence between the represented material and the sign that, as we see, is one of the modes of countervisual resistance that confronts the hegemonic Latin American landscape and its distance from the represented place. On the other hand, the succession of images that represent a space that is progressively degraded as the dam is built, are not only opposed to the images of a natural domesticated terrain without conflict seen in landscape representations of the dam, but it also puts the foundations of landscape itself into crisis. If the landscape, as a place, is the interaction between the human and the natural marked by productive domestication; if, as a mimetic device, landscape conceals the conflicts of that relation, what Caycedo represents is what Andermann calls despaisamiento: “the cancellation of any relation between men and the environment that is not governed by radical destructiveness” (Andermann 2018: 216). The destruction of space in the extreme commodification of the extractive zone takes the notion to a place where representation is impossible. Thus, the installation, both in what it represents and in its forms and materials, functions as a line of flight away from the very notion of landscape. Beyond landscape, i.e., beyond the possibility for a transfigured appropriation of this apparatus or its present impossibility, the postnatural views that emerge from the crisis of the notion of nature, as well as the planetary catastrophe that demands posthuman perspectives, challenge the aesthetics of modernity and reclaim other ways of imagining space. These necessarily enter into tension with the limits of our own point of view limited by the notions of humanity from which we construct meanings of space and the scale at which we consider experience. This implies creating aesthetic forms that attempt to flee from traditions that continue anchoring us to hegemonic views of the human and the natural. The challenge, both for artistic production and for critique, from a contemporary sensibility, is to take up, within this tension, forms of seeing and being that go beyond extractive imperial apparatus. In the exploration of these aesthetics and the reading of the tradition from which they emerge, but also confront, there are new possibilities for the mediation between seeing space, inhabiting it, intervening in it, and understanding the possibilities and sensibilities of relationships among the beings that constitute it.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. ¿Qué es un dispositivo?. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2014. Andermann, Jens. “Paisaje: Imagen, entorno, ensamble.” Orbis Tertius 13.14 (2008): 1–7. ——. “Introduction.” Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape. Eds. Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, and Dayron Carrillo Morell. Chicago and Zurich: University of Chicago Press and Diaphanes, 2018. 7–15. ——. Tierras en trance: Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje. Santiago: Ediciones Metales Mesados, 2018.

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Beckman, Ericka. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Bobrow-Strain, Aaron. “On Allora & Calzadilla, Land Mark (Foot Prints) (2001–2).” Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics. Eds. Emily Eliza Scott and Kirsten Swenson. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2015. 128–130. Briceño, Ximena. “Paisaje y región andinos: nuevas formulaciones.” Visiones de los Andes: ensayos críticos sobre el concepto de paisaje y región. Eds. Jorge Coronado and Ximena Briceño. La Paz: Plural, 2019. 12–29. Brienen, Rebecca Parker. Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Casid, Jill H. Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Cornejo Polar, Antonio. Escribir en el aire: ensayo sobre la heterogeneidad sociocultural en las literaturas andinas. Lima: Centro de Estudios Literarios “Antonio Cornejo Polar”; Latinoamericana Editores, 2016. Cosgrove, Denis. “Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10.1 (1985): 45–62. ——. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. De la Cadena, Marisol. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Demos, T. J. Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016. Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Duviols, Pierre. “La interpretación del dibujo de Pachacuti Yamqui.” Saberes y memorias en los Andes: in memoriam Thierry Saignes Eds. Thérèse Bouysse Cassagne et al. Paris: Institut des hautes études de l’Amérique latine; Institut français d’études andines, 1997. 101–123. Fernández-Christlieb, Federico. “El nacimiento del concepto de paisaje y su contraste en dos ámbitos culturales: el viejo y el nuevo mundo.” Perspectivas sobre el paisaje. Eds. Susana Barrera Lobatón and Julieth Monroy Hernández. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2014. 55–79. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Gudynas, Eduardo. Extractivismos: ecología, economía y política de un modo de entender el desarrollo y la naturaleza. Cochabamba: RedGE, 2015. Kohn, Eduardo. “A Conversation with Philippe Descola.” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 7.2 (2009): 135–150. Lubrich, Oliver. “Humboldtian Landscapes.” Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape. Eds. Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, and Dayron Carrillo Morell. Chicago and Zurich: University of Chicago Press and Diaphanes, 2018. 73–110. Martínez-Pinzón, Felipe. Una cultura de invernadero: trópico y civilización en Colombia. Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert, 2016. Mitchell, William John Thomas. Landscape and Power, Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ——. “Imperial Landscape.” The Cultural Geography Reader. Eds. Patricia L Price and Timothy S Oakes. New York: Routledge, 2008. 161–200. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Montaldo, Graciela. “El cuerpo de la patria: espacio, naturaleza y cultura en Bello y Sarmiento.” Hispamérica 23.68 (1994): 3–20. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

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Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Uncanny Landscape.” The ground of the image. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. 51–62. Nouzeilles, Gabriela. “Introducción.” La naturaleza en disputa: retóricas del cuerpo y el paisaje en América Latina. Ed. Gabriela Nouzeilles. Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2002. 10–38. Oliver, Liza. “Frans Post’s Brazil: Fractures in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Colonial Landscape Paintings.” Dutch Crossing 37.3 (2013): 198–219. Page, Joanna. “Planetary Art beyond the Human: Rethinking Agency in the Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene Review 7.3 (2020): 273–294. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 2010. ——. “Coda: Concept and Chronotope.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. G169–175. Roger, Alain. Court traité du paysage. Paris: Gallimard, 2017. Sauer, Carl. “The Morphology of Landscape.” The Cultural Geography Reader. Eds. Patricia L Price and Timothy S Oakes. New York: Routledge, 2008. 96–103. Schmidt, Benjamin. “The ‘Dutch’ ‘Atlantic’ and the Dubious Case of Frans Post.” Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800. Eds. Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman. Leiden: Brill, 2014. 249–272. Thurner, Mark, and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. “La invención de Humboldt y la destrucción de las pirámides de La Condamine.” Procesos. Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia 51 (2020): 201–204. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. G1–14. Thompson, Krista A. An Eye for The Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Vanegas, Yadis Vanessa. “Etsa-Nantu/Cámara Shuar: prácticas audiovisuales desde la ecoterritorialidad y el biocentrismo.” Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales y Artes Escénicas 16.2 (2021): 76–95. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Zuleta, Paulina Faba. “El cuerpo como acontecimiento: Las formas de operar de lo político en el arte de Ana Mendieta.” Arte, individuo y sociedad 32.1 (2020): 133–154.

Héctor Hoyos

Matter The affordance of “matter” as a conceptual category in Latin American environmental aesthetics is its capaciousness. Conversely, the pitfall is its unspecificity. If matter is all there is, how is “matter” to signify? Dispensing entirely with body-soul dualism is a strong current in today’s anti-Cartesian Latin Americanist criticism (Gómez-Barris 2017; Hoyos 2019). But in absence of opposition, signification is at risk. The category of matter rubs itself against language while courting the non-conceptual. It serves multiple purposes in political ecology and historiography. A Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history, concept history) à la Reinhart Koselleck is a non-starter, for matter is a priori atemporal, ahistorical, pre-linguistic, unformed, and impervious to the cultural. Or is it? With a Latin Americanist longue durée in mind, the present entry sets out both to elucidate and complicate the matter of matter. I shall combine source review, a critique of the state of the discipline, and methodological appraisal. Of special interest is the triangulation of matter, animism, and indigeneity. In the West, the founding figure is Aristotle, who distinguishes matter from form. On one side, roughly, stuff; on the other, the perceptible shape that contains it. In De Anima (350 BCE), Aristotle introduces body and soul as a special case of this opposition. Thomas Aquinas and René Descartes produce influential turning points in the unfolding of this dialectic, respectively, in the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. Aquinas Christianizes the opposition under substance and accident in order to account for, among other theological notions, transubstantiation—bread and wine “becoming” corpus et sanguis. Descartes secularizes it, up to a certain point, under res extensa and res cogitans, extended and thinking matter, which herald the modern scientific, mechanicist outlook. Arguably, the fundamental rift also informs Saussure’s twentieth-century distinction of the signifier and the signified, a cornerstone for modern theories of language and literary criticism, let alone today’s casual hermeneutic practice of reading for “content.” During this trajectory, such analytical approaches to matter have coexisted with different monist (one-substance) traditions, from Heraclitus to Spinoza and beyond. They have also variously interfaced with Latin America.

(In)animate Matters An indispensable source is Orlando Bentancor’s The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru (2017), which argues that Aristotelian Thomism was the conceptual backbone of colonial extractivism. Separating matter from form and inert object from knowing subject justified and empowered Iberian imperial rule. Scholasticism, filtered through Dominican friar Francisco de Vitoria (1492–1546) and the School of Salamanca, led to a “providentialist view of metals [which] presupposed that available https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-018

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resources were a raw matter that could be employed to further Catholic expansion” (Bentancor 2017: 5). In a manner of speaking, the Crown weaponized Aquinas’s metaphysical principle of the natural subordination of matter to form. Consequently, for Bentancor, scholasticism engendered the brutal enslavement of indigenous and African peoples, as well as the relentless depletion of the earth. Others may argue that theology in such instances was merely accessory to Realpolitik. In any case, aesthetics is ever present. Consider the contrast between seeing a mountain qua mountain or silver ore versus seeing it (revering it) as Apu or Pachamama, haltingly translated, respectively, as Mountain God or Mother Earth. This is the case in Potosí, a sacred site for Aymara and Quechua peoples that Europeans instrumentalized as a source of mercantilist wealth. If mining sought to desubjectify nature, what we encounter in such remarkable aesthetic achievements as the colonial painting La Virgen del Cerro Rico de Potosí (c. 1680), an anonymous masterpiece that portrays the mountain as having the silhouette of Virgin Mary’s broad mantle, is a literal clash of worldviews (Figure 1). While the ostensible goal of such colonial depictions is domination via religious syncretism, the iconography provides its modicum of resistance by re-animating, in a Christian key, the supposedly inert mine.

Figure 1: Anonymous. “La Virgen del Cerro,” c. 1740. Casa Nacional de la Moneda, Potosí. Photo by Dan Lundberg. Wikicommons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/20170808_Bolivia_1411_ Potosí_sRGB_(26204035019).jpg.

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Figure 2: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, “Plus Ultra, el ynga: ‘I am the support for your columns’”, c. 1590. In Martín de Murúa, Historia del origen y genealogía real de los reyes Incas del Perú. Galvin manuscript. Courtesy of Seán Galvin, Image Getty Research Institute.

Similarly, invocations of mine tunnels as entrails are both recurrent and telling. They practically bookend colonial times proper. Front end, Guamán Poma’s 1590 drawing of Potosí, where the enveloping silhouette was rather that of an Inca-Hercules holding the iconic two columns of the Spanish Empire (Figure 2). Back end, Simón Bolívar’s 1815 Carta de Jamaica, where the Liberator identifies the American continent with “las entrañas de la tierra para excavar el oro que no puede saciar a esa nación avarienta” (the entrails of the earth to excavate the gold that cannot satisfy this greedy nation) (Bolívar 2015: 56). The greedy nation in question, Spain, is personified via its insatiable appetite. In the corresponding personification of earth, however, the rhetorical figure

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also conveys a literal truth. Mountains are living things, tethered to complex ecosystems. As anthropologists Marisol de la Cadena (2015) and Elizabeth Povinelli (2016) have suggested, the opposition between matter and life ought to be interrogated. The scholars’ respective concepts of “Earth–Beings” and geontologies mobilize aesthetics to bridge this gap in Latin America and elsewhere. De la Cadena in particular shows that animism has a sustained presence in the Peruvian Andes, although it is threatened by a continued onslaught that is both economical and metaphysical. Consider president Alan García, who held office as recently as 1985–1990 and 2006–2011, publicly dismissing Indigenous’ “absurd and pantheistic ideologies,” to clear the way for new mining projects (De la Cadena 2015: 204). Seen from within—experienced, sensed from within —the aesthetic experience of “animism” cannot be pinned down under that name. As De la Cadena explains, Andean ways of being with mountains could be described as both religious or as not religious, for they are “interactions with other-than-human entities that are neither natural nor supernatural, but beings that are with runakuna [people, usually monolingual Quechua speakers] in socio-natural collectives that do not abide by the divisions between God, nature, and humanity” (De la Cadena 2015: 206). Five centuries of translation and conflict—kindled above in Guamán Poma, La Virgen del Cerro Rico, and Bolívar, evoked in Mary Pratt’s influential notion of contact zone (1992)—add multiple layers of complexity. Aesthetics, too, remains to be rethought. Per Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), the feeling of the sublime in front of nature involves temporary distress: fear of being overpowered by what is perceived. However, a compensatory satisfaction soon takes hold: a feeling of rational superiority over nature (§23–§29; see also Budd 1998: 244). Caspar David Friedrich’s epochal romantic painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1817) (Figure 3) epitomizes this outlook. And yet the dignified hiker, whose bunions and calluses we can only intuit, is never outside nature to begin with, nor are we. The view from above is, in a sense, negligible. Rational superiority is overrated—see global warming. It’s as if this painting could not be framed. The implications are manifold, no less as criollo Latin American consciousness is tributary to the romantic gaze that Bolívar, too, borrowed from a different wanderer, namely, Alexander von Humboldt. The degree to which aesthetics is intertwined with racialized epistemic privilege invites further study. For its part, Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of multinaturalism (1998), an anthropodecentric rejoinder to multiculturalism, seeks to contribute to the art and practice of abandoning or supplementing both Western epistemology and ontology. At stake is whether there is one substance or a multitude— whether the concept of matter has any purchase at all. Per Viveiros de Castro, Amerindian thought takes “‘culture’ or subject as the form of the universal, and ‘nature’ or object as the particular (Viveiros de Castro 2014: 56).” Various aspects of this approach give pause, such as the heuristic or pedagogical overreliance on the parallelism between the multicultural and the neologistic “multinatural”; the uneconomic use of

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Figure 3: Caspar David Friedrich, “Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” (The wanderer above the sea of fog), 1817. Hamburger Kunsthalle. Public domain.

jargon; a casual overlapping of the epistemic and the ontological; and the homologation of the rather diverse forms of Amerindian thought. More or less partial adoption of this purposefully vague framework leads to rich, thickly descriptive practices both in anthropology and in literary studies. Among the latter, standouts include Gabriel Giorgi (2014) and Marília Librandi-Rocha (2018). The goal of perceiving outside the human, although impossible in a narrow sense, is no less salutary. See Giorgi’s expansive revision of the Brazilian master Guimarães Rosa’s circa-1950 short story “Meu tio o Iaguaretê” (Giorgi 2014: Chapter 1) or Librandi’s account of nonhuman aurality in Clarice Lispector (Librandi-Rocha 2018: Chapter 6). In both cases, becoming animal amounts to an intellectual and moral ideal, an affirmation of a common substance across the human-nonhuman divide. In Giorgi, this results in an ecological-political argument for an expanded understanding of the commons.

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From the outside looking in, animism can be derisively described, per the British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor’s 1871 pronouncement, as “a crude childlike natural philosophy” that leads natives to a “doctrine of universal vitality” whereby “sun and stars, trees and rivers, winds and clouds, become personal animate creatures” (Tylor 1889: 285). It can also be blindly celebrated. An undercurrent of allegedly Amerindian harmony with matter, i.e. nature or “natures,” can be found in much contemporary thinking. Bentancor takes issue, pointing fingers at Walter Mignolo and noting that “decolonial theory tends to romanticize Andean vitalism by conceiving it as some pure exteriority or alterity that resists Eurocentric appropriation” (Bentancor 2017: 330). He counters with archival evidence that, on the one hand, there were ample elements of vitalism in the colonial Hispanic approximation to metals and, on the other, Andean views were not incompatible with the technical aspects of mining. Succinctly put, “attributing to metals the capacity to proliferate and regenerate in a maternal earth can also enhance the fantasy of the endless availability of metals” (Bentancor 2017: 333). Examples from elsewhere in the region further complicate the picture of an indigenous non-instrumental or anti-extractive relationship to nature. Anthropologist Carl Langebaek (2021) synthesizes the extant archeological literature on the extensive network of canals built across some 500,000 hectares of pre-Columbian Colombia by the Zenú people beginning in the sixth century CE. A man-made ridged landscape and a multi-generational project along the Magdalena, Cauca, and San Jorge rivers, the water management system could aptly be described as geo-engineering avant la lettre. Ditto for the better-known canal system built by Mexica settlers in the Valley of Mexico from 1325 to the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan, the site of enduring hegemonic contestation (Del Valle). So much for leave-the-earth-alone native wisdom: indigenous peoples across the Americas rerouted rivers and created artificial lakes with no recourse to Thomism or capitalism. The renewed attention to materiality encourages interdisciplinarity, as the present entry reflects, because objects of study are not always already codified within the textual traditions of individual disciplines, such as anthropology, political science, theology, archeology, botany, economics, cultural studies, and others. It also calls into question the academic siloes that have hitherto excised “colonialists” from “modern” or “contemporary” Latin American studies scholars. Such strict, in some ways arbitrary temporal divisions cannot account for “slow violence,” as Rob Nixon calls the incremental effects of environmental degradation, some of which extend past these rubrics. This process disproportionally affects the poor and disenfranchised, having as much to do with extractive technologies as with the ethos and culture that sustain them. Contemporary “good living” or “living in harmony” movements, respectively sumac kawsay in Quechua and suma qamaña in Aymara, as well as the buen vivir state doctrine in Evo Morales and Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada’s Bolivia or, more recently, in Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez’s Colombia, all speak to naturecultural projects that span broader time frames than those of the nation-state or

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national cultural traditions, while also intervening in the present. (See Escobar 2012: “Prologue to a new edition”). Such movements are rooted, pun intended, in a different relationship to the ground under our feet. Today’s anticolonial interdisciplinarity, fueled in part by a neoanimistic rapport to matter, is very much in flux. Aesthetics, though generally recognized to be of import, does not have a clear mission. At the height of the linguistic turn in deconstruction and poststructuralism, the contribution for aesthetic appreciation and literary criticism, more or less literary, was clear. The discipline of history was first about narrative, to simplify Hayden White’s (1973) influential argument. In the highly textualized academia of the 70s and 80s, sociology, anthropology et al also required the kind of linguistic self-awareness that the likes of Jacques Derrida or Paul De Man could provide. But the materialist turn is also, at least in part, a turn away from languagecentric criticism. Literary and cultural studies have yet to find their footing in this new juncture. With the golden age of interpretation seemingly behind us, and a revival of the factual gathering steam even in literary quarters—from Susan Sontag to Rita Felski—aesthetics must retool or perish. Environmental aesthetics could offer a way forward, given its explicit thematic engagement with the current climate debacle. However, critics may sense a whiff of capitulation to positivism and scientificism. Abandoning the speculative and embracing the descriptive, too, comes at a cost. Differently put, matter is not all that matters.

Signification and Monism The noted anthropologist Alfred Gell remarks in an influential 1998 work that, as much as it would be interesting to know why the Yoruba may evaluate one carving as superior to another, this does not tell us why they carve; he would rather provide an explanation of the social fact behind the presence of a given art object than engage in “indigenous aesthetics” (Gell 1998: 3). Gell goes on to hypothesize an ornate warrior’s shield, to quip “anthropologically, it is not a ‘beautiful’ shield, but a fear-inducing shield” (Gell 1998: 6). In his mind, evaluation of a particular work of art is the sole function of a critic. This slippery slope of an argument, based on an “objective” rapport to the art object (foremost a social object) embodies what could be described as the dark side of today’s materialism. Gell reduces aesthetics to beauty, as if Kant had not been concerned with reverential fear, that is, awe, in his discussions of the sublime; draws from an actual people and an imaginary people indistinctly, subsuming the Yoruba and the fantasy shield-wielding warrior nation into exempla; particularizes aesthetics (“indigenous”) while universalizing anthropological method; and pretty much squeezes criticism from existence. A deconstructionist might suspect the neutrality of Gell’s examples and the paradoxical outcome of his speech acts: an

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ethnocentric rebuttal of ethnocentrism. Such recursive contradictions are precisely what contemporary appeals to objectivity and matter set out to avoid. The deconstructive practice of debunking binarisms can shed light onto matter by revisiting its age-old opposition to form. Can you really get one without the other? Hailing from a different corner of the linguistic turn, Theodor Adorno described form as “sedimented content,” by which he meant that aesthetic qualities typically thought of as accessory, such as genre conventions, are the product of historical processes and social tensions. (Adorno is a historical materialist.) The “truth content” of a work of art results from a complex interplay of form and content that critics activate; truthful works of art cannot be exhausted in their genre but cannibalize the conventions they may be framed under. In doing so, neither works of art nor critics find themselves in an autonomous realm of aesthetic appreciation, for that would amount to a contradiction in terms. Instead, they engage in social critique. More intuitively, it’s quite impossible to picture “pure” form or “pure” content: formless matter or form-that-does-notmatter are useless entelechies, the result of extricating terms that signify in relation to one another and elevating them to arcane metaphysical principles. In other words, and words they are, there is no consideration of matter that does not entail interpretation, nor interpretation that cannot also point to the mostly reliable bedrock of the objective. Literary and cultural critics remain relevant because language is matter, too. They are well suited to engage with the nuances and subtleties of our always mediated relationship to the world. Consider Amazonian rainforest shaman Davi Kopenawa’s 2010 800-plus page elucidation of Yanomami cosmology, The Falling Sky, in his collaboration with French ethnographer Bruce Albert. What is a literary person to do here? The Viveiros de Castro paradigm would readily render the text as evidence of multiple natures. The initiation scenes depicted in the book would mirror the readers’ initiation into a different way of perceiving and conceptualizing a shared yet heterogeneous materiality, from the jungle to the planet that engulfs us all. Remediation being the point, form would appear either as all-important, as in the recurrent oneiric and hallucinatory motifs, or as not important at all, for the gist is to produce unmediated access to a certain experience of the world. A less heroic, more nuanced, and ultimately more fitting literary reading could point out that truth and verisimilitude are not the same thing, perhaps analyzing the rhetorical devices that sustain the text’s authority; reveal important intertextual conversations; and engage critically with the source. All this while recognizing the current life-threatening climate crisis, taking heed of the disturbingly apocalyptical overtones of the work, saluting the initiative of learning from indigenous ways of being with nature, and upholding epistemic modesty. In other words, again, materialists need not shut down their interpretative training. As far as intertextuality goes, there is the obvious tradition of testimonio that coalesced around Guatemalan Quiché human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú’s 1983 epochal collaboration with Elizabeth Burgos (Arias et al 2001). And then there is the Christian tradition, which gains from setting it side-by-side with Yanomami

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knowledge in the way that comparative literature, more so than theology, is equipped to do. Kopenawa and Albert write: “The shaman did eat his wife’s vulva but it was the xapiri who made her pregnant through him. It is so” (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 46). Readers will recognize in the first sentence a family resemblance with the annunciation of the Virgin Mary or, in the emphatic formulation in the second sentence, the echo of a distant amen. If Yanomami cosmology becomes more relatable this way and, conversely, if Christianity appears as myth, all the better. Or: “if the youngsters start to copulate too soon the xapiri no longer want to dance for them. They are disgusted by their penis odor and find them dirty” (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 40)—see Leviticus and chastity directives. When a young shaman cannot resist the call of underwater women, how not to think of Homeric sirens? (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 54) Or in the casual misogyny that informs both cultural forms? The recurrence of such structures, which would have caught the eye of Lévi-Strauss’s urtextual 1955 Tristes Tropiques, suggests that, beyond the objective or material, different cultures may share linguistic and narrative elements, thorny ones included. (If Kopenawa indeed models harmony with nature, this harmony is predicated on fraught gender roles). Nature-cultural essentialism and its opposite, relativism, also exist in a continuum. The takeaway is yet another blurring of boundaries, this time between a purportedly animistic non-West and an inanimate West, or be it spirit and matter, as if by Hegelian reversal. Such poles were always idealizations. The category of matter, in the singular, dispels fantasies of noncommunication and impermeability between naturecultural realms bound to each other. When deployed without methodological fundamentalism, it welcomes the powers of philology minus the epistemic preeminence. To be sure, literary writing can be complicit in extractivism. (God speaks in Genesis 1:26: “let [humankind] have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth”). But such writing—and art more broadly—can also approximate animism looking outward, and do so transhistorically. Whether its critiquing developmentalist ideologies, intervening in extractive sensory practices, or “simply” defamiliarizing unreflective ways of being in the world, aesthetic qualities are neither accessory nor irrelevant. For one, the praxis of transcultural materialism finds a place for aesthetics in environmental humanities. Building on Fernando Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940), my study Things with a History (2019) follows a mode of Latin American writing that articulates two strands of materialism: historical, in the Marxian sense, and new, in the Latourian sense. Ortiz called “transculturation” a slow process of becoming that involves botany, economics, ethnicity, and culture(s). He turned to storytelling and a plethora of rhetorical figures (metaphor, analogy, synecdoche, allegory, and personification, inter alia) less to explain social transformation in a positivist sense than to resituate readers within nature-culture, attuning them to injustices that may span centuries, continue in the present, and involve both human and nonhuman actors. Straitjacketed by historical materialist interpretations, the counterpoint of tobacco and

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sugar has been seen as an allegorical opposition of socialism and capitalism. Such economic systems underpin these industries, respectively, with skilled artisanal labor and rote large-scale exploitation. But when Ortiz waxes lyrical about tobacco adopting the native woods of Cuba as his carriage—a cigar box—on the way to meet European aristocrats, or evokes Don Tobacco and Doña Sugar giving birth to Baby Rum, such humorous tropes transcend embellishment, challenge economistic reductionism, and bring the agency of matter to the fore. Although Ortiz’s transculturación comes closest to codifying this practice, it appears in Latin American writers that predate him and peaks in authors facing the unprecedented material transformation cognate to present-day globalization. The latter include the Cuban Antonio José Ponte, the Bolivian Blanca Wiethüchter López, the Argentine César Aira, the Colombian Fernando Vallejo, and the Chileans Roberto Bolaño and Alejandro Zambra, as well as plastic art practitioners such as the Mexican photographer Daniela Rosell and the Ecuadorian installation artist Karina Aguilera Skvirsky. I have called the larger trend transcultural materialism, with the prefix “trans-” having to do with communities in conflict, but also with cutting across into culture’s alleged Other, that is, nature. Transcultural materialism makes noninstrumental use of narrative and aesthetic qualities to upset the nature-culture divide, affect our rapport with things, and reassess our place in human-nonhuman history. For her part, Allison Bigelow, working on early modern sources (yesterday in geological time), mines language for traces of historical and material change. Noting that only by the seventeenth century would dictionaries register the slippage of the word minero from the mineral to a person with a certain skillset, she observes,“The presence or absence of a word in a language does not tell us much about the worldview or lived realities of the speakers of that language. But as one measure of the way in which human beings make meaning in the world, language—when read alongside historical sources as an index of change, continuity, accommodation, and adaptation—is an important avenue through which we can access the past (Bigelow 2020: 16, my emphasis).” An ample understanding of matter undergirds the renewed take on interdisciplinarity at work in this learned study, which revolves around gold, iron, copper, and silver, and the underexamined role of indigenous knowledge in their extraction, much in the same way that Ortiz considered tobacco, sugar, and its past and present laborers. The complementarity of philology and material culture in Bigelow’s monograph is symptomatic of a broader scholarly trend. Language is not just the medium to conduct research, but an object of study. Unproblematically, language is matter, too. This does not foreclose scholarship that, without engaging with, say, the material properties of gold—durability, malleability, brightness—, addresses the fascination gold has caused in literary and cultural history. Such is the case of Charlotte Rogers’ Mourning El Dorado: Literature and Extractivism in the Contemporary American Tropics (2019) which follows the captivating sixteenth-century myth of the Gilded One. A conquistador fantasy that takes after the Muisca practice of dipping their goldclad leaders in the sacred waters of Lake Guatavita (see Langebaek 2019), El Dorado

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merged with classic tropes about lost cities of riches, effectively fueling a plundering craze throughout the continent. Rogers focuses on how this multi-century, composite mirage carried on in a mournful anti-extractive mode in twentieth-century writers such as the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Brazilian Milton Hatoum, and the Colombian Álvaro Mutis. Her method is firmly rooted in traditional rhetorical analysis. Still, it participates in the materialist, neoaniminist thrust of much contemporary research in the humanities.

A Material Turn? From afar, it would appear that there is a general sense of agreement as to the relevance of a materialist, rather than an idealist, approach. This is far from the case, as most scholarly monographs will foreseeably continue to bear the imprint of Platonism, wittingly or not. The very notion of the “humanities” wreaks of anthropocentrism, yet again plucking homo sapiens and its spiritual outgrowths away from all other matter. “Environmental humanities,” the aegis of the present volume, is no less suspect, as the anthropocentric etymology of the adjective reveals: environ is French for that which surrounds. We may as well call the enterprise “nonhuman backdrop human studies.” More importantly, the moniker provides a handy shorthand to stop engaging in theorization altogether and codifies largely unresolved problems as a legible parcel of academic production, itself subsumed within an all-encompassing market that it may or may not be at odds with. Even among materialists there are stark disagreements. Ericka Beckman’s Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (2013) could be seen as a complement to Rogers, as she focuses on export reveries in the emerging Latin American nations. She examines poetry and prose closely linked to commodities: modernista luxury goods, the Colombian José Eustasio Rivera’s rubber-boom themed La vorágine (1924), the Argentine Julián Martel’s financial-collapse inspired La bolsa (1891), and others. And yet Rogers is less interested in following the money, as it were, while the implications for political economy and ideology critique are front and center in Beckman’s historical materialist approach. Similarly, although Bentancor and Bigelow are both interested in specific, historically-overdetermined substances such as silver, one privileges history of ideas and commodity fetishism, while the other examines metallurgy and the animacy of matter. At best, these approaches complement each other; at worst, they are in contradiction. Uncharitably, both might come across as antiquarian and Eurocentric when seen from the vantage points of De la Cadena or Viveiros de Castro, however the latter differ in other ways. Moreover, the fluid conversation across disciplines modelled here—open to anthropology, archeology, history, and literary and cultural studies—can be easily cut short by institutional realities. Disciplines entrench themselves and, conversely, suborientations mushroom, mirroring the division of labor in other provinces of the

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economy. Academic publishing, invested in labels that increase book circulation, incentivizes miscommunication among neighboring approaches similarly anchored in the material. New materialisms and multinaturalism have a lot in common from the vantage point of traditional humanistic connoisseurship, but are often antagonistic to each other—not without reason, as noted in the above discussion on decolonialism. Emerging academic venues allow more or less different research lines to thrive, but also postpone difficult, necessary conversations. Regardless, it is clear that matter is of great importance to contemporary writers in the region. Consider Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza’s Autobiografía del algodón (2020), an essayistic, non-fictional narrative that constellates family and labor history around the title crop. In conversation with philosophers José Revueltas and Martin Heidegger, the narrator ponders on the meaning of belonging (pertenecer): Se pertenece como quien responde, por el mero hecho de tener cuerpo, de estar hecho de una materia en común, a un requerimiento o una invitación de este planeta, de este sistema solar, de este universo. Pertenecer es estar mediado; aceptar esa mediación. Entregarse a ella (Rivera Garza 2020: 88). [One belongs as one who responds, by the mere fact of having a body or being made of a shared substance, to a requirement or an invitation from this planet, from this solar system, from this universe. To belong is to be mediated; to accept that mediation. To surrender to it.]

The striking commingling of an invitation and an imposition conjures a middle voice, between subject and object, of matter self-aware of its actions and of being acted upon. In the preceding pages, Rivera Garza writes: “Yo soy yo y mi sitio junto con otros sobre la tierra” (I am me and my place together with others on earth) (Rivera Garza 2020: 86). Though written in the colonial language, how far removed is this pronouncement from an Amerindian ethos and experience, ultimately? The book engages explicitly with Zacateco, Guachichil, Caxcan, and Tepehuan legacies and enduring traditions. A work that belongs in transcultural materialism, Autobiografía del algodón moves back and forth between the 1934 agrarian labor movement and the post-1994 NAFTA hellscape. It connects the dots between narco violence and slow violence, excavating and cherishing both human lives and parched earth in the process. Or consider Rivera Garza’s countrywoman, Jazmina Barrera, whose Linea Nigra (2020) is a very personal, often medical, diary of her pregnancy, but also a reader’s journal and a historicization of motherhood from the vantage point of the present. A book of vignettes and ruminations buoyed by the title image—the line that appears on the belly during pregnancy—, it includes a succinct, poignant reflection in its final pages worth finalizing with. It combines two realizations. One is that painting, which is the medium favored by the author’s larger-than-life mother and a recurrent theme in the book, is not about images but about matter. The other is that, as her same mother (now a grandmother) reports, the word materia shares an “etymological root” with the word mother: mater (Barrera 2020: 163). This is so.

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The authoritative Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary cites the phrase “mater esse de aliquo,” in Ovid, which means “to be someone’s mother” or “to be pregnant with someone.” To be someone’s matter, perhaps, in the all-enveloping sense of sustenance that environmental thinking is at pains to communicate, at times borrowing from the language of Pachamama. In Barrera’s book, the vignette suggests the author has been painting, or drawing, with a line both straight and sinuous, embodied. Beyond, it shows the written word reaching out to its purported other, the world, while always being of a piece with it.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Aquinas, Thomas. The Collected Works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Questions on the Soul. Trans. James H. Robb, electronic resource, InteLex Corporation, 1993. Arias, Arturo, ed. The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Aristotle. On the Soul and Other Psychological Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Barrera, Jazmina. Linea Nigra. Bogotá: Laguna libros, 2022. Beckman, Ericka. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Bentancor, Orlando. The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Bigelow, Allison. Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Bolívar, Simón. Carta de Jamaica y otros textos. Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2015. Budd, Malcolm. “Delight in the Natural World: Kant on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature Part III: The Sublime in Nature.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 38.3 (1998): 233–50. De la Cadena, Marisol. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies. Trans. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Giorgi, Gabriel. Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2014. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Hoyos Ayala, Héctor. Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kopenawa, Davi, and Bruce Albert. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. Keith Tribe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.

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Lane, Kris E. Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Langebaek, Carl Henrik. Los Muiscas: La historia milenaria de un pueblo chibcha. Bogotá: Debate, 2019. ——. Antes de Colombia: Los primeros 14.000 años. Bogotá: Debate, 2021. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1955. Lewis, Charlton, and Charles Short. “Mātĕrĭa.” A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Rivera Garza, Cristina. Autobiografía del algodón. Mexico City: Penguin Random House, 2020. Rocha, Marília Librandi. Writing by Ear: Clarice Lispector and the Aural Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Rogers, Charlotte. Mourning El Dorado: Literature and Extractivism in the Contemporary American Tropics. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. The New American Bible. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/__P3.HTM (26 Feb. 2023). Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom. New York: Holt, 1889. Valle, Ivonne Del. “On Shaky Ground: Hydraulics, State Formation, and Colonialism in Sixteenth–Century Mexico.” Hispanic Review 77.2 (2009): 197–220. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo Batalha. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4.3 (1998): 469–88. ——. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

Orlando Bentancor

Mining Any expert on the Andes knows that it is almost impossible to read chronicles, letters, and reports from the colonial period without encountering the ramified effects of the mining enterprise carried out on the legendary Potosí hill, discovered around 1545. The ubiquitous and elusive nature of Potosí mining is inseparable from the proliferation of descriptions that have either characterized the hill as a mouth of hell that swallowed indigenous workers or celebrated it as the bastion and support of imperial glory. Consequently, the dynamic and protean nature of mining is not understandable if we reduce it to individual, discrete and separate empirical observations, no matter how detailed and conscientious they may seem. For this reason, this chapter’s guiding hypothesis is that it is not possible to offer a merely positivist analysis of mineral extraction because it consistently exceeds any attempt to limit it to obtaining metals at the mine pithead. The nominalist empiricism that rules a large part of the academic imagination isolates mining from a larger process determined by forces and relationships of capitalist deterritorialized abstraction that alienate and erase the agency of human and non-human colonial agents that make mining possible. For this reason, this chapter does not intend to provide a history of mining that would easily get lost in the infinity of data that there is about it (Brown 2012; Dore 2000; Lane 2021; Moore 2010; Robbins 2011; Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter 2010; TePaske and Brown 2010; Vilches 2010). The main point of this chapter is that the specificity of mining in Latin America is founded not on its local character but on the processual entanglement between capitalism and colonialism as it unfolds on the planetary capitalist ecology (Moore 2015). It will focus on a critique of fetishism, the act of treating the product of mining as if it were the cause of the process and independent of it while also acquiring a pre-eminence that appears to be ontological. The coloniality of mining both in the sixteenth century past and in the neoliberal present depends on the naturalization of an ontological order that disguises itself under the form of an invisible, impersonal, and fateful process that hides and retroactively devalues the expenditure of work and energy of human and non-human actors. To appreciate the importance of mining, it is necessary to go through a defetishizing critique that emphasizes the centrality of value creation. My position is based on the conviction that it is neither possible nor desirable to directly observe mining in its sensory character since it is necessary to go through its immaterial and abstract mediation to appreciate its sensory and concrete nature later. This implies seeing how the act of extracting ore is inseparable from the action of imposing violent abstractions on human and non-human labor, simply because this labor is covered and hidden in the form of value. To illustrate this, I will engage in a dialogue with what I consider three different yet highly compatible books. These are Planetary Mine (2020) by Martín Arboleda, The Matter of Empire (2017) by Orlando Bentancor, and Mining Language (2020) by Allison https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-019

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Margaret Bigelow. These three books cover different historical periods since Planetary Mine is mostly about mining in the present, while The Matter of Empire and Mining Language are about mining in the colonial period. Although they also differ in their methodological approaches, as explained in the following pages, all three share the centrality of the co-implication between mining and a materialist ontology. Joint consideration of these three works contributes to defetishize mining by focusing on the primary role of a value-centric ontology that involves real abstractions as part of an invisible planetary infrastructure while trying to uncover the hidden practical, material, and sensory conditions associated with human and non-human agents.

Mining as World-Making Practice In his monumental Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (below: PM), Martín Arboleda proposes a notion of “planetary mine” as the contemporary process of extraction that results from two different yet inseparable world-historical processes that are “first, a new geography of late industrialization that is no longer circumscribed to the traditional heartland of capitalism (i.e., the West), and second, a quantum leap in the robotization and computerization of the labor process” (Arboleda 2020: 4). PM shows how the technological revolution taking place in East Asian economies since the 1980s decentered the “metageographical categories of core/periphery and even of global North/global South” (Arboleda 2020: 4). In fact, mining is an extractive practice that is “entangled in a global apparatus of production and exchange” entirely irreducible for the local/global binary (Arboleda 2020: 5). Arboleda’s central claim is that mining is not a “discrete sociotechnical object but a dense network of territorial infrastructures and spatial technologies vastly dispersed across space” (Arboleda 2020: 5). This deterritorialized infrastructural mining is part of a “circulatory system of capital, which now transverses the entire geography of the earth” (Arboleda 2020: 5). Mineral extraction and abstract finance-capitalist deterritorialization are two sides of the same process. Ultimately, what is at stake here is leaving behind the binaries of the center and periphery that mining itself made obsolete. In other words, mining as a deterritorialized practice exceeds two traditional paradigms: word-system theory and decolonial critique. Being irreducible to the “mere wresting minerals from the soil,” mining technology itself erases the “boundaries between manufacturing and extraction, waste and resources, biologically and nonbiologically based industries” (Arboleda 2020: 5). Above all, mining is a complex combination of infrastructural elements that combine material transoceanic corridors, racialized colonial labor, and financial networks (Arboleda 2020: 5). Statecentric categories of political economy, such as resource dependency imperialism, should yield a new vision of state power and capitalism that accounts for this deterritorialized flow of mining/capital (Arboleda 2020: 5). The processual method

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employed in PM pays attention to the forms or modes of existence of capital that help to understand “the universal content that is expressed through the unfolding of concrete practices and things” (Arboleda 2020: 6–7). The core of such an analysis of mining is form-analysis Marxism which recovers the centrality of value while articulating it with political phenomena that sustain mining, such as militarization, debt peonage, and internal colonialism. The result of not reducing mining to the physical act of extraction is realizing the importance of the deterritorialization of value, the process being “supersensuous and systemic” (Arboleda 2020: 38). In a bold statement that summarizes this posture, Arboleda declares: “Philosophically speaking, this entails capturing how the essential level (the total surplus value of society) acquires phenomenal reality in the sensuous experience via the messy materialities and entanglements of firms and states” (Arboleda 2020: 38). In short, sensuous experience is caught in a crucial ontological dimension of a supersensuous and systemic dimension of mining that guides and partially determines the whole process. To take a case in point, planetary mine is a process dialectically bound to the complex material and metabolic conditions that include a whole array of apparently insignificant details that include things such as the pipes and cables employed in the buildings of the megacities of China as well as the “containers of the thousands of cargo vessels that make up the maritime commercial fleets of China, Japan, and South Korea, which have rendered the Pacific Ocean the main infrastructural corridor of world trade” (Arboleda 2020: 13). The “metabolism of the supply chain of extraction” is materialized in nearly “imperceptible practices and habits that constantly weave together the fabric of everyday life in the twenty-first-century city: sending an email, driving to work, ordering groceries through the internet” (Arboleda 2020: 13). PM rigorously shows how commodity fetishism and capitalist ideology are inseparable from mining extraction by making visible the material and symbolic practices embedded in the planetary infrastructure that would otherwise remain hidden under the form of disconnected and discrete actions that cover the process as a whole. Like most STS (Science, Technology, and Society) scholars, Arboleda knows that a serious attempt to understand contemporary Latin American mining requires a systematic reconstruction of a planetary infrastructure that is subordinated to the fetishism of commodities. This approach has the merit of emphasizing what drives the process and is left behind by positivist methodology: the repetitive capitalist compulsion to endless selfreproduce by expanding and accumulating value (Kapoor 2020; Dick and MacLaughlan 2020). Seeing mining as inherent to an impersonal compulsion of capital compels us to enact a shift of perspectives that acknowledges how mining belongs to an “entirely different ontological order” (Arboleda 2020: 16). The Money-Commodity-Money (M-CM’) process of self-valorization of capital is an automatic subject that is “ontologically alien to state power” (Arboleda 2020: 120). Mining is part of the capital as an objectifying, world-making practice of spiraling movement of self-expansion that subjects social practices to powerful “impersonal modalities of social domination” (Arboleda

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2020: 18; Kordela 2014). This impersonal self-objectifying practice of capital as mining is materialized “into rivers poisoned by mercury and cyanide, ancient glaciers torn to shreds by explosives and machinery of extraction, peasants ravaged by debt, police forces bizarrely out of control, mining towns riddled by cancer epidemics, and rampant labor casualization” (Arboleda 2020: 18). Taking seriously class-based, contradictory, and antagonistic character of the capital’s self-valorization materialized in mining’s sociotechnical system, and ecologies render visible “how human bodies become possessed (and often obliterated) by uncanny forces and nonhuman objects become animated with powers over life and death” (Arboleda 2020: 18). Ultimately, by emphasizing this aspect of PM, I am not arguing that there is something mystical, spooky, or metaphysical about mining, but that to understand the coloniality of mining enterprise in the present, it is necessary to acknowledge how it has always been already conducive to abstract value generation since the colonial times. As it will become evident in the following pages, the alliance between mining and capitalism is inseparable from an ontological project of subordinating nature to a process of commodification that goes back to colonial times. Despite mining being part of the most advanced stage of techno-capitalism, the fourth age of the machines, it still depends on a colonial system of “domination sedimented in centuries of racialized violence, enslavement, and expulsion” (Arboleda 2020: 25; Schwab 2017). Indigenous People, the previous enemies of the empire, became the contemporary “threat to ‘security’ and homeostasis of the metabolic global supply chains for the circulation of commodities” (Arboleda 2020: 26). Arboleda offers an “alternative reading of systematic primitive accumulation that is sensitive to lawmaking violence and forceful expropriation but ultimately posits them as subservient to and ontologically distinct from the impersonal forms of social mediation intrinsic to modern society” (Arboleda 2020: 32). PM is a titanic effort to show mining as a process of continuous deterritorialization in which automated and robotic technology subordinates localized and concrete minerals to the form of merchandise mediated by an authoritarian, technocratic, and neocolonial state apparatus. This process of deterritorialization, simultaneously autonomous and automated, is imposed on the populations as the need for an inexorable destiny like a teleological project. In PM, scenes populated with extractive robots, military cyborgs, and colonial violence that seem to be taken from the movie Blade Runner or the novel Iris by Edmundo Paz Soldan paint a vision of techno-capitalist mining in which the acceleration of automation and robotization is superimposed on the pauperization and criminalization of the indigenous populations that live in the sacrifice zones. It is impossible to overstate the importance of PM’s value-centered vision of planetary mining. Arboleda allows us to reflect on how mining as a material process produces a result that becomes ontologically autonomous and retroactively appropriates, dominates, and devalorizes the material conditions that make it possible. The importance of this type of research lies in the fact that it shows how commodity fetishism as practiced by economists, the act of treating the product of mining as if it were the

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cause of the process and independent of it, acquires a pre-eminence that appears to be ontological in which human and non-human agents seem to be subservient to an inevitable and necessary teleological fate. Although it is vital to emphasize that mining as a techno-capitalist process becomes fetishistically autonomous from its own material-extractive conditions, this perspective is still the perspective of mining seen from the side of commodity fetishism. Despite the fact it has the enormous merit of bringing the centrality of value in mining to our attention, I contend that the importance of this ontological process is not new but old. The marriage between mining and capitalism as an ontological project of subordinating nature to a process of commodification goes back to the sixteenth century. Therefore, it is necessary to look for the historical origins of planetary mining as a deterritorializing process in “the long sixteenth century,” with the revolutionary expansion that took place after the exhaustion of European sources after the mining boom of 1450 (Moore 2015). Although I concede that the priority of capitalist deterritorialization questions the binaries of the world-system theory and decolonial critique, I still maintain that colonialism is the disproportionately larger act of appropriation that makes abstract surplus value possible. In the sixteenth century, mining was part of a deterritorializing process with the Andes as its main protagonist. After the discovery of the Cerro Rico de Potosi, the Spanish exhausted the mineral resources of the hill in a couple of decades. Consequently, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo introduced a revolutionary deterritorialization process that reconfigured the area, inaugurating a new era and increasing the crown’s profits. The Toledan reforms consisted of the triple introduction of amalgamation (a revolutionary method of refining metals), the mita (a rotational system of labor that was compulsory and paid at the same time), and the reductions (racialized resettlement that separated indigenous peoples from Spaniards). Together, these were foundational acts of violent deterritorialization that made possible a capitalist ecology centered in mining (Bakewell 2010; Cole 1985; Tandeter 1995). Potosí mining was a transoceanic extractive infrastructure that depended not only on the extraction of mercury from the Huancavelica mines but also on the construction of ships using timber from southern Norway (Moore 2010). Moreover, the contemporary deterritorialized extraction process of the mineral depends on neocolonial structures originating in the sixteenth century with the experiments of conquest and colonization of nature and inhabitants of the new world. Although previous research has focused on how extractive technologies implemented in contemporary neoliberalism have an origin in the colony, thus making explicit the centrality of a colonial legacy that “continued unabated from the sixteenth century to the present,” scarce attention has been given to the colonial origins of the naturalization of the ontological order of mining as part of an impersonal and fateful process that covered over its own practical and sensorial conditions of possibility (Anderson and Bora 2017). The expenditure of the work and energy of all the human and non-human actants that contributed to value creation has been retroactively devalorized and erased by the very product of labor itself. Now more than ever, it becomes necessary to

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continue the task of making visible the material infrastructure of mining accomplished by STS scholars such as Arboleda by including real abstractions and ontological fictions in the planetary infrastructure itself. In other words, this chapter aims to draw attention to the deterritorialized colonial assemblage of abstractions and practical and sensory techniques, such as colors, smell, and taste of minerals, the fluid motion of the act of separating minerals from their geological conditions, that remain invisible, naturalized, and taken for granted in mineral extraction both in the past and in the present. Real abstractions are not accidental but inherent components of the metabolic chain of supply that mediate sensory experience just as the rest of the “imperceptible practices and habits that constantly weave together the fabric of everyday life” mentioned above (Arboleda 2020: 13). As explained in the following section, real abstractions play a crucial role in the colonial appropriation that precedes the commodification of nature in general and the mineral world in particular. By this precedence, I am referring to the disproportionately larger acts of appropriation (colonial primitive accumulation) of the energy and agency of human agents and mineral beings that results from the conceptualization of the mineral world as prime matter that is subordinated to the fetish product. From a materialist historical perspective, capitalization depends on a larger act of appropriation of nature that is related not only to mining as a process of deterritorialization but also to mining as an ontological system of abstractions that actively support the reproduction of the material practices of gendered and racialized colonial labor.

Mining as Real Abstraction My contribution, The Matter of Empire (below: TME), concerns mining as both central to the colonial enterprise and inseparable from the attempts to ground the empire in natural law (Bentancor 2017). Put another way; it explores what may seem an extremely paradoxical phenomenon. The actual extraction of metals from the Andean mines was inseparable from ontological beliefs about the essence of matter. TME calls these beliefs “metaphysical instrumentalism,” summarized as an Aristotelian/Platonic/Thomist philosophical principle of natural subordination of an imperfect prime matter to form, an inferior means to a higher end, use value to exchange value, and non-value to value. TME explores how these ontological fictions appear not only in the political theories of natural law employed to justify the dispossession of indigenous peoples of their lands and sovereignty but also in the writings on mining that justified and described the production of extraction of minerals. TME examines sixteenth-century debates on Spanish sovereignty in the Americas and treatises on natural history and mining written between 1520 and 1640. These texts include writings by Francisco de Vitoria, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Bartolomé de Las Casas, José de Acosta, the writers of “the circle of Toledo” (a reference to the Peruvian Viceroy Francisco de

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Toledo who formalized the Potosí mita labor draft and introduced mercury amalgamation), Juan de Solórzano Pereira, and Álvaro Alonso Barba. The purpose behind the examination of these heterogeneous traditions that both justify and describe the extraction of mineral resources from the Andes is to focus on the moment of appropriation disproportionately greater than mercantile commodity exchange, that is, on the colonial conditions of devaluation of the material agency of human and more than human agents that sustain the commodification of nature. My favorite example is Jose de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (The Natural and Moral History of the Indies), published in 1590, which occupies a central place in the book (Acosta 2012; Bentacor 2017: 151–215). On the one hand, Acosta inherits the natural law disputes in Vitoria, Sepulveda, and Las Casas and the failed attempts to ground mining and imperial extractivism on the principle of natural subordination. On the other hand, when he tries to offer a causal and rational explanation of the generation and use of metals in the new world, he produces the classical Thomist view of metals as a raw plastic material that serve and sustain higher entities by being potentially directed to a higher end. The paradox is that this view of metals as inferior and passive was incompatible from Acosta’s capitalist view of metals as a superior and commanding form of value that underpins the global economy. That explains the centrality that Acosta grants to mining, which he considers a necessary condition for evangelization and the imperial network, providing a justification for the measures introduced by the viceroy Francisco de Toledo such as the mita while conceiving both metals and indigenous work an imperfect matter that must be molded into a higher end-product. I do not hesitate to claim that the emergence of an impersonal, autonomous, and separated ontological order of planetary mining that imposes itself on sacrifice zones as if it were the work of fate has its origins in Iberian metaphysical instrumentalism. The principle of subordination of the amorphous and imperfect prime matter to an ideal form of value is not an ideal abstraction separated from the messy world of mining. It is a real abstraction. This concept created by Marx and systematized by Sohn-Rethel consists of abstractions that originate in the practical act of introducing a binary separation between use value (characterized by mutability, change and variation) and exchange value (characterized by supposed immutability and presence permanently identical to itself endowed with an autonomous agency) (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 2021). As Sohn-Rethel says, these abstractions inhabit the minds and imaginations of individual agents. Still, they do not spring from the mind or imagination but from the sphere of commodity exchange as a social performative activity that treats things as if they were devoid of changeable qualities (use value) and treats money as if it were the measure of all things (exchange value) (Sohn-Rethel 2021: 21). What makes abstractions real is that they are transferred from the practical sphere of political economy to epistemology and ontology while simultaneously organizing reality. If Sohn-Rethel tracks real abstraction in epistemology and philosophy, Jason Moore sees in real abstraction a violent force organizing capitalist ecology (2015: 27). Capitalism as a colonial project depends on a violent division between an external Nature and a civilizing

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Humanity. Whereas Sohn-Rethel sees abstractions as transferred from the sphere of exchange to philosophy, and Moore sees real abstractions as introducing splits between Nature and Humanity, by combining resources from Heidegger and Marx, TME sees the medieval concept of prime matter as an abstraction that results from the transfer of craft activity into an ontology that naturalizes colonialism and domination of nature. In other words, to conceive of nature in terms of hierarchical order, it was necessary to transfer the act of domination from the practical and material sphere of the production of handcrafted goods to the physical description of the world. The causal, rational, and hierarchical natural order presupposes the craft activity in which a superior agent imposes a blueprint on the lower order. Moreover, the transference of artisanal technique and metalworking to natural law in Iberian philosophy was employed to justify mining and colonial appropriation and to provide scientific accounts of mining in the Andes. Specifically, Spanish officials who appealed to natural law to ground the conquest and mineral extraction justified the subordination of the mineral world to the human world using the example of the craftsman. He transforms things according to a system of four causes. According to this handicraft metaphysics, an Artisan/God/Prince (efficient cause) manipulates bronze (material cause) to produce a statue (final cause), imposing a mental model or blueprint (formal cause). The attempts to ground mining on the natural right presupposed mining as a form of artisanal technique. Thus, metaphysical instrumentalism conceived the mineral world and indigenous workers as an imperfect prime matter. This covered tautological, performative and self-referential procedure triggered loops and impasses as mining ceases to be a mere means to an end, becoming an end in itself, just like the capitalist drive endowed with the force of an impersonal fate invoked by Arboleda above. The violent colonial appropriation of the mineral world and indigenous work through institutions such as the mita and technologies such as amalgamation presupposed a real abstraction that violently separates nature and humanity, amorphous and imperfect raw material and the pure form of value. Metaphysical instrumentalism was the core of Iberian ideology that guided appropriation as a primitive colonial accumulation that precedes the capitalization of the mining as a cycle of investing money in merchandise to produce more money (M-C-M’). Once the capitalization of the mineral world was set in motion, contradictions and impasses arose that resulted from the transformation of the mineral medium into an end in itself. In other words, metaphysical instrumentalism provoked loops that transformed mining, which was supposed to be an inferior material means, into an end in itself. The sixteenth century was simultaneously the moment of appropriation that preceded the valorization of the mineral and the moment of emergence of a techno-capitalist drive that naturalized the hierarchical order that made it possible. This contradiction is visible in the writings of colonial officials such as Juan de Solórzano Pereira, who was perfectly conscious of the pernicious and destructive effects of mining and nonetheless recommended continuing to practice it (Bentancor 2017: 287). The more the empire treated prime matter

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as a mere means to an end, the more it depended on it to sustain the imperial network. The more it depended on the means, the more it destroyed the material living conditions upon which it depended. It is instructive here to recall that Nicholas A. Robbins’s Mercury, Mining and Empire demonstrates in great detail that the emergence of an economy linking Asia, Europe, and the Americas was made possible by an ecological catastrophe (Robbins 2011). Mining becomes a destructive force when it autonomizes itself by becoming an end in itself that cuts ties with the “natural order” it is supposed to obey. The end was the means of the means: civilization, common good, or salvation were the means by which mining as technical manipulation continued treating mineral agents and indigenous workers as an imperfect prime matter. Today’s mining corporations continue to employ the same principle of metaphysical instrumentalism. They replace the old ends of civilization and salvation with new goals such as sustainable development and prime matter with natural resources. The result is the ontologization and naturalization of an order that appears necessary, autonomous, and impersonal while feeding on death and destruction. The consequences of reading together PM and TME are two. First, it allows us to see the real abstractions born in the long sixteenth century as inherent parts of the deterritorialized transnational infrastructure called planetary mine. In this sense, mining is not merely wresting minerals from the earth because extraction is also an abstraction, separation, and homogenization performed at an ideological level. Moreover, real abstractions proper to metaphysical instrumentalism operate all the way down through these levels because the sensory experiences of metal’s touch, sight, smell, and taste, were constantly translated and converted into the form of value that takes over and instrumentalizes the agency and power of human and non-human agents. For example, Álvaro Barba was a Spanish priest and metallurgist who lived in Peru from 1604 to 1650, author of one of the most essential metallurgical treatises of the Renaissance titled Arte de los metales (1640), where he wrote about the color, smell, and taste of metals in the context of Andean mining employing a metaphysical instrumentalist approach (Barba 1967; Bentancor 2007). Sensations and affects such as feeling cold, wet, dry, or hot corresponded not only to empirical environmental conditions that were material, factual and objective but also to Aristotelian concepts of form as a force impressed on the matter of the four elements, air, water, fire, and earth. He called this form the “mineral virtue” that used the elemental qualities and affections such as heat and cold to generate silver in the earth’s bowels. This is an example of how the real abstraction proper to metaphysical instrumentalism is constitutive of the mining as an act of separating metals from the earth: it is a real and practical activity that simultaneously fetishizes value and devalues human and non-human agency and labor by acting as if the bodily sensations and affections of matter were reducible to something potential, plastic, passive, and devoid of any capacity to act and produce that does not come from a superior and perfect form.

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Mining as Sensorial Practice The second consequence of combining the insights of PM and TME is that it opens the door for a search on the conditions of possibility of value creation and how it retroactively devaluates the labor/energy of matter, colonial subjects, and women. The principle of subordination of matter to form reinforces patriarchal ideology by dividing between a feminine and passive matter and a masculine and active form. This division implicitly devalues and erases the agency of the indigenous female mining worker in Potosí. In fact, women’s work was essential to reproduce the conditions of plunder and primitive accumulation covered by the fetishism of the value form. For example, although underground work was reserved for men, women played a fundamental role in the refinement of metals in the trapiches (rudimentary ore mills) and in the trading of ores, a fact that remained hidden by the dominant gender assumptions about mining labor official colonial historiography (Mangan 2005; Barragán 2020). What remains to be explained is the moment that precedes and exceeds the practical and conceptual transformation of the mineral into money. Allison Margaret Bigelow’s Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (below: ML) will allow us to illuminate the other side of the process of colonial appropriation, that of the subaltern practices, beliefs, and knowledges that have been erased by the subordination of mining as labor to mining as money/capital (Bigelow 2020). In ML, Bigelow examines technical and scientific lexicons of mining to provide a profound understanding of “the diverse ways of knowing that shaped the vernacular scientific industries—even, and especially, when such subaltern knowledge systems were not recognized as scientific” (Bigelow 2020: 2). A detailed analysis of mining and metallurgical language provides “new evidence of Indigenous knowledge production, African refining agencies, and South Asian mineralogical beliefs as collected and conveyed within Iberian imperial letters” (Bigelow 2020: 2). By focusing on mining language, Bigelow provides a highly complex processual view of mining and colonialism: “Spanish empire was less a monolithic imposition from above and more like a protean, contingent, human, plant, and metallic matter that composed it—dynamic, locally defined, and contextual” (Bigelow 2020: 6). Colonial writers were forced to redefine their ideas about metals by incorporating Amerindian ideas about matter and value (Bigelow 2020: 6). Mining Language demarcates its sphere from new materialism and from philosophy in general by focusing on “materials themselves-as they were made and understood by diverse actors and artisans of the colonial period” (Bigelow 2020: 7). While studies such as TME narrate the transformation of mineral extraction into commodity fetishism as the principal dimension of mining, Bigelow is more interested in “studying the moments before metals became money—moments when miners classified, sorted, and processed ores that were then sent out for minting” (Bigelow 2020: 8). This theoretical gesture of looking for the moment previous to the transformation of mineral into value puts her project in company with new

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materialism, which deals with the question of the agency of matter and the existence of independent qualities outside human subjectivity. However, Bigelow’s practice is closer to some kind of “old materialism,” or even a form of historical materialism that “traces through spoken, written, and visual languages the ‘old material’ ways in which miners throughout the Iberian world understood the animacy of matter and the ability of metallic objects to shape human experiences” (Bigelow 2020: 8). By understanding mining both as “process and product,” that is to say, as a coproduction of practices and material transformation, Bigelow complicates Eurocentric views of mining: “Instead of a linear march toward scientific modernity in which European imperialism is imposed from above, this expansive approach reveals entangled histories of globalization and colonization. It throws into sharp relief the subaltern miners whose humanity was denied even as colonial forces appropriated and adapted their scientific, technical, and medical ideas” (Bigelow 2020: 9). In my view, Bigelow is contributing to the defetishization of mining by searching for the practical, material, and sensory conditions of possibility of mining itself. Moreover, the analysis of language is the critical component that allows uncovering the intellectual contributions of people whose ways of knowing have been devalorized in the colonial scientific historiography, such as “mining women, Afro-Latin artisans, and Indigenous experts” (Bigelow 2020: 12). One of many fascinating examples is present in the section of the book devoted to Álvaro Alonso Barba’s 1640 Arte de los metales, mentioned above. While TME reads Barba as an example of metaphysical instrumentalism that ultimately depended on real abstractions such as matter and form, ML reconstructs the complex processes of refining and amalgamation by highlighting the Indigenous concepts of practices that entered the Spanish mining vocabulary previous to being forgotten. As a matter of fact, despite the attempts to appropriate subaltern knowledge by subsuming it into metaphysical principles, the most successful refining techniques were born out of the fusion of American and European practices before these American and Amerindian contributions were erased by the Enlightenment authors who attributed themselves the authorship of the process. For instance, Barba’s logic of color classification employed a racialized language related to the infamous “casta” system of racial valorization, yet irreducible to it. Bigelow shows in detail how the tripartite division of metals in “pacos” (red), “mulatos” (brown), and “negrillos” (black) followed the logic of pragmatic transformation of metals into value, according to which “each metal required different metallurgical methods and materials to become useful for human society and valuable in markets” (Bigelow 2020: 278). These classifications aimed not to match each kind of silver with a place within a racial hierarchy but “to match each kind of silver to its most profitable mode of refining” (Bigelow 2020: 278). Such a complex and multifaceted taxonomy employed the language of the “sistema de castas,” but “the values and colors that miners assigned to mixed metals like mulatos and negrillos did not align with casta categories of the same names” (Bigelow 2020: 278). As a result, color “provided the names of categories, but not the logic of categorization”

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(Bigelow 2020: 278). In other words, it is possible to affirm that the classification of metals according to their color is based on what the metals can do and what can be done with them before being transformed into value exchange. Furthermore, this racialized classification of metals was not linked to a pragmatic logic but was based on indigenous words that were later erased in subsequent European appropriations. Bigelow finds the best example of this gap between the logic of color and the logic of categorization in the “mulatos.” García de Llanos, the author of Diccionario y maneras de hablar que se usan en las minas y sus labores en ingenios y beneficios de los metales (1609) explains that miners classified metals by “space, or underground location, using observable physical properties to understand the inner essences of mixed metals” (de Llanos 1983: 278). “Negrillos” were extracted at the deepest levels, and “pacos” were found close to the surface. The ash-colored mulatos (“cenicientos”) occupied an “intermediary space for the length of two or three human bodies (“estados”)” (de Llanos 1983: 278). Quechua speakers used the word “pactascak,” “pactas mitta,” or “chaupi mitta” and Aimara speakers used the word “taypirana” to describe something found “in between” (de Llanos 1983: 32). Bigelow infers from this that “Spanish speakers seem to have translated Andean concepts of spatial intermediaries into a racial classification that was irreducible to the rigid hierarchies of the casta system yet associated with the pragmatic goal-oriented creation of value. Bigelow unearths the etymological and conceptual origins of the explicitly racialized terms like “mulato” and “cimarrón” demonstrating how “Indigenous miners contributed to the conceptual foundations and daily practices of the colonial Andean silver industry” (Bigelow 2020: 279). In my own reading of ML, the logic of subordination of matter (and the sensorial and practical qualities of practical use value) to the form of value (the real abstractions that actively separate the material and concrete agency of the product) retroactively valorize the mining process in such a way that it conceals the practical knowledge of indigenous workers. To conclude, if PM and TME both defetishize mining by focusing on the primary role of a value-centric ontology that involves real abstractions as part of a planetary infrastructure, Bigelow’s work defetishizes value by making visible the practical, material, and sensory conditions associated with the agency of matter and of female workers and African and indigenous people who have been retroactively devalued by the very product of their work. While TME focuses on the impasses and loops triggered by the dialectical co-production between indigenous beliefs and metaphysical instrumentalism, ML focuses on the primitive accumulation of subaltern knowledge as both producer and product of what TME calls metaphysical instrumentalism. Bigelow’s crucial work shows us the simultaneously active material, functional and sensory role of subjects whose contribution has been erased from history in the same way that the product of the process, money, erases its conditions of possibility. In other words, it tells us about the conditions of appropriation, installing itself a step before the fetishization of mining knowledge itself, that is, in the active agency of both non-human agents such as minerals and the actors and cultural agents that made mining possible with their body,

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nerves, muscles, and energy. In sum, a parallactic shift of perspectives between these three books can help conclude the following thesis: planetary mining as a deterritorialized process of extractive abstraction is inseparable from a disproportionately larger act of colonial subordination of a retroactively devalued imperfect prime matter to a perfect abstract form of value. Mining as a project consists of the teleological imposition of abstract forms of valorization on human and non-human matter that conceals the sensory agency of the subjects that make it possible. And yet this project depends on a process that involves the sensory and active experience of gendered and racialized work. A broader understanding of mining requires a continuous shift of perspectives capable of paying attention to both its sensory and abstract components.

Works Cited Acosta, José de. Historia natural y moral de las Indias. Ed. José Alcina Franch. Madrid: Dastin, 2002. Anderson, Mark, and Zélia Bora. Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017. Arboleda, Martín. Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020. Bakewell, Peter. Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosi, 1545–1650. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010. Barba, Álvaro Alonso. Arte de los metales. Seguido de notas y suplementos al libro por un antiguo minero; juicios y comentarios. 1640. Potosí: Editorial Potosí, 1967. Barragán, Rossana. “Women in the Silver Mines of Potosí: Rethinking the History of ‘Informality’ and ‘Precarity’(Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries).” International Review of Social History 65.2 (2020): 289–314. Bentancor, Orlando. “Matter, Form, and the Generation of Metals in Álvaro Alonso Barba’s Arte de los metales.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 8.2 (2007): 117–133. ——. The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Bigelow, Allison Margaret. Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute of Early American History Culture, 2020. Brown, Kendall W. A History of Mining in Latin America: From the Colonial Era to the Present. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012. Cole, Jeffery Alan. The Potosi Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985. Dick, Maria-Daniella, and Robbie McLaughlan. “Conclusion: Death Drive Ecologies.” Late Capitalist Freud in Literary, Cultural, and Political Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 15–74. Dore, Elizabeth. “Environment and Society: Long Term Trends in Latin American Mining.” Environment and History IV (2000): 1–29. García de Llanos. Diccionario y maneras de hablar que se usan en las minas y sus labores en los ingenios y beneficios de los metales (1609). La Paz: MUSEF Editores, 1983. Kapoor, Ilan. “What ‘Drives’ Capitalist Development?” Confronting Desire. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. 75–93. Kordela, Aglaia Kiarina. Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014.

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Labban, Mazen. “Deterritorializing Extraction: Bioaccumulation and the Planetary Mine.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104.3 (2014): 560–576. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014. 892360. Lane, Kris. Potosi: The Silver City That Changed the World. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. Mangan, Jane E. Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Moore, Jason W. “This Lofty Mountain of Silver Could Conquer the Whole World: Potosi and the Political Economy of Underdevelopment, 1545–1800.” Journal of Philosophical Economics IV (2010): 58–103. ——. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2015. Robbins, Nicholas A. Mercury Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Schwab, Klaus. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Great Britain: Portfolio, 2017. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. New York: Macmillan, 1978. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken, and David Schecter. “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to 1810.” Environmental History 15.1 (2010): 94–119. Tandeter, Enrique. Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosi, 1692–1826. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. TePaske, John J., and Kendall W. Brown. A New World of Gold and Silver. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Vilches, Elvira. New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Sebastián Figueroa

Monoculture Introduction In 2014, the documentary film Plantar pobreza. El negocio forestal en Chile (Planting Poverty. The Forest Business in Chile, 2014), by the newspaper Resumen, raised awareness of the environmental and social issues provoked by forest plantations in Chile, one of the countries with the largest expanse of pine and eucalyptus in South America. With a straight-forward approach that includes data research and multiple interviews with experts, conservationists, and community advocates, the film shows monocultural forests to provoke not only biodiversity loss in native ecosystems but also to further precariousness in the communities that inhabit them, thus questioning the alleged ecological and economic benefits of the forest industry. The film also depicts the increasingly troublesome relationship between the State and Indigenous communities, who experience the expansion of the forest industry as an iteration of historical colonialism in neoliberal clothes. Plantar pobreza is one of the first serious attempts to dissect the impact of forest plantations in Chile, which, after neoliberal reforms implemented at gunpoint by the 1973–1989 dictatorship, became a global exporter of wood and pulp. However, as the documentary hints at, Chile’s forest boom responds to historical processes of “accumulation by dispossession,” to use David Harvey’s conceptualization of primitive accumulation, of Indigenous peoples and their natural environments.1 These acts of appropriation and exploitation, in turn, can be traced back to the colonial and postcolonial periods, creating thus a continuity between deforestation and monocultures. Indeed, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Chile’s forests from the southern frontier, originally territory of the Mapuche people, suffered rampant exploitation by the colonizers, resulting in widespread deforestation that eventually led to the introduction of pine and eucalyptus as a way to restore forest areas. It is important to note that this ecological transformation of the southern frontier has been a major topic in literary and environmental discourses from Chile since the nineteenth century, and especially in recent decades with the rise of Mapuche poetry —the Indigenous group most affected by forest exploitation. In this context, the work of Mapuche-Huilliche poet Jaime Luis Huenún offers a unique opportunity to examine

 Harvey defines accumulation by dispossession as a “new round of enclosure of the commons” by private hands backed by state powers that became increasingly salient after 1973 with the liberalization of the market. Harvey distinguishes Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation” as a “whole series of violent and episodic struggles” to open a “path” for the expanded reproduction capital, while accumulation by dispossession “disrupts and destroys a path already opened up,” thus showing the cannibalistic tendency of capitalism (Harvey 147: 162). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-020

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the historical background of monocultural forests, thus shedding light on the ecological and symbolic functioning of monocultural systems at large.2 In his landmark book Reducciones (Reductions), Huenún explores the destruction of the Valdivian temperate rainforests and the cultural and ecological practices of the Mapuche-Huilliche people, a process of accumulation by dispossession which set the conditions for the appropriation of the southern frontier and the massive growth of monocultural forests. Focusing on Huenún’s poetry and the development of the forest industry in Chile, I argue that monocultural systems are not just a mode of production, but a colonial strategy for imposing ethnocentric and anthropocentric ways of looking at the world through frontier appropriation. I draw here on the work of Indian scholar and food activist Vandana Shiva (2014 [1993]), who understands monocultures not just as just a farming practice, but a mindset predicated on the imposition of ecological and symbolic regimes onto Indigenous communities. Considering the case of pine and eucalyptus plantations in Chile, I also argue that the monocultural mind expand across the world through what Jason W. Moore (2000) calls “commodity frontier,” which means, rather than the appropriation of new territories, the creation of new ecological and symbolic regimes in which nature appears as a mere resource for the reproduction of capital. In the first part of the chapter, I begin by providing a broad definition of monoculture as both a mode of production and a political ideology that seeks to eliminate alternative ways of relating to the environment. In the second part, I situate the current forest boom in Chile within a broader historical milieu, thereby demonstrating that the ecological impacts of intensive monoculture are related to colonialism as well as neoliberalism. In the final section, I return to the poetry of Jaime Huenún to study the dispossession of the Huilliche people that led to the deforestation of the southern frontier, showing how monocultural systems, while they may be imposed onto Indigenous communities by powerful entities like the State or forest companies, cannot completely erase alternative forms of interacting with the forests.

Monocultural Systems Monoculture, from the Greek μόνος, monos, meaning “one, single, alone,” is the farming of a single crop or livestock in a tightly controlled environment for commercial purposes. This means that all aspects of a monocultural system, namely enclosures, water irrigation, fertilizers, and control of diseases, are designed toward the optimization of crop yield (Freedman 2021: 2931). In fact, a main tenet of every monoculture is the exclusion of undesired species, like weeds, insects or fungi, which can compete with or affect the growth of the desired crop (Allaby 2019). These undesired species

 The Huilliche people, who belong to the Mapuche macro-ethnic group, inhabit the southern part of the ancestral territory from Valdivia to Chiloe.

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are removed by hand or through the use of pesticides, but genetic manipulation of the desired crop to be tolerant to these poisons, or to grow faster or stronger or better in quality as in the case of transgenic rice or apples, is also a common strategy in monocultural farms. Monocultures became the world’s dominant method of farming in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries thanks to the technological modernization of food and forest production to supply the demands of an ever-expanding population (Daintith and Martin 2010: 19). The introduction of transgenic seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides during the so–called Green Revolution (1940–1970) and the introduction of financial logics in the countryside by neoliberal reforms (1970–2000) were instrumental for the expansion of monocultural farms in new natural frontiers, especially in Latin American countries such as Mexico and Chile (Shiva 1993 [1991]). However, monocultures quickly proved to be devastating for native environments. Apart from provoking soil erosion, water depletion, and biodiversity loss, monocultural systems impact heavily on social-natural relations, destroying traditional farming practices. In countries where transgenic monocultures are massive, as in the case of transgenic soy in Argentina, use of pesticides has also been linked to increasing rates of cancer, malformations, and abortions among local communities (Barruti 2016: 5). While monocultures are often linked to food production, monocultural forests are spread all over the world to supply the raw materials for the lumber and pulp industries, among other sectors like biofuels, food, and medicine (i.e., oil palm). This is not the only use of monocultural forests. As the case of Chile illustrates, they have also been widely used to “restore” deforested areas as well as “green lungs” for urban settings. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), for instance, has been promoting since the nineties the expansion of tree-farming across the world as a means of combating climate change and deforestation (Muzio 1998: 280). The claim behind this endeavor is that all trees are equal, which means eliminating any qualitative distinction between native forests and monocultures. Yet, a monoculture is not a forest. As Peter Wohlleben (2016) has argued in The Hidden Life of Trees, a forest is a multispecies ecosystem where different forms of life are interconnected, while monocultural forests are uniform, fragmented plantations where there is no room for biological diversity. Actually, more than forests, they resemble “lumber factories and warehouses for raw material” instead of “complex habitats for thousands of species” (Wohlleben 2016: 198). Reflecting on the difference between native forests and monocultures but in a postcolonial context, Vandana Shiva (2014 [1993]) argues that native forests are usually a source of food for Indigenous people, who often do not see forestry disconnected from agriculture. In contrast, monocultural forests are artificially separated from food production by scientific forestry “on the basis of the separate commodity markets to which they supply raw materials” (Shiva 2014: 84). In this fashion, monocultural forests affect traditional farming practices as well as food security in general. Now, the separation responds to the principle of biological uniformity that governs monocultural forests, where everything that is useless may be discarded to enhance the grow of the desired

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species. This goes against the principle of interdependence of the forest, in which everything may be useful for the other species. As a result, monocultural forests become more like a factory of trees that needs to be externally managed, creating competition and dispensability where before there was symbiosis and creativity. Shiva claims that the ways in which Western scientific forestry and agriculture have been imposed onto Indigenous communities in postcolonial contexts demonstrate that monocultures are not just a farming practice, but a mindset – a “monoculture of the mind” – predicated on the false imperialist premise that Western knowledge, despite being locally and culturally specific-that is, predominantly patriarchal, white, and European-, is a universal knowledge that can be applied everywhere. Using the example of the region of Punjab, where the suicide rate among peasants rose significantly after the Green Revolution, the Indian intellectual shows how the introduction of a market of transgenic seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides by food corporations resulted in a loss of biodiversity and debt among farmers, who suddenly were no longer able to grow traditional seeds that had been available to them for hundreds of years. The Green Revolution was thus less a program of modernization than the expression of a colonial enterprise to exclude “other knowledge systems” and thus create an “exclusive monopoly” over food production (Shiva 2014: 83). In another important essay about seed patents, Shiva (2000) argues that global corporations such as Monsanto are today branching out beyond food to establish monopolies in such vital areas as the pharmaceutical and energy sector, thereby putting into crisis the very sustenance of life, especially for poor and Indigenous communities. Shiva’s concept of “monoculture of the mind” can be applied to discuss cultural uniformization more broadly, particularly in the context of globalization of the market economy. Arguably, one of globalization’s main tenets has been the destruction of local cultural manifestations to adopt modern Western ways of production and being. More specifically, theorists speak of “global monoculture” to refer to the Americanization of culture across the world and the lack of alternative ways of thinking after the collapse of State socialism in 1989 (Morimoto 2019; Madsen 1993). In contrast to truly intercultural or multicultural societies, in which different races, languages, cultures, and beliefs interact, a monocultural society would be one based on the exclusion of cultural differences, notably linguistic ones (Deverson and Kennedy 2005). At the same time, market assimilation of ‘multiculturalism’ under identity politics has been linked to increased ghettoization in diverse societies, so monoculture may well be linked to neoliberalism, which is about accommodating differences to the market in the form of increased and more diverse customer profiles, rather than to account for real difference in the form of political action (Gielen and Haq 2020: 13). One can locate the roots of this understanding of monoculture in Herbert Marcuse’s analysis of the advanced industrial society as a one-dimensional society, where critical thinking is only allowed within the limits of the capitalist status quo (2007 [1964]). Moreover, Marcuse suggests that industrial society, by virtue of the way it negates capitalism and demands acceptance of its principles and institutions, “tends to be totalitarian”

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(Marcuse 2007: 5). Monoculture, in this fashion, may designate a social system predicated upon the elimination of differences that can oppose the expansion and stability of the system itself, be they plants, peoples, cultures, or even ideas. Now, considering the way that monocultures work, I argue that their historical roots may be found in the colonial plantation as a system of food production also predicated upon the subordination of others (Sapp Moore et al. 2019). Despite their structural differences, chiefly the enslavement of people within an imperialist framework, both forest monocultures and the plantation use similar strategies to impose the intensive farming of single crops for commercial purposes onto indigenous territories: appropriation of lands, simplification of local ecologies, destruction of native forms of production and relations, and discipline of human populations, both native and transported, to work on those plantations (Haraway and Tsing 2019, 6). Monocultures are thus a key aspect of the “Plantationocene,” a concept advanced by Donna Haraway and Anna L. Tsing to situate the slave plantation as “the model and motor” of the Anthropocene, or the geological epoch of the humans, and to make visible the geographies of racialized labor created by imperialism that may remained concealed in discussions about climate change (Haraway 2015: 162). As I show in the following section, plantations of pine and eucalyptus in southern Chile are monocultural systems deeply imbricated with the Plantationocene understood as a colonial enterprise of environmental transformation on a global scale. At the same time, the particular historical conditions in which the forest industry developed in Chile, shifting from internal colonialism to State-planned developmentalism to neoliberalism, shows how monocultures can move across different political agendas in order to eliminate alternative thinking and impose themselves as a superior system of producing, thinking, and relating to the environment.

Pine and Eucalyptus: Frontier Monocultures Plantations of pine (Pinus radiata) and eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus) are a prime example of monocultural forests in southern Chile. These native species from North America and Australia, respectively, are characteristically resilient trees that can grow in eroded soils and inhospitable environmental conditions, necessitating only 20 years to reach twenty-five meters in height, at which point they can be harvested and processed into lumber or pulp. This makes plantations of pine and eucalyptus not only a profitable industry, but also ideal replacements for exhausted forests. In fact, pine and eucalyptus were introduced to Chile in the first part of twentieth century to create a lumber and pulp industry as well as to take the pressure off native forests, which had been strikingly reduced since the colonization of the southern frontier by the State between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. This shows, following ecological historian Thomas Klubock, that pine and eucalyptus are “inextricably tied to

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the history of colonization [. . .] in the region known as la frontera” (Klubock 2014: 3). The “frontera” (frontier) designates roughly the region between the Biobío and Toltén rivers, although it may also be considered to include the region between the Valdivia River basin to the Chiloe archipelago, originally the territory of the Mapuche-Huilliche people. The “frontier” was coined by the Chilean elites in the mid-nineteenth century to appropriate the land and resources of the southern territories in order to solve a crisis of accumulation, reinventing Araucanía as a wild territory controlled by racially inferiors “Indians” with no real right over land (Pinto 2003: 133). Following Moore’s concept of commodity frontiers, Chile’s expansion to Araucanía in the nineteenth century thus followed capital’s need to expand to new natural frontiers, where it could find the energy -land, resources, food, labor force- to reproduce itself (Moore 2003). The occupation of the frontier materialized in 1860, when the Chilean State launched a large military campaign known as “Pacificación de la Araucanía” (“Pacification of Araucania”) to displace and, where necessary, exterminate the Indigenous people south of the Biobío River as well as appropriate their resources (Pineda 2014: 183). Simultaneously, the Chilean state launched an aggressive colonization program with German immigrants, who settled mostly in Huilliche territory between Valdivia and Puerto Montt. While the dispossessed Mapuche people were being resettled in small lands called “reductions,” the Chilean state gave substantial portions of the expropriated lands to private companies, who enclosed the territories and burned the forests to build wood mills and crop fields (Manuschevich et al. 2020: 213). According to Federico Albert, a German-born conservationist and creator of the first national forest reserves in Chile, between 1850 and 1914 the forests in Chile reduced from twenty-eight million hectares to only fifteen million due to fires and logging (Otero 2006: 117). This number was to plummet even further in the following decades with the development of the timber and pulp industry. The result was the endangerment and extinction of native trees such as alerce or lahuan (Fitzroya cupressoides), a long-lived conifer native of the Andean mountains so intensely exploited, and even used as currency, that it practically disappeared from the ecosystems of Valdivia. In response to the critical condition of native forests, the Chilean State eventually introduced later on multiple regulations on burning and logging to stop deforestation, including the 1931 Ley de Bosques and the creation of national reserves such as Parque Nacional Conguillío in Araucanía in 1950 and the Parque Nacional Alerce Costero in Valdivia in 1987. However, these regulations were implemented not just to counter deforestation, but also to enforce authority over a frontier territory that the State continued to consider a “wild West” (Klubock 2014: 4). During these years, the State recovered vast portions of forests from private hands and transformed them into public land, prosecuting illegal exploitation by peasants and Indigenous communities while also pushing for the creation of a forest industry based on Monterey pine and, later on, eucalyptus. The boom of the forest industry in Chile officially began during the military dictatorship (1973–1989), when the government led by Augusto Pinochet dismantled the

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Agrarian Reform sought by previous governments and gave massive public land to forest companies like Celco, CMPC, and Mininco. The military government then introduced radical free-market policies to booster the forest industry, like the Decree No. 701 of 1974, which created massive tax breaks for forest companies (Manuschevich et al. 2020: 211). Forestry was also marketed as a form of green neoliberalism, where small farmers and rural communities would associate with big firms to reforest the eroded landscape of the south. The harvest of one million hectares in 1979 and the rapid economic growth of the sector in the eighties led some to quickly speak of another “Chilean miracle” of the dictatorship, aside from the economic one engineered by the “Chicago Boys” (Klubock 2014: 240). However, this boom was predicated on the availability of cheap forest resources and inexpensive labor force as a result of the violence of the dictatorship. After the military regime, the center-left coalition that governed Chile between 1990 and 2010 introduced important environmental regulations for the forest sector and returned small portions of the expropriated lands to Indigenous communities, but kept the model intact, introducing new stimuli for commercial forestry and other extractive industries like hydroelectricity and salmon farming in zones not yet commodified, such as Patagonia. In this fashion, the boom of the forest industry not only persisted across political changes but reinforced neoliberal policies and State power in the southern frontier. Despite the continuous boom of the sector, forest plantations have proved to have devastating effects on native environments and Indigenous communities. Pine and eucalyptus are famous not only for growing fast, but also for using large quantities of water and returning little nutrients to the soil, which dries up rivers and eradicates other plants and fauna, thus producing green deserts as seen in Figure 1. Genetic uniformity also makes plantations of pine and eucalyptus highly vulnerable to plagues, requiring the widespread spraying of chemical pesticides that poison watersheds, crops, and people. Furthermore, the occurrence of fires has increased exponentially since the 2000s in the regions most affected by forest plantations. The 2017 mega-fire, for example, affected 518,174 ha and caused loss of human lives, destruction of villages, and terrible economic losses (Pliscoff et al. 2017). Plantations of pines and eucalyptus also show how neoliberalism plays out very differently in rural and Indigenous communities. Instead of bolstering progress, the regions with the greatest number of plantations, especially Araucanía, exhibit some of the highest rates of poverty and unemployment in the country. Furthermore, forest regions endure several socioecological challenges, such as wildfires, water depletion, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and racism. This shows how monocultural systems, at the same time as they are the outcome of industrial capitalism and the market economy, are tied to historical forms of colonialism in Indigenous territories. This is one of the premises of Jaime Huenún’s Reducciones, to which I turn now in order to examine how poetry has imagined the relation between colonialism and devastation of native ecologies and landscapes, and opening historical forces that have remained underground but now push to reach the surface.

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Figure 1: Example of clear-cutting in Biobío, Chile. https://resumen.cl/articulos/plantaciones-forestalesnuevo-estudio-recopila-evidencia-sobre-efecto-negativo-en-suministro-de-agua-de-cuencas. (Accessed 14 April 2023).

Jaime Luis Huenún: Reductions and Deforestation Deforestation was an important topic in Chilean literature from early on. Nineteenthcentury travelers and writers such as Vicente Pérez Rosales, who led the German colonization in the south, and Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, who studied meticulously Chile’s natural resources, warned about the negative impact that the burning of forests would have on the environment and urged for forest regulations. Despite the creation of the first natural reserves, Pablo Neruda’s poem “Oda a la erosión en la provincia de Malleco” from 1956 harshly criticized the deforestation in Araucanía, calling out Chileans and Indigenous peoples to come together for the restoration of the landscape of the south. In his 1970 essay La sobrevivencia de Chile (The Survival of Chile), environmental activist and writer Rafael Elizalde Mac-Clure denounced the “sylvophobia” of Chilean people, arguing that the clearing of forests to make room for urbanization in the sixties was the continuation of the colonial enterprise to erase the forest as a way to eliminate Indigenous people. In this way, deforestation has been critically present in the imaginaries of development and modernization in Chile, where the perception of forest loss, as Victoria Saramago (2020) has brilliantly studied in a broader Latin American context, generated nostalgic fictional discourses about nature as well as early forms of environmental awareness among authors. More recently, Mapuche poetry has offered an Indigenous perspective on the problem of deforestation in a context of unprecedented monocultural expansion.

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Poets like Elicura Chihauilaf, Leonel Lienlaf, Jaime Huenún, and Roxana Miranda Rupailaf, among others, would draw on oral traditions and rites from Mapuche culture to decolonize literary discourse and reconnect with the lost ecologies of the Wallmapu, or the ancestral Mapuche territory (Sepúlveda 2021). In this context, Jaime Huenún’s landmark collection of poetry Reducciones (2012) stands out for its ability to bring to light Indigenous perspectives on the environment that have been suppressed by centuries of colonization. Composed as a collage of poems, historical prose, and archival documents, the book is written, as Sergio Mansilla (2012) has put it, “with the materials that conform the obliterated history of the systematic extermination of the Indigenous culture of the Southern Patagonia territories of the continent” (Mansilla 2012: 8). At the same time, one of Reducciones’ central theme is the recuperation of the ancestral memory of the Mapuche-Huilliche people through poetry, which is not understood just as a literary genre, but as a language of the earth that speaks through generations notwithstanding the ruins that history has left behind. One of the forms of such language is the Spanish “champurriado,” a mixture of Castilian and Mapudungun, in which some of the poems are written. The term, often used as an insult, designates people of mixed race as well as everything that is “impure”. However, Huenún’s “español champurriado” makes way for an intercultural way of telling the history of colonization of the Huilliche territory in which the language of the colonized blends with the language of the colonizer, unearthing both memories of violence as well as complex cultural identities directly connected to the forests of the south. In the opening pages of Reducciones, readers are confronted with a gloomy chronicle of the burning of the forests of Characahuin, the original name of the MapucheHuilliche community where the industrial city of Osorno is located today: desde la llegada del colono europeo, la ciudad de Osorno se levantó de las cenizas a que los roces de fuego redujeron los bosques y los sueños de Characahuin [. . .] abrir a incendio y hacha la húmeda e impenetrable selva del pellín y el laurel, chamuscar el pelaje pardo del pudú, derretir los pequeños cuernos del huemul con las brasas del coigüe, fueron algunos de los afanes que convirtieron los campos de los huilliches en haciendas y llanuras productivas. Ahora en las grandes praderas de los fundos osorninos pastan las vacas Holstein y los rojos toros de Hereford (Huenún 2012: 23). [Since the arrival of the European colonizer, the city of Osorno arose from the ashes to which the fire reduced the forests and dreams of Characahuin [. . .] to open by burn and axe the humid and impenetrable jungle of pellín and laurel, to scorch the brown fur of the pudú, to melt the little horns of the huemul with the embers from the coigüe, those were some of the efforts that converted the fields of the Huilliche in productive haciendas and grasslands. Now in the large prairies of the Osorno farms pasture the Holstein cows and the red Hereford Bulls.]

This brief chronicle describes the massive environmental transformation experienced in the Huilliche territory after the European colonization, which used slash and burn techniques to open land for European cattle in place of native livestock. The fragment also marks the textual mixture of the entire book: poems, chronicles, and archival

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documents that voice the concern not only over the violence inflicted by Europeans and Chilean against the Mapuche-Huilliche people, but also the loss of forests and ecologies that played an essential role in their cultural identity. This becomes more visible in the poem “Seis (Campamento de Pampa Shilling),” in which the poet writes: Aquí, henos aquí ya viudos de nuestros dioses [. . .] frente al brasero quemamos lengua y memoria [. . .] ¿para quién brilla el laurel? Nadie me responde, nadie. Solo estoy ante la noche (Huenún 2012: 113). [Here, here we are now widowed from our gods [. . .] in front of the embers we burn language and memory [. . .] To whom the laurel shine? [. . .] Nobody answers me, nobody. Alone I am before the night.]

Here, the native laurel (Laurelia sempervirens) from the Valdivian temperate forests considered sacred by the Huilliche people, symbolizes the profound connection with the forests of the south, a connection seemingly lost due to proscription of Indigenous beliefs and imposition of Christianism during colonization. This has left the poet, who represents the person that asks the fundamental questions for the community, in a state of abandonment and loneliness in front of the brazier, in the middle of the night. And yet, language and memory are still there to invoke the bond between the laurel and the community. In this fashion, the poet’s voice emerges from the ashes of colonialism to reconstruct, albeit precariously, the identities and ecologies of the Huilliche people. A central theme in Huenún’s book, as the title indicates, is the “reduction” as a place where the Mapuche-Huilliche people, despite racism and violence, devise ways to reconstruct their history, culture, and ecologies. Many poems draw on the memories of Huenún’s family in the Franciscan mission of Quilacahuín, one of the “reductions” established by the Chilean State to relocate the Mapuche-Huilliche communities dispossessed during the occupation. As we also learn from the poems and chronicles inserted into the book, these “reductions” did not only mean territorial relocation, but the devastation of Indigenous cultures. Indeed, the Chilean elite promoted European migration as a way, as Huenún bluntly puts it, to “improve the race” (mejorar la raza; Huenún 2012: 25). With the arrival of hundreds of German families to southern Chile between 1850 and 1910, so did land enclosures and expropriations: “los altos hombres

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rubios uncidos al arado, la violencia y la ley, cercaron con fiereza los terrenos que el gobierno había estampado a favor de sus nombres” (the tall blond men yoked to the plough, the violence and the law, enclosed with ferocity the territories that the government had stamped in favor of their names) (Huenún 2012: 24). Driven out by “rifle” from their villages, the Mapuche settled in distant areas where they could be at least safe: las estrellas dejaron de alumbrarnos la sangre de repente, y tuvimos que ocultarnos como zorros en montañas y barrancos (Huenún 2012: 105). [the stars quitted illuminating our blood suddenly, and we had to hide like foxes in mountains and cliffs.]

In the reductions, the Mapuche were subjected to other forms of racism and violence such as the imposition of Spanish, “la lengua que devora bosques” (the tongue that devours forests; Huenún 2012: 47). The “reduction” was thus an outright project of cultural genocide with the aim of creating a new frontier for capital (Antimil and Olate 2020). At the same time, Huenún finds in popular and ancestral practices the traces and clues that allow him to reconstruct, albeit precariously, the history, culture, and ecology of his people. In this sense, Huenún’s Reducciones conveys a form of “environmentalism of the poor,” as Joan Martínez Alier and Ramachandra Guha (2002) label popular forms of defending the environment that do not draw on academic or European environmentalist discourses. Indeed, the oral stories told by the poet’s grandmother, traditional activities such as hunting in the “monte” (forest) and fishing in the coast (Huenún 2012: 60), and celebrations like the nguillatun, a traditional prayer ceremony held during harvest time, lead to the rediscovery of the Mapuche-Huilliche culture and the environment: “los huilliches alzan sus ruegos rodando hacia los arcos de la sangre y la memoria” (the Huilliche raise their prayers, rolling towards the arches of the blood and memory; Huenún 2012: 27).3 This is particularly visible in “Ceremonia del amor,” perhaps the poem that best exemplifies the “champurriado” language, where Huenún mediates the violence of the conquest through the natural cycles, shaping the relationship between trees, animals, and water as different forms of sexual intercourse: Los árboles anoche amáronse indios: mañío e ulmo, pellín y hualle, tineo y lingue nudo a nudo amáronse

 “[T]he Huilliche raise their prayers, rolling towards the arches of the blood and memory.”

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[. . .] hasta el amor despertar de las aves ya arrulladas por las plumas de sus propios mesmos amores trinantes (Huenún 2012: 56) [The trees last night to each other made Indian love: mañío and ulmo, pellín and hualle, tineo and lingue knot to knot they made love [. . .] until the love woke up from the birds already lulled by the feathers of their very own chirping loves]

In the poem, the forest -and nature more broadly- is represented as an entanglement of trees that made love and also are born out of love. This love, in which Indigenous people co-participate, is perverted by the intervention of “huincas” (foreigners) in the native forest, which is described in the poem as a form of raping: “violadas somos aguas Rahue” (raped water we are Rahue4). However, the third part of the poem shows how the pain inflicted by colonial violence does not lead to ruination, but to the persistence of the Huilliche culture through the cycles of nature and love: Huilliche amor, anoche amaron más a plena chola arboladura, a granado cielo indio perpetuo (Huenún 2012: 57). [Huilliche love, last night they made love yet again in broad chola grove, in dark red perpetual Indian sky.]

In this way, the poem envisions a form of cultural and ecological reconstruction, not as a form of a naïve reencounter with something pure or virgin located in the past, but as an embrace with the history of violence through affect and poetry. Indeed, the odd but exquisite music of the poem, in which Mapudungun vocabulary blends with Castilian phonetics from the epoch of the Conquest, creates a sensorial effect that supplements the archival drive of Huenún’s book, thus transforming the poem into an affective device (Bortignon 2017). In this way, the poem invites to link poetry to the environment in which history takes place, allowing us to read the book as a whole as a critique of deforestation from the ruins of colonialism.

 The Mapudungun “Rahue” (lit. “place of cay”) refers to the Rahue River in the Osorno province, in which Huilliche people originally settled.

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By reading Reducciones as an ecological poetics, I argue that Huenún’s poetry makes it possible to connect with popular and indigenous forms of environmentalism which recognize that, despite the ongoing violence, one can find threads and alliances in the forests of the southern frontier, which monocultures cannot erase completely, to create an ethics of survival and coexistence. This is the reason why Huenún emphasizes in different poems that nature is not an exuberant, abundant or mysterious dimension of the world, but rather a “casa de los pobres” (house of the poor; Huenún 2012, 101), where the most vulnerable, the displaced and/or exterminated, the wretched of the earth, can sustain life once again.

Conclusion: Resistance Huenún’s Reducciones offers a singular route for reconnecting with the native ecologies lost to monocultural forests in southern Chile through poetry, following the tendency in Mapuche poetry and art to create environmentally conscious literary texts. This tendency has been accompanied in recent years by a strong political and environmental movement seeking to denounce the harsh conditions of life amongst the Indigenous communities located next to forest plantations as well as to recuperate the Mapuche cultural order. Organizations such as the Consejo de Todas las Tierras and Coordinadora Arauco Malleco, among others, aim to recover lands appropriated by the Chilean state, both pacifically and by force, as a form of resistance towards plantation capitalism. In this context, it is interesting to see how fire, historically linked to the destruction of native ecosystems, can become a weapon against monocultural expansion. Indeed, some political organizations aiming to recuperate land from the forest companies use the burning of machinery and lumber as means to sabotage monocultural plantation forestry. In response to these acts of resistance, the Chilean state has recurrently imposed a state of exception in the territory, particularly since 1996, considered the inaugural year of the so-called “Conflicto Mapuche” (Mapuche conflict). The main results of these policies have been human rights violations, police corruption, and the radicalization and fragmentation of groups in favor or against the Mapuche cause (Rodríguez and Vergara 2018). Moreover, the continuity of such repressive politics between the dictatorship and the following “democratic” governments proves that the condition of possibility of monocultural forests is violence against people and their environments. The green uniform of the Chilean police or carabineros, massively deployed in the Wallmapu, emerges thus as an extension of the “green deserts” that constitute forest plantations, showing the real face of “green neoliberalism” in the south. In conclusion, monocultures of pine and eucalyptus are one of the most prominent faces of the continuance between dictatorship and democracy as well as colonialism and neoliberalism in Chile. This is even reflected in the current Constitution of 1980,

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created during the dictatorship by a sham referendum to favor capital over people. In this constitution, the exploitation of vital resources like water is constitutionally recognized, thus entering in contradiction with public use of water (Art. 19). This has permitted abusive use of waterways by forest and agricultural companies even despite the extreme drought experienced in recent years in the country. The Constitutional Convention created in 2020 after the social revolt of October 18, 2019, which for the first time in Chile’s history enjoys a comprehensive presence of Indigenous peoples, attempted in 2022 to replace Pinochet’s constitution with a new text that consecrates water as a human right, limiting in this manner its excessive use to grow export commodities such as pine and eucalyptus (Art. 140, 48). The new constitution also declared forests a common good and exhorts the State to preserve them for future generations (Art. 134). Unfortunately, the project of new constitution was massively rejected in the referendum held on September 4, 2022, after lack of support from the government and an aggressive right-wing campaign of misinformation which especially questioned rights of autonomy for the Indigenous people of the country (Vergara 2022). Yet, the experience of political organization for the defense of the environment may have created an opportunity for the future to think of new ways to relate to the environment that could destabilize the totalitarian drive of forest capitalism in Chile before it’s too late.

Works cited Alier, Joan Martínez. Environmentalism of the Poor. A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002. Allaby, Michael. “Simplicity and diversity.” Basics of Environmental Science. New York: Routledge, 2000. 183–187. Antimil, Jaime, and Aldo Olate. "El escenario actual de la lengua mapuche en un territorio. Estudio de caso desde la historia y la sociolingüística". Nueva Revista del Pacífico 72 (2020): 116–143. Bortignon, Martina. “Reposicionar al pueblo expuesto: Reducciones de Jaime Huenún como archivo de sensaciones”. Taller de Letras 61 (2017): 29–42. Barruti, Soledad. Mal comidos: Cómo la industria alimentaria argentina nos está matando. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2016. Convención Constitucional de Chile. Propuesta de Constitución Política de la República de Chile de 2022. Santiago: Convención Constitucional de Chile. Daintith, John, and Elizabeth Martin. “Monoculture.” A Dictionary of Science. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2010: 19. Deverson, Tony, and Graeme Kennedy. “Monoculture.” The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195584516.001. 0001/m-en_nz-msdict-00001-0034362?rskey=D1a50M&result=12 (14 April 2023). Freedman, Bill. “Monoculture.” The Gale Encyclopedia of Science. Eds. Katherine H. Nemeh and Jacqueline L. Longe. Farmington Hills, Gale, 2021: 2931. Gielen, Pascal, and Nav Haq. “Introduction.” The Aesthetics of Ambiguity: Understanding and Addressing Monoculture. Amsterdam: Valiz. 5–19.

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Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–65. Haraway, Donna, andAnna Tsing. “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing.” https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/ Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2019 (6 June 2022). Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Huenún, Jaime. Reducciones. Santiago: LOM, 2012. Klubock, Thomas Miller. La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Madsen, Richard. “Global Monoculture, Multiculture, and Polyculture.” Social Research 60.3 (1983): 493–511. Mansilla, Sergio. “Los archivos de la niebla (notas para leer Reducciones de Jaime Huenún)”. Reducciones by Jaime Huenún. Santiago, LOM, 2012: 7–19. Manuschevich, Daniela, Mel Gurr, and Carlos A. Ramirez-Pascualli. “Nostalgia for la montaña: The Production of Landscape at the Frontier of Chilean Commercial Forestry.” Journal of Rural Studies 80 (2020): 211–221. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Mencer: Ñi Pewma. Dir. Francisco Huichaqueo. Chile, 2011. Moore, Jason. “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 23.3 (2000): 409–433. Morimoto, Lori. “From Imagined Communities to Contact Zones: American Monoculture in Transatlantic Fandoms.” Transatlantic Television Drama: Industries, Programs, Fans. Eds. Matt Hills, Michele Hilmes, and Roberta Pearson. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019: 273–290. Muzio, Gabriel. “FAO: Un nuevo juego ecológico. Contribución al debate sobre plantaciones de árboles.” La tragedia del bosque chileno. Santiago, Ocholibros, 1998: 279–284. Pineda, César Enrique. "Mapuche. El caso de la Coordinadora Arauco Malleco en lucha contra las compañías forestales en Chile". Territorios en disputa. Despojo capitalista, luchas en defensa de los bienes comunes naturales y alternativas emancipatorias para América Latina. Comps. Claudia Composto and Mina Lorena Navarro. Mexico City: Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2014: 180–202. Pinto, Jorge. La formación del Estado y la nación y el pueblo mapuche. De la inclusión a la exclusión. Santiago de Chile: Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, 2003. Plantar pobreza. El negocio forestal en Chile. Dir. Resumen. Chile, 2014. Pliscoff, Patricio, Mauricio Folchi, Enrique Aliste, Daniela Cea, and Javier A. Simonetti. “Chile Mega-Fire 2017: An Analysis of Social Representation of Forest Plantation Territory.” Applied Geography 119 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2020.102226 Rodríguez, Ana, and Pablo Vergara. La frontera: crónica de la Araucanía rebelde. Santiago de Chile: Catalonia, Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2015. Sapp Moore, Sophie, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gómez, and Gregg Mitman. “Plantation Legacies.” Edge Effects. The Plantationocene Series. https://edgeeffects.net/plantation-legacies-plantationocene. Madison: University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2019 (6 June 2022). Saramago, Victoria. Fictional Environments. Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020. Sepúlveda, Magda. “Mapuche Poetry: Self Definitions and Representation of the Chilean Cultures”. A History of Chilean Literature. Ed. Ignacio López Calvo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021: 296–316.

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Shiva, Vandana. “‘Life Inc.’: Biology and the Expansion of Capitalist Markets.” Sostenible 2 (2000): 79–92. Shiva, Vandana. “Monocultures of the Mind.” The Vandana Shiva Reader. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014. Vergara, Camila. “Chile’s Rejection.” Sidecar. New Left Review, September 09, 2022, https://newleftreview. org/sidecar (14 April 2023). Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees. Vancouver and Berkeley: Greystone Books, 2016.

Victoria Saramago

Oil Introduction Scholars working on oil in the context of the emerging field of the energy humanities have often commented on how ubiquitous yet seemingly invisible oil is in the cultural production of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.1 Oil is everywhere, from the cars we drive to the plastic that populates such a large portion of our lives; still, it has been predominantly overlooked in cultural criticism until recently.2 In this chapter, I investigate the cultural significance of oil in Latin American cultural production when it becomes meaningful precisely as it ceases to fuel the inner workings of modern life. I argue that a critique that displaces the use of oil as an energy source to focus instead on moments in which it appears in a state of idle potentiality offers alternative ways of configuring the place of oil in an Anthropocenic imagination.3 In order to do so, I start with an overview of scholarship on oil, then move to a reading of the availability of oil in Julio Cortázar’s short story “La autopista del sur” (The southern thruway, 1966) and its uncanny appearance in Júlio Bressane’s film A família do barulho (The Family of Disorder, 1970). Oil’s key presence on the global stage has been matched by a keen attention from scholars in the energy humanities, including the early formulation of a critical terminology related to the representation of oil in cultural objects as much as the imbrication of oil-fueled economies and the possibilities of cultural production. Already in 1992, Amitav Ghosh noted the relative absence of oil as a theme in twentieth-century

 Irme Szeman and Dominic Boyer note, in their introduction to Energy Humanities: An Anthology, that “access to and the struggle over energy have had [an evident] role in shaping modern geopolitics [. . .] What is less evident, however, is the degree to which the energy riches of the past two centuries have [. . .] impacted the imperatives of even those varied activities we group together under the term ‘culture’” (Szeman and Boyer 2017: 2).  For a recent study of cultural perspectives on plastic, see Caren Irr.  For an overview of debates on the Anthropocene, see the introduction to this volume. By an Anthropocenic imagination, I refer to the array of images that populate current views of the Great Acceleration in wide but recognizable ways. In parts of the Global South, megalopolises with skyscrapers and slums separated by long traffic jams have risen alongside large plantations fueled by agrochemicals and machinery. Images of burning rainforests—the Amazon being perhaps the most well-known example—are combined with the removal of vegetation and of people to establish mining sites, build dams, and make room for other extractive activities. The aerial views of a world dramatically transformed by humans, such as the ones produced by photographer and filmmaker Edward Burtynsky, have been a staple in the Anthropocenic imagination. The Great Acceleration refers to the period starting in the post-World War II and continuing to the present, which has brought about not only an exponential expansion of the human presence and impact on the planet, but also the geographical diversification of that impact. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-021

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novel writing in contrast to its ubiquity in modern life, while coining the term “petrofictions” to describe narrative works that addressed the impact of oil industry especially in the Global South. Almost two decades later, Patricia Yaeger (2011), borrowing from Fredric Jameson, proposed that an “energy unconscious,” which invites a reading of texts both as symbolic acts in Jamesonian terms but that also “have causalities outside (or in addition to) class conflict and commodity wars” (Yaeger 2011: 309). Concomitantly, influential contributions to a deeper understanding of the role of oil as an organizing force behind modern social structures were made by historians such as Timothy Mitchell and his “carbon democracy” (2011), which sheds light onto how coal and later oil triggered and subsequently restricted modern democracies under the assumption of an unending cheap energy, or Andreas Malm (2016) in his concept of “fossil capital,” referring to how the adoption of fossil fuels in the British industrial revolution allowed for the reorganization of labor dynamics in modern capitalism.4 In subsequent years, the groundwork laid out by Ghosh and Yaeger continued to expand through the work of Imre Szeman, who coined the term “petrocultures,” an expanded version of “petrofictions,” and tackled the pressing issue of how the modern hegemony of oil can translate into cultural and literary analysis. Szeman notes that, because oil “is a resource whose consumption is disassociated from its extraction” (Szeman 2019: 229), “the importance of fossil fuels in defining modernity has stood in inverse relationship to their presence in our cultural and social imaginaries” (Szeman 2019: 227, Szeman’s emphasis). Focusing on consumption and its depictions in twentieth-century American culture, Stephanie LeMenager (2014) defines as “petrotopias” the now all-toofamiliar landscapes structured by highways and parking lots, a “petroleum utopia” meant to make the movement of persons and goods flow seamlessly across space. Writing about sites of production, on the other hand, Jennifer Wenzel (2020) identifies a reconfiguration of the conventions of magical realism in portions of the Global South heavily impacted by oil extraction as a “petro-magic-realism,” a way of making “legible the all-tooreal effects of petro-magic—read here as a mode of violence that mystifies through the seduction of petro-promise” (Wenzel 2020: 122). These are but some of the scholars who have been underscoring an often unsuspected yet pervasive correlation between some of the most iconic works, genres, and cultural expressions of the past century and the invisible force of oil in reshaping spatial, social, labor, and environmental organization. Wenzel’s petro-magic-realism, in fact, draws not just upon the Latin American magical realism whose most recognizable name is Gabriel García Márquez, but also upon Fernando Coronil and the Venezuelan intellectual and cultural tradition of reflecting on oil. Venezuela’s major oil reserves, which placed it in a unique economic and geopolitical position among South American countries, has inspired writers such as Arturo Uslar

 Such process has its basis, according to Malm, on a “fossil economy” defined by him as “an economy of self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels, and therefore generating a sustained growth in emissions of carbon dioxide” (Malm 2016: 20).

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Pietri to propose that the profits from Venezuelan oil ought to promote the country’s economic and social development through his famous motto “sembrar el petróleo” (“to seed the oil”).5 Decades later, Coronil characterized the petrodollar-fueled Venezuelan state as a magical entity capable of turning “its dominion over nature into a source of historical progress” (Coronil 1997: 389). More recently, studies by Rachel Price (2019) and Santiago Acosta (2020) have shed light onto the many connections between cultural trends such as abstract painting in and about Venezuela in the 1960s and 1970s and the country’s oil boom after the 1973 embargo, which led the price of Venezuelan oil to skyrocket.6 As “the main organizing force of the relations between society and nature” (Acosta 2020: 8), oil sponsored and impacted cultural production. Outside of Venezuela, Edith Negrín (2017) has traced a literary history of oil in Mexico across the twentieth century, which shows how Mexican and foreign authors approached the issue in connection with the country’s political history in the period, and with a keen attention to how oil impacted discourses of nationality.7 Through these and other examples, the contemporary Latin American scholarship on petrocultures has been excavating the larger archive of oil writing in the region, which ranges from Pablo Neruda’s famous denunciation of the Standard Oil Co. in South America, which arrived “con sus cheques y sus fusiles,/ con sus gobiernos y sus presos” (Neruda 1981: 164) (“Standard Oil arrived beforehand with its checks and its guns, / with its governments and its prisoners” [Neruda 2017: 81]), to the recent reenactment of an oil-fueled discourse of progress upon the discovery of offshore oil reserves off the coast of Brazil during the first government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. This retroactive gaze at a perhaps unsuspected literary and intellectual tradition on oil must also, I argue, take into consideration the many shapes and functions oil has assumed in the past century, as well as the place of oil in a larger critique of labor power and capitalist exploitation. If, according to Jason Moore (2016), the capitalist world-ecology is based on the concomitant appropriation of “cheap” nature and labor, then the energy generated by commodities such as oil is made akin to the energy generated by cheap or unpaid human labor.8 This interrelation becomes visible,

 In Uslar Pietri’s words, “[u]rge aprovechar la riqueza transitoria de la actual economía destructiva para crear las bases sanas y amplias y coordinadas de esa futura economía progresiva que será nuestra verdadera acta de independencia” (Uslar Pietri 2012: n.p.; “It is urgent to take advantage of the transitory wealth of the current destructive economy in order to create the healthy, comprehensive, and coordinated base of that future progressive economy that will be our true act of independence”). Translated by Laura Colaneri.  While Acosta investigates the impact of oil in the cultural industry and vice-versa, Price investigates the impact of energy-driven developmentalism in the work of Cubal visual artist Dolores Soldevilla.  For historical studies of the social impact of oil in Venezuela and Mexico, see, respectively, Miguel Tinker Salas and Germán Vergara.  According to Moore, “through this praxis [of nature externalization] capitalist and territorialist agencies seek to create new Natures as objects of power and production, and as new and expanded sources of unpaid work/energy” (Moore 2016: 112, Moore’s emphasis).

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for example, in Patricia Galvão’s Brazilian “proletarian novel” Parque Industrial (Industrial Park, 1933), whose proletarians, increasingly determined to stop being exploited by wealthy industrialists, at some point destroy one of their limousines as they scream: “Esta gasolina é o nosso sangue!” (Galvão 1933: 100) (“This gasoline is our blood!” [Galvão 1993: 78]). Through this convergence between blood and gasoline, this episode draws attention to labor power as a resource capable of generating the energy that will, just like oil, sustain the continued capitalist appropriation of resources in a version of what Kathryn Yusoff has called the “racialized equation of energy” (Yusoff 2018: 15).9 To bring to the fore these fleeting moments in which oil and its derivatives allow for a reconsideration of overlooked connections between natural resources and human bodies means to destabilize the easily assumed place of oil at the center of a technological imagination often perceived as disconnected from the human labor that makes it possible. In this vein, this chapter further disentangles writings on oil from both productivity and labor in order to explore alternative dynamics between oil-based energy and human bodies and affects. The atmosphere of political and cultural contestation of the 1960s and early 1970s, with its countercultural winds and renewed political imaginings of alternatives to the imperatives of capitalist productivity, offers a fertile ground to reconfigure the role and meaning of bodily and machinic energy expenditure or lack thereof, in light of alternative social and family formations. How does oil become culturally significant precisely as its presence and function no longer serves the modern addiction to fossil fuels that marks the Great Acceleration? A different environmental aesthetics of oil may emerge, for example, when oil is present yet remains unused in contrast to the fuel needed to keep human bodies working, as in Cortázar’s short story, or when the promise of oil riches does not go beyond the domestic space of a backyard. While the precarious attempts of survival in Cortázar’s story establish a contrast between oil energy and bodily energy, in Bressane’s film oil availability is provocatively integrated into a wider questioning of the heteronormative, bourgeois family. In both cases, the frictions between oil and human dramas lead to a breakdown of productivity-based understandings of energy that open up space for new social and affective ties, and that put in tense dialogue the unused presence of oil and a certain condition of idleness in which humans cannot or will not engage in economically productive activities. Produced in the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s, the two works are also, from a historical perspective, examples of the petro-imagination of the pre-1973 crisis, when oil production and availability had been experiencing a steady increase in different parts of the world. The 1973 oil embargo, imposed by members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries on a number of nations as a means of pressuring them to reconsider their support for Israel against Palestine in the Yom Kippur War,

 Yusoff locates in the beginning of early-modern slave trade the “conversion of inhumane slave energy into fuel” (Yusoff 2018: 14) for mines, sugar plantations and other, a conversion that, according to her, persists yet remains invisible in mainstream narratives on the Anthropocene.

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resulted in a sharp increase in oil prices that led to worldwide rationing. Mitchell shows, however, that the “energy crisis” of the period was in fact not a mere problem of supply and demand, but had a myriad of other causes, including misguided policies and collective panic. While excavating the causes of the crisis is beyond the scope of this chapter, the key point for the present discussion was that “[m]idle-class citizens faced the unfamiliar experience of a shortage of what had always been plentiful, anxiety over the future availability of an essential commodity, mile-long queues in competition with other consumers, and prices that increased almost by the day” (Mitchell 2011: 173). In contrast to this scenario, I argue that the two works approached in this chapter are typical examples of a period before the 1973 crisis, in which a reliable and increasing availability of fossil fuels was at the heart of economic growth. It is from this angle that these works, by showcasing instances in which oil is present but remains mostly unused, provide a critique of human productivity through characters that cannot or will not abide by its standards. Finally, a comparative reading of these two works also sheds light onto the difference between, in Amy Riddle’s words, “petrofiction as a literary theme and literary genre” (Riddle 2018: 420), the first of which analyzes “how oil is depicted in the content of the story” (Riddle 2018: 420), while the second is “more complicit with drawing oil from the content of the story to the organizing form of the novel” (Riddle 2018: 420). A família do barulho explores oil primarily as a theme while “La autopista del sur” is more in line with the latter, in which oil is rather the fundamental component making the whole structure of the highways and its traffic jams possible. Such difference is especially relevant for an analysis such as the one sketched out here, that proposes to excavate a tradition of cultural thinking of oil decades before terms such as “petrofiction” entered the current critical vocabulary on the issue, when heightened awareness of the global environmental impact of oil has been informing authors, public, and critics alike.10 By exploring the uncanniness and also the queerness of oil, Cortázar and Bressane are among the numerous authors who, in different scales, shed light onto the meaning and consequences of oil dependence.

“La Autopista Del Sur” Only recently has criticism on the works of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar started to focus more on the persistent presence of cars, airplanes, and other oil-intensive means of transportation in his oeuvre, as well and on technology more broadly.11 One

 This concern for investigating early modes of environmental thinking in the mid-twentiethcentury also informs my Fictional Environments, albeit with a different set of questions.  See, for example, articles on Cortázar’s work by Sarah Booker (2020) on technology with a focus on photography, Jack Martínez Arias (2015) on the competing protagonism between humans and cars in a

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his most celebrated works on the topic is “La autopista del sur,” first published in Todos los fuegos (1966).12 The story is set on the road that connects Fontainebleau to Paris when, in hot summer days, a mysterious and unending traffic jam keeps drivers stranded for weeks or maybe months, with barely any progress made. Unable to take their cars away from the road, they create alternative forms of social organization in order to secure food and water, to keep the weakest as safe as possible, and to develop unexpected yet transient bonds of friendship and affection, until the traffic jam suddenly dissolves and all can resume their regular lives. Interestingly, no gas stations or any other indication that gas may be needed appear in “La autopista del sur”—a notable omission in face of the struggle for survival and self-governance from human characters. While oil remains beyond the realm of basic necessities, this story foregrounds another type of fuel: the food and water that will keep the bodies of the characters running. In doing so, it brings to light the contrast between the persistent yet unused availability of oil and the precariousness of human bodies in their constant dependence on fuel to maintain the energy expenditure necessary for life. “La autopista del sur” follows, to a certain extent, the island outcast plot which, from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to the TV series Lost (2004–2010), focuses on individuals who arrive on islands devoid of white people (or real people, in the case of Lost) after surviving a naval or aerial disaster, and who must forge new forms of social organization and find new modes of survival. The characters stuck in Cortázar’s traffic jam, likewise, start to create groups and alliances and, in spite of the open hostility of nearby towns that keeps them circumscribed to the space of the highway, find people who can provide them with food and water.13 Their condition as highway outcasts, however, is fundamentally tied to their responsibility and attachment to their cars, which cannot be abandoned in the middle of the highway. Contrary to the ships of outcasts stories, which tend to sink or crash at the beginning of the plot to then fade away from the story, the presence of the car and its power of determining people’s lives is at the basis of the drama they face. In fact, the association between humans and cars is such that human characters, nameless, are identified by a combination of the car model they occupy and some general feature: “las dos monjas del 2HP, [. . .] la muchacha del Dauphine [. . .], [el] matrimonio del Peugeot 203” (Cortázar 2021: 707) (“the two nuns in the 2CV [. . .] the couple in the Peugeot 203 (behind the Marxist framework, Laureano Ralón on the issue of technique in Cortázar’s work, or Silvia Zangrandi (2012) on the space of the motorway.  Decades later, Cortázar and Carol Dunlop would return to the highway connecting Marseille to Paris in a meditation on the microcosmos of the highway as it relates to the illnesses of the authors. When Dunlop was already suffering from leukemia and shortly before the authors’ deaths, their slow travel through and appreciation of the highways and their paraderos, or resting areas, reinvents these spaces of displacement and movement as chronotopes of dwelling.  According to Martínez Arias, “[w]ithout moving, these machines allowed characters to acquire a certain autonomy and even some power of decision; but when they move, it is the flow of the traffic that regains total control” (Martínez Arias 2015: 223, my translation).

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girl’s Dauphine)” [Cortázar 1973: 3]), and so on. The human characters are, thus, existentially and circumstantially defined by their relationships to cars. While such dynamics might suggest a certain anthropomorphization of the cars, this is not what truly happens because the cars, in spite of being stranded on the highway, are not outcasts. They do not feel thirsty, nor do they suffer from the implacable heat of the first days and the following changes of temperatures. While “la vibración del sol sobre la pista y las carrocerías dilataba el vértigo hasta la náusea” (Cortázar 2021: 709) (“the sun’s vibration on the highway and cars pushed vertigo to the edge of nausea” [Cortázar 1973: 5]) and “se empezaba a sentir sed” (Cortázar 2021: 713) (“thirst was prevalent” [Cortázar 1973: 9]), the visible toll the situation takes on humans does not translate into mechanical failure, lack of gas, or any other ailment cars might face. On the contrary, “todo era olor a gasolina” (Cortázar 2021: 708) (“[a]ll was gasoline fumes” [Cortázar 1973: 4]). The only problems related to the cars happen when the lines move a few meters without all of its drivers being ready to drive, or when a man commits suicide and someone else needs to drive his car in order to avoid blocking one of the lanes. When the traffic jam finally dissipates, “[l]os autos corrían en tercera” (Cortázar 2021: 731) (“[T]he cars were in third” [Cortázar 1973: 27]), “[d]e cuando en cuando sonaban bocinas, las agujas de los velocímetros subían cada vez más” (Cortázar 2021: 731) (“[f]rom time to time, horns blew, speedometer climbed more and more” [Cortázar 1973: 27]). The possibility that cars might themselves fail or run out of energy is beyond the short story’s imaginative framework. It is in this sense that this short story emerges as a prime example of how the interplay between both notions of energy emerges in the context of the pre-1973 oil crisis to ultimately reaffirm the ubiquitous presence of oil as a fact of life under the Great Acceleration. “La autopista del sur” is, nevertheless, a story about another type of fuel. More specifically, the fuel human bodies need to survive. It is fundamentally a story about the need for energy resources—in this case, food—and about the awareness of a future finitude of available resources. In focusing so much on the nutrients needed for human bodies while relegating the presence of fuel for cars as a mere “smell in the air,” Cortázar both assumes and portrays the invisible yet immediate availability of oil as a basic presupposition, while implicitly distinguishing oil-generated energy from other forms of energy—most notably, the energy provided to and by humans. In establishing “friction” as an underlying condition for the successful making of global connections that simultaneously “gets in the way of the smooth operation of global power” (Tsing 2005: 6), Anna Tsing evokes the friction produced by a vehicle’s wheel on the road as both metaphor and concrete example of such “heterogeneous and unequal encounters” (Tsing 2005: 5): “Roads create pathways that make motion easier and more efficient, but in doing so they limit where we go” (Tsing 2005: 6). The initial uncanniness of Cortázar’s short story stems precisely from the suspension of the friction needed for the maintenance of global capital in its most basic, literal way: cars stop moving. A subsequent uncanny move arrives with the sudden visibility, by the stranded drivers, of the neighboring villages from which drivers obtain food and

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water. The transversal social and economic dynamics these encounters generate establishes a peculiar energy transition through which, from the failures of the supposedly efficient oil-based displacement, another form of friction emerges, now based on the energy produced by human bodies. While their inability to move their cars renders them idle or unproductive in the eyes of global capital, these characters are in fact engaged in a relentless effort to survive. Such focus on the smaller scale of human bodies, thus, challenges the predominance of oil-based forms of displacement and productivity at the same time as it leaves untouched the basic premise of an unending supply of fossil fuels readily available.

A Família Do Barulho Following the aesthetic innovations and renewed political engagement of the Cinema Novo movement in Brazil in the 1960s, the movement known as Cinema Marginal, led by figures such as Rogério Sganzerla and Júlio Bressane, is known for its foreclosure of a redemptory political horizon, its displays of life in Brazil’s big cities, and its unapologetic exploration of violence. In Robert Stam’s oft-quoted formulation, “[j]ust as Cinema Novo decided to reach out for a popular audience, the Underground opted to slap that audience in its face” (Stam 1995: 311). Even though Cinema Marginal’s production has been largely absent from the scholarship on environmental studies, this chapter aims to show that it may offer a powerful reflection on the energy availability of the 1960s, including oil, that, by casting its appeal as ultimately futile, provides a skeptical perspective of the magic of petro-states. In order to do so, this section will focus on one of Bressane’s most radical and fragmented films, A família do barulho, translated as The Family of Disorder. The inaugural film of the legendary albeit short-lived producer Belair, A família do barulho narrates the story of a sui generis family interpreted by Helena Ignez, Guará Rodrigues and Kleber Santos, who would roughly correspond to the mother, the father and the child. In practice, Ignez, a prostitute who also robs banks and is the family’s breadwinner, lives a conflictive relationship with Guará and interacts violently with Santos, who repeats in fear: “Ela é violenta!” (She is violent!). Guará and Santos, in their turn, act simultaneously as father and son and as a couple, with most of their sexual contact taking place while Ignez is away. Halfway through the film, the family is expanded to include a belly dancer or odalisca interpreted by Maria Gladys, who dreams of saving enough money to move to Baghdad and, in Guará’s view, will help him become rich by selling the oil he finds in his backyard and thus make him financially independent from Ignez’s character.14 The characters of Gladys and Ignez share a relationship of rivalry and growing intimacy until the odalisca suddenly

 I translate odalisca as belly dancer instead of odalisque because, in Brazilian popular culture, this term is more commonly associated with the sensual dance than to the slave condition of odalisques in harems.

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disappears. The family’s story is constantly juxtaposed to still shots displaying old family photographs, which reinforce and question the film’s main familiar structure. Shot in a matter of days in the February of 1970, right before Bressane and other Belair members went into exile in the context of the military dictatorship, the film was produced in an environment of intense improvisation and minimal guidance by an eight-page long script (Dias 2012: 100). The editing process equally pushed the basic conventions of narrative editing by including a number of shots of the same scene, including fotogramas velados, i.e., shots that would have been compromised due to inadequate exposure to light (Dias 2012: 102). From the juxtaposition of the characters’ roles to the juxtaposition between family structures to the juxtaposition of competing frames, A família do barulho relies on a series of variations on a theme or image that shed light onto the many ambivalences the film explores. Even though the film’s criticism has been mostly focused on its attack on the bourgeois family, A família do barulho is also fundamentally a film about oil. Guará’s character, convinced that his backyard sits on an oil field, at some point grabs a knife and, dressed only with swimwear, starts to break the patio’s cemented ground while he screams “o petróleo é nosso!” (the oil is ours!), in a reference to the motto put forward by Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo in the late 1930s and 1940s, when oil reserves were discovered in the state of Bahia. In subsequent scenes, Guará is seen stirring a dark liquid inside a cooking pot, arguably containing oil. Oil, then, works on a double vector that adds to the ambivalences mentioned above. It encompasses the promises of untold riches connected to transnational circuits of extraction through the figure of the odalisca, the orientalizing soundtrack and the images of palm trees, all of which, appearing around the time of Guará’s discovery, will connect him to the Middle East and its dominating position in the oil geopolitics of the 1960s. At the same time, oil remains a family-related, intimate affair: its extraction and supposed refining takes place in the realm of the Rio de Janeiro backyard and kitchen while Guará’s “family” is around. When the belly dancer leaves the family, no effort seems to be made to integrate this oil into national and transnational economies. In a direct challenge to the invisibility of oil generated by the large-scale, impersonal nature of its sites of extraction that imposes a slow violence on its local population, the appearance of oil in A família do barulho is as mundane as it is economically useless.15 This personal act of extracting oil by piercing a backyard concrete floor with a knife is also a queering act in line with Guará’s and Santos’s relationship in defiance of the stern gazes of those pictured in the old family photographs that permeate the film. If Bruce Erickson and Catriona Mortimer-Sandilans have discussed the spatial configurations of heteronormative masculinity such as the North American wilderness, the backyard of a family house in the Rio de Janeiro of the early 1970s constitutes a space of domestic heteronormativity, one that Guará literally attacks with a

 See Rob Nixon (2011) for a study on slow violence.

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knife as a co-extensive attack on all the families in the photographs and the sexual politics that made them possible. The realization that the underground of a “respectable” family house in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Leblon may in fact contain an oil reserve and the act of extracting it becomes, then, the environmental counterpart of the queering gesture of the film’s characters, most notably those of Guará and Santos. In the fossil imagination of the pre-1973 era, the profuse availability of oil seen in the perpetually-fueled cars of “La autopista del sur” becomes part of Bressane’s transgressive filmic grammar.

Figure 1: Helena Ignez in A família do barulho (The Family of Disorder), 1970.

To understand A família do barulho as a classic of the 1960s and early-1970s petrocultures means to revisit one of the film’s closing scenes, also one of the most iconic frames of Cinema Marginal, in which a single take of Helena Ignez’s head shows her vomiting a dark liquid (see Figure 1). Critics have unanimously read this liquid as blood, linking it to a vampire–like trait of other characters interpreted by the actress, such as the protagonist of Rogério Sganzerla’s A mulher de todos (1969), or as an intertextual dialogue with Lygia Pape’s visual poem A língua apunhalada (1968), or even as a reference to the tortured and disappeared in the most repressive period of the military dictatorship during which the film was released (Guimarães and Oliveira 2021: 189–199). Ignez herself has referred to this scene as one of haemoptysis or blood vomiting (Elduque and Ignez 2017: 133).16 Given that the film is in black and white, the liquid’s specific color is not immediately evident, but is appears black or close to black, and viscous.17 It is, indeed, very similar to the oil Guará “cooks” and the one he allegedly finds when he pierces the ground with his knife; this is why I want to propose that this is an image of blood vomiting as much as it is of oil vomiting. In a film whose male characters live off the exploitation of female labor, the “magic” source of wealth represented by oil symptomatically comes

 For a study of this scene, see also Elduque (2019).  It was actually chocolate, as Ignez informs in the interview cited above (Elduque and Ignez 2017: 133).

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out of the body of the female laborer—similarly to Galvão’s proletarians protesting that their blood is the gasoline fueling the cars of the rich. The ending of the film would embody the continuity between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature as highlighted by ecofeminist authors such as Val Plumwood.18 Such a reading would shed light onto the flickering, tenuous nature of the critique of oil in cultural objects from the period, whose authors do not necessarily engage with petro-imaginations in a consistent fashion but, in certain occasions bring it to the fore as an object of aesthetic attention and political questioning. It also shows, however, how the presence of oil in cultural production in the period may offer elements for a critical perspective on the productivity and assumption of unending availability generated by the economic predominance of fossil fuels. Just as the film’s family does not abide by the imperatives of heteronormative reproduction, the lack of market integration of the oil extracted by Guará and metaphorically produced by Ignez turns the whole enterprise into an idle one.

Conclusion In the past century and a half, and especially since the beginning of the Great Acceleration approximately around 1945, an increasing dependence on oil and other fossil fuels on nearly every scale of daily life became a defining factor of how they are perceived and lived. In this sense, a productivity-based notion of oil and the impact it generates on multiple spheres of life has been at the center of critics’ attention to oil in the realm of contemporary literary and cultural studies. Building on this scholarship but taking a different path, this chapter has shown how a dissociation between oil and productivity—that is, a dismantling of petroleum utopias—may reveal another facet of the cultural production in which it appears, one in which idleness and other forms of social and affective connection find a space where they can flourish. In the atmosphere of the 1960s and early 1970s, in which political and cultural questioning co-existed with an increasing dependency on oil, “La autopista del sur” and A família do barulho invite a momentary reconsideration of the function, assumed availability, and invisibility of this resource in the context of the Great Acceleration. In a moment in which a post-petroleum future is being intensely debated as a necessary path to address the current climate crisis, an excavation of oil’s disengagement from the inner workings of contemporary production chains may offer alternative ways of questioning the seamless interdependence between fossil fuels and human activity on which contemporary life is predicated.

 In her foundational Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Plumwood (1993) gives her contours to an ecofeminist philosophy by analyzing the prevalence and pitfalls of the long-standing parallels between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature.

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Works cited A família do barulho. Dir. Júlio Bressane. Belair, 1970. Acosta, Santiago. “We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture Boom, 1973–1983.” Dissertation. New York: Columbia University, 2020. Booker, Sarah. “Tracing the Apparatus: The Technological Mediation of Experience in Los autonautas de la cosmopista, o un viaje atemporal París–Marsella by Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 29.3 (2020): 363–77. Coronil, Fernando. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Cortázar, Julio. “La autopista del sur.” Cuentos completos, vol. 1 (1945–1966). Barcelona: Penguin Random House, 2021. 707–32. ——. “The Southern Thruway.” All Fires the Fire and Other Stories. Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine. New York: Pantheon, 1973. 3–29. Cortázar, Julio, and Carol Dunlop. Los autonautas de la cosmopista, o Un viaje atemporal París-Marsella. Barcelona: Alfaguara, 2016. Dias, Rosa. “A família do barulho na Belair de Júlio Bressane.” Filosofia e cultura brasileira. Eds. André Masseno and Tiago Barros. Rio de Janeiro: Quintal Rio Produções Artísticas, 2012. 98–105. Elduque Busquets, Albert. “Between Film and Photography: The Bubble of Blood in “The Family of Disorder.’” Screen 60.1 (2019): 148–159. Elduque Busquets, Albert, and Helena Ignez. “As Belair went by: An Interview with Helena Ignez.” Tropicália and Beyond: Dialogues in Brazilian Film History. Ed. Stefan Salomon. Berlin: Archive Books and University of Reading, 2017. 123–35. Galvão, Patricia. Parque industrial. São Paulo, 1933. ——. Industrial Park. Trans. Elizabeth Jackson and David Jackson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Ghosh, Amitav. “Petrofiction: The Oil Enounter and the Novel.” Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Eds. Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 431–39. Guimarães, Pedro, and Sandro de Oliveira. Helena Ignez: Atriz experimental. São Paulo: Edições Sesc, 2021. Irr, Caren, ed. Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso, 2016. Martínez Arias, Jack. “Pendiendo de la maquinaria: autos y hombres en “La autopista del sur” de Julio Cortázar.” A Contracorriente: Una Revista de Historia Social y Literatura de América Latina 12.3 (2015): 220–39. Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2011. Moore, Jason. Capitalism and the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso, 2016. Mortimer–Sandilans, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Negrín, Edith. Letras sobre un dios mineral: el petróleo mexicano en la narrativa. Mexico City: El Colegio de México; Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2017. Neruda, Pablo. “La Standard Oil Co.” Canto General. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1981. 164–65. ——. “Standard Oil Co.” Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Eds. Irme Szeman and Dominic Boyer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 80–82. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1993.

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Price, Rachel. “Energy and Abstraction in the Work of Dolores Soldevilla.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 72.2 (2019): 161–81. Ralón, Laureano. “Cortázar y la técnica: Continuidades y descontinuidades en la autopista del sur.” Badebec 6.11 (2016): 42–64. Riddle, Amy. “Petrofiction and Political Economy in the Age of Late Fossil Capital.” Materialism and the Critique of Energy. Eds. Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti. Chicago: MCM’ Publishing, 2018. 413–442. Saramago, Victoria. Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Stam, Robert. “On the Margins: Brazilian Avant–Garde Cinema.” Brazilian Cinema. Eds. Randal Johnson and Robert Stam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. 300–327. Szeman, Imre. On Petrocultures: Globalizations, Culture, and Energy. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019. Szeman, Imre, and Dominic Boyer, eds. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Tinker Salas, Miguel. The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture and Society in Venezuela. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Tsing, Anna. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Uslar Pietri, Arturo. “Sembrar el petróleo.” Ahora 1.183 (1936). Sembrar el petróleo en Venezuela. Caracas: Universidad Simón Bolívar, November 2012. http://hemerotecavirtualsembrarpetroleo.blogspot.com/ (14 April 2023). Vergara, Germán. Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Yaeger, Patricia. “Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and other Energy Sources.” PMLA 126.2 (2011): 305–26. Wenzel, Jennifer. The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Zangrandi, Silvia. “Fanta–Reality on the Road: Cars and Suspension of Time in the Short Stories ‘La autopista del sur’ by Julio Cortázar and ‘Autosoles’ by Carlo Lucarelli.” LEJANA: Revista Crítica de Narrativa Breve 4 (2012): 1–9.

Lesley Wylie

Plant In Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, Michael Marder notes that within the history of Western thought, plants have occupied “the margin of the margin, the zone of absolute obscurity undetectable on the radars of our conceptualities” (Marder 2013: 2). This has not been the case in Central and South America and the Caribbean, where plant imaginaries have long played a central role in the formulation of ecologicallyattuned ways of engaging with non-human others. Pre-Conquest, plants were not only an important source of food across the continent, but key to Indigenous healing practices and religious life. Symbolic crops and flowers—tobacco, cacao, maize, and marigolds, to name but a few—were not only valued for their curative potential but regarded as sacred—as sources of life, and links to the supernatural (Wylie 2020: 8–9). Stories about plants and their important relationships to people have been circulating for thousands of years in Central and South America. As Roberto Cintli Rodríguez shows, artistic engagements with maize, considered by Mesoamericans as the progenitor of all human life, can be traced back at least two thousand years (Rodríguez 2014: 5). Such magico-religious understandings of plants endured well beyond the Conquest, not only among Indigenous people but also among Afro-descendent communities, for instance, who often adopted significant native trees such as the Ceiba pentandra—the Mayas’ “World Tree” (Carrasco 2008: 400)—as substitutes for flora held sacred in Africa. And into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, plants have continued to be at the forefront of how many Latin American writers and artists express their worldviews; respond to socio-political upheavals; formulate local, national, and continental aesthetic traditions; and re-imagine relationships with more-than-human worlds. In this chapter, I examine some of the possibilities of thinking with and through plants in Latin America. As I explore in section one, plants have long been an important means through which writers and artists have formulated a distinctive Latin American aesthetic. Drawing on the concept of the “vegetal baroque,” I discuss how for Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier the language of plants serves to underscore the heterogeneity of “Latin” American aesthetics and identity, which are marked not only by Indigenous but also European and African beliefs and modalities. In sections two and three, I establish how Latin American artistic engagements with plants often draw on pre-Columbian conceptions of nature, particularly relating to vegetal animism and metamorphosis between humans and non-humans. Bringing recent philosophical, ethnobotanical, and scientific debates about plants into dialogue with literary and artistic works on vegetal life—in particular Carpentier’s “Problemática de la actual novela latinoamericana”; W. H. Hudson’s “A Boy’s Animism”; “Perrimontun” by Maribel Mora Curriao—this chapter traces some of the genealogies of “plant-thinking” in Latin America and considers their potential for mediating environmental crisis.

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Before turning to the recurrent ways in which plants have been imagined in Latin American artistic production, it is important to consider, albeit briefly, their broader role in shaping post-Conquest Latin American society. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira open their collection, The Language of Plants, with the statement: “Plants are perhaps the most fundamental form of life, providing sustenance, and thus enabling the existence of all animals, including us humans” (Gagliani et al. 2019: vii). In the case of post-1492 Latin America, plants not only played this constitutive role—providing food, fuel, and building materials for a growing settler population—but also, through the establishment of large monocrop plantations, transformed the landscapes, economies, and societies of Central and South America and the Caribbean. In colonial Latin America, nature was regarded as a “repository of commodities” (Barrera-Osorio 2006: 13). Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra describes how, in the seventeenth century, “[t]he new wealth of the Americas suddenly turned ‘green’” (Cañizares-Esguerra 2006: 127), with plantations of sugar, coffee, and indigo, among other crops—all of which depended on the labour of African slaves—yielding extraordinary riches. Under the plantation system, plants were seen as capable of supplying “lasting, seemingly ever renewable profits” (Schiebinger 2004: 7)—a view which persists into the present and is embodied, for instance, in Amazonian mega-plantations of oil palm and soya. As Macarena GómezBarris argues, “the Global South has long been constructed as a region of plunder, discovery, raw resources, taming, classification, and racist adventure” (Gómez-Barris 2017: 3). For centuries, plants have been at the centre of capitalist enterprise in Latin America, both within the plantation system and via the extraction of wild forest products such as quinine and rubber (e.g. Hecht 2013). Plants have also played a transcendent role in literary, artistic, and intellectual expression on and from Latin America. They are the subject of early colonial botanies commissioned by Spanish royalty (e.g. Gonzalo Fernández Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias, 1535–1557) and late colonial georgics (e.g. Andrés Bello’s “La agricultura de la zona tórrida,” 1826; they constitute the backbone of Creole literary traditions such as the plantation romance and the novela de la tierra; they generate powerful imaginative tropes such as the idea of “plant horror,” present from José Eustasio Rivera’s rubber boom classic, La vorágine (1924) to present-day narratives about toxic agriculture, such as Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (2014); and they have, at various points, given expression to anti-colonial, anti-slavery, and antifascist sentiments (Wylie 2020: 171). In recent years, plant imagery has also been central to creative and intellectual works addressing environmental catastrophe in Latin America, many by Amerindian intellectuals and activists. Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes note the “complex patterns of sameness and difference that stretch through decades and centuries” (French and Heffes 2021: 3) of environmental cultural production on Latin America. This chapter will be attentive to how the imagination of plants in Latin America, whilst shifting over time, also returns to the same preoccupations and representational strategies in the exploration of the intricate webs linking human and non-human life. The chapter opens with a reflection on an

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aesthetic tradition to which plants have been foundational: the New World baroque. It then turns to the motif of vegetal animism and sentience in Latin American literature, drawing on the thinking of Philippe Descola, Eduardo Kohn, and Suzanne Simard, among others. In the final section, it considers the related trope of plant-people metamorphosis, including through the prism of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s work on “interspecies entanglements” (Tsing 2015: 7) and Emanuele Coccia’s concept of the “metaphysics of mixture” (Coccia 2019). Whilst the writers and artists central to this chapter differ in their approaches to and conceptions of vegetal life, all express the belief that nature and culture in Latin America are not separate spheres, but continuously intersect and abut. The understanding of plants as intimately connected to people is widespread in Latin American cultural production and an important means through which writers and thinkers have expressed—and continue to express—environmental concerns and solutions.

The Vegetal Baroque The key statement on the New World baroque by Cuban intellectual Alejo Carpentier —the 1964 essay “Problemática de la actual novela latinoamericana”—confirms the central presence of plants in Latin America’s literary and artistic imagination in the mid-twentieth century. When Carpentier came to write his essay, plants had long provided a blueprint for how Latin American aesthetic traditions might be rooted in American—as opposed to European—spatial imaginaries. Examples include nineteenth-century costumbrismo, in which works such as Manuel Alonso’s El Gíbaro: Cuadro de costumbres de la isla de Puerto Rico (1849) and Gregorio Gutiérrez González’s Memoria sobre el cultivo del maíz en Antioquia (1886) confirmed agricultural traditions as an important marker of national and continental difference. And nineteenthand twentieth-century telluric writing (e.g. Domingo F. Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845), Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões (1902), Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940), or the novela de la selva) also extensively referenced flora in order to infuse Latin American works with authenticity and local colour, albeit in ways often heavily indebted to European poetics. Carpentier’s fictional and non-fictional writings are also consistently marked by plants, from the intricate descriptions of the Amazon rainforest in his 1953 novel Los pasos perdidos, where the jungle vegetation is configured as “el mundo de la mentira, de la trampa y del falso semblante” (the world of lies, traps and false appearances) (Carpentier 1999: 169)—with trees and plants blending into animal and mineral forms and vice-versa—to the profusion of arboreal-like pillars and vegetal–inspired architectural embellishments in the 1964 essay “La ciudad de las columnas”. I have discussed the concept of Carpentier’s “vegetal baroque” at length elsewhere (Wylie 2020: 92–134). Although the motif can be traced across the writer’s oeuvre, in “Problemática de la actual

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novela latinoamericana,” Carpentier articulates some of the main characteristics of the New World baroque, which came to define Latin American (particularly Cuban) literary stylistics mid-century. In this important essay, the Cuban author argues that the art of the Americas “siempre fue barroco” (was always baroque), from pre-Columbian times to the present. Taking as a central example the “Tree of Life” motif on the ceiling of the Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán in Oaxaca, according to Carpentier the specifically American baroque aesthetic is not only marked by the fusing of the human and vegetal, but generated by plants themselves: “No temamos el barroquismo, arte nuestro, nacido de árboles” (Let us not fear the baroque, our art, born of trees) (Carpentier 1990: 41). In the same essay, Carpentier specifies two American trees that, in his view, can only be expressed fully through recourse to the baroque—the ceiba and the papaya: la palabra ceiba [. . .] no basta para que las gentes de otras latitudes vean el aspecto de columna rostral de ese árbol gigantesco, adusto y solitario, como sacado de otras edades [. . .]. Allí está, en lo alto de una ladera, solo, silencioso, inmóvil, sin aves que lo habiten, rompiendo el suelo con sus enormes raíces escamosas . . . A centenares de metros de allí (porque la ceiba no es árbol de asociación ni de compañía) crecen unos papayos, herbáceas salidas de los primeros pantanos de la creación, con sus cuerpos blandos, cubiertos de medallones grises, sus hojas abiertas como manos de mendigos, sus ubres-frutas colgadas del cuello . . . (Carpentier 1990: 30–39). [The word ceiba [. . .] is not enough for people from other latitudes to see the appearance of the rostral column of that giant, austere and solitary tree, as if taken from other ages [. . .]. There it is, at the top of a hillside, alone, silent, immobile, uninhabited by birds, breaking the ground with its enormous scaly roots . . . Hundreds of metres from there (because the ceiba is not a tree of association or companionship), some papayas grow, herbaceous plants from the first swamps of creation, with their soft bodies, covered with gray medallions, their leaves open like the hands of beggars, their udder-fruits hanging from their necks . . .]

The ceiba, also known as the silk cotton tree, has played a transcendental role in the cultural imagination of Mesoamerica, South America, and the Caribbean. As noted in the introduction, it was considered an axis mundi by the Mayas, and is highly valued throughout much of the region, including in Cuba where, as Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte (1954) sets out, many Afro-Cubans observed strict rules regulating the tree’s treatment, including the injunction not to cut one down (Cabrera 2006: 191–192). Carpentier was aware of the tree’s symbolic connotations in Afro-Cuban and Indigenous traditions and wrote of the ceiba in other works, including in El siglo de las luces (1962), but it is in “Problemática de la actual novela latinoamericana” where the tree engenders a specific set of aesthetic principles, founded on baroque motifs such as metamorphosis and symbiosis. Whilst, according to Carpentier, universally recognizable trees such as the pine or palm require no literary introduction, Latin Americans writing about the ceiba and papaya must draw on the complex, syncretic ideas of the baroque. Carpentier positions both trees at a temporal (“as if taken from other ages”) or spatial (“hundreds of metres from there”) remove, and notes their un-plantlike textures and appearances. References to the ceiba’s reptilian bark and the papaya’s human-like

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appendages can be related not only to baroque conceits, but to broader ideas about people-plant inter-relationality widespread in Latin American literature and art (a trope to which I will return in section three of this chapter). The reference to the papaya’s “udder–fruits” is, for instance, a nod to a key visual expression of the baroque —Wifredo Lam’s painting La jungla (1942–1943), in which the merging of an exuberant tropical vegetation with abstract human forms is suggestive of wider plant-people contiguities. Through botanically-inspired metaphors and images, here and elsewhere in his oeuvre Carpentier finds a way to ground Latin American aesthetics—characterized by expansive and heterogeneous influences from the Chilam Balam to high European art—in the landscape itself. Whilst Carpentier is primarily concerned with finding a language commensurate to America’s tropical nature and syncretic cultural traditions, his exposition of the role of vegetal life as a potential mediator between culture and nature, humans and nonhumans, also corresponds to broader aesthetic tendencies in Latin America. Throughout Carpentier’s 1964 essay, the ontological slipperiness of plants and humans aligns with much animistic thinking about nature—the focus of the next section—and suggests the future possibilities of the vegetal baroque as an aesthetic mode befitting twenty-first-century ecological crisis.

Plant Anthropomorphism and Animism One of the recurrent tropes in Latin American literary conceptions of plants is the presentation of vegetal life as capable of experiencing human sensations and emotions. The trope of anthropomorphism, in Juan Duchesne Winter’s words, “enacts animism as a practical ontological operation [. . .] that frequently characterizes humannon-human interactions” (Duchesne Winter 2019: 21). Anthropomorphism, extends, of course, far beyond Latin America, entrenched, for instance, in Western literary traditions such as the classical georgic and Romantic nature poetry. Nevertheless, in the case of Latin America, the literary trope of plants as sentient and communicative beings converges in productive ways with non-Western understandings of plants, particularly in the Amazon basin. According to Descola, Amazonian ontologies can be viewed as “animistic” insofar as they are marked by a characteristic “attribution by humans to non-humans of an interiority identical to their own”: This attribution humanizes plants [. . .] since the soul with which it endows them allows them not only to behave in conformity with the social norms and ethical precepts of humans but to establish communicative relations both with humans and among themselves (Descola 2013: 129).

“Animism” has a loaded history in the Amazon and beyond, as Descola acknowledges, but it can be a useful term for articulating the particular form that “plant-thinking” takes in Latin America. As Kohn notes, animism “captures an animation that is emergent

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with life [. . .]. It is grounded in an ontological fact: there exist other kinds of thinking selves beyond the human” (Kohn 2013: 94). Gómez-Barris also broaches the issue of animism in her focus on “too-often-ignored network[s] of relationality”: the “visible and invisible forces between the human and the nonhuman, between animate and inanimate life” (Gómez-Barris 2017: 2). The use of the term “animism” by Anglo-Argentine author, W. H. Hudson, should be understood in the context of these decolonial and posthuman interventions. Whilst Hudson writes in English, his formative years growing up on the Argentine pampas and the intersections between his fictional and non-fictional writings and Latin American literary traditions such as the novela de la selva have led to his being included for consideration within the field of Latin American studies (e.g. Gómez and Castro Klarén 2012). Although written over a century ago, many of Hudson’s works prefigure contemporary ecological thinking in their exploration of the profound inter-relationality between humans and non-humans. In fact, Hudson’s reflection on plant-animism in his autobiographical Far Away and Long Ago marks one of the most significant reflections on the subject by a Latin American writer. In the central chapter, “A Boy’s Animism,” Hudson recalls how, as a child, he would seek out “large trees”—usually locust or white acacias—at night by his house near Quilmes in La Plata: at such times the sense of mystery would grow until a sensation of delight would change to fear, and the fear increase until it was no longer to be borne [. . .]. The loose feathery foliage [. . .] had a peculiar hoary aspect that made this tree seem more intensely alive than others, more conscious of my presence and watchful of me (Hudson 1991: 231).

In this passage—as throughout much of Hudson’s fiction and non-fiction—the term “animism” becomes a prism for thinking through the complex relationship between humans and non-humans. The tree in the passage above is “intensely alive,” not only in a biological sense, but also via its ability to perceive (even watch) the observing boy. Later in the chapter, Hudson goes on to compare the tree to a “supernatural being [. . .] intently regarding him, and divining every thought in his mind” (Hudson 1991: 232). Interactions between plants and people abound in Latin American literature, famously in novelas de la selva such as Rivera’s La vorágine and Rómulo Gallegos’ Canaima (1935) (Wylie 2020: 138–152), where the human protagonists frequently communicate and converge with the jungle vegetation. However, what is distinctive about the treatment of plant anthropomorphism in much Latin American culture is that, unlike the personified nature of European Romanticism (De Man 1984: 241), the vegetal nature of plants tends not to be dwarfed by their human resemblances. In Hudson’s extended reflections on plant animism in Far Away and Long Ago, for instance, he speaks in detail of the biological and ecological life of plants: their dimensions and habit; the shape of their “downy” leaves and pale flowers; how they feel “soft” to the touch (Hudson 1991: 228–229). Hudson’s plants do not have human forms, for sure, but he credits them with capacities such

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as perception and sentience that Western science continued to consider unique to humans until well into the twentieth century. This is where the thinking of Hudson converges with both animist Indigenous ontologies and contemporary plant science. Hudson regards the relationship between people and plants as interactive and affective—as when he cites the example of an English aristocrat known for his habit of bidding trees on his estate goodnight by touching their bark and whispering to them, believing “they had intelligent souls and knew and encouraged his devotion” (Hudson 1991: 234). Theresa L. Miller’s suggestive multispecies ethnography, Plant Kin, has explored similar relationships between people and plants among the Canela in the Brazilian Cerrado, where gardeners have “plant children,” and consider seeds and cuttings “infants or newborns [. . .] in need of sustained care and attention” (Miller 2019: 159). Whilst—much to his chagrin—Hudson was not fully accepted by the scientific community of his day, some of his animistic ideas about plant perception and communication clearly anticipate twenty-first century advances in bioacoustics and plant signalling, including the acknowledgement of “a certain kind of language” (Nealon 2016: 12) among plants. Recently Simard has shown that forest trees are able to communicate between themselves, and to share food and information about insect attacks or disease, including with trees of other species, through a complex network of underground mycorrhizal fungi (Simard 2021: 168–169). And Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola have also attested to how sensory organs in the epidermal cells of plants “are activated when the plant touches something, or when vibrations reach it” (Mancuso and Viola 2015: 67), raising questions about whether plants might even experience “pain”—a capacity that, as Jonathan Bate notes in The Song of the Earth, has been a “standard humanitarian argument” (Bate 2000: 177) for the protection of animals. Commonplace ideas in Indigenous American plant knowledge, touched upon by Hudson, are now being investigated and corroborated by science. As Matthew Hall argues, the combining of knowledge from Indigenous peoples and plant scientists is crucial for forging appropriate ethical guidelines for the treatment of plants as “morally considerable beings” (Hall 2011: 14). Latin American creative engagements with plants have long anticipated such pairings, drawing on Indigenous-inflected understandings of non-humans’ capacities to sense and communicate in ways that dovetail with much twenty-first-century plant research. Instances of plant personification and animism across Latin American cultural production clearly align with much contemporary ecological thinking. Eduardo Gudynas has recently pointed out that “extractivisms need a form of thinking and feeling based on the Cartesian duality of society and Nature, rejecting any kind of organicity or affective bond with the environment” (Gudynas 2021: 66). The recurring trope of plant as animate being is one important way through which to re-establish this “affective bond” and to question wasteful or wanton consumption of nature.

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Plants as “Metaphysics of Mixture” In Idle Days in Patagonia, Hudson argues that “animism” is partly a sensation or emotion arising in the mind of the observer, not when “outside of and above the natural phenomenon, but in and one with it” (Hudson 1923: 112). This sense of the indistinguishability of plants and people—how we are “in and one” with all non-human life —is another significant theme across Latin American cultural engagements with plants and one of the primary ways through which many writers and artists have formulated an environmental consciousness distinct from traditional Western views of nature as emphatically separate from human culture. Such ideas are by now well-established in posthuman meditations on human/ non-human entwinements. Tsing opens The Mushroom at the End of the World by observing how “interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now materials for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists” (Tsing 2015: 7). Coccia addresses the idea of interspecies entanglements with a specific eye to plants in The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2019). Throughout the book, Coccia argues that the human relationship to nature is one of “immersion” (Coccia 2019: 37); humans and plants breathe the same air, and hence “[t]o inhale is to allow the world to come into us” (Coccia 2019: 66): To live, to experience, or to be in the world also means to let oneself be traversed by all things. To get out of oneself always means to enter into something else. [. . .] everything is in everything, nothing can separate itself from the fate of the rest (Coccia 2019: 68–69).

In Plant Theory in Amazonian Literature Duchesne Winter sees Coccia’s view of plants as marking the productive coming together of South American vegetalist traditions with what he terms the “salvationist, liberationist, and utopian streak” (Duchesne Winter 2019: 16) of some work in the Euro-American plant-humanities. Duchesne Winters’ account of how, in the Amazon, “plants have incredibly extensive connections with almost everything, from the stars, to earth-forming, to breathing, nutrition, semiosis, language, culture, thought, and spirituality” (Duchesne Winter 2019: 17), draws out the complexities of human-plant interactions and intersects with Coccia’s notion of the interpenetration of all worldly things. Coccia’s phrase “everything is in everything” resonates with much Indigenous American thinking about the continuities between human and non-human worlds, including the central Mapuche idea of Itro fill Mogen, which can be defined as “a totality without exclusion in which all living beings […] take part” (Holas Véliz 2014: xx). The poem “Perrimontun” by Maribel Mora Curriao, originally written in the Mapuche language Mapudungun, is one example of the exploration of human/non-human entanglements by a contemporary Latin American writer: My voice hidden in the weeds lost in the foothills and valleys.

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The moon I greeted as a child rose to kiss desires dissolving into nothingness. Daughter – it said – do not come out at dusk dawn flowers will cover your bones [. . .] but I keep the dreams you sowed as a child. Do not fear they blossom from your hands now the dawn flowers will give birth (Mora Curriao 2014: 64).1

Here, plants are central to the imagination of human immersion in nature (indeed, the word “immersed” features in line three of the English translation of the poem). Whilst the poem opens by evoking the concealment or dissolution of marks of humanity—“voice” and “bones”—by weeds or flowers, later on the female body becomes a generative vessel for vegetal life. The world presented in Mora Curriao’s poem is not only animistic, but demonstrates the profound interconnectedness of humans and non-humans, who not only speak to and guide the poetic “I,” but merge into and from her. The extended vegetal metaphor of dreams being sowed and blossoming on and through the human body at the poem’s close is also reminiscent of a number of twentieth-century plant-women imbrications in Latin American visual art, such as Mexican Frida Kahlo’s 1943 self-portrait Raíces, in which the recumbent artist is depicted as fixed to the soil via thick vegetal offshoots. Thirty years later, in 1973, Imagen de Yagul was staged by Cuban-American performance artist, Ana Mendieta, who lay on a Zapotec grave in Yagul, Oaxaca, and had her body photographed after it was strewn with white flowers. A co-authored book of poems and photographs by Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo and photographer Aldo Sessa, Árboles de Buenos Aires (1979), also features a suggestive photograph accompanied by the poem “Mujer dormida bajo un gomero” (Woman asleep below a rubber tree; Ocampo and Sessa 1979: 25–25). In it, an elderly, possibly indigent, woman, loosely covered with a coat, lies asleep on her side on a raised brick wall built around the buttress roots of a rubber tree. The focal point of the image, the tree’s roots, are positioned as if growing out of the woman’s body, infusing the scene with a mythical dimension and re-imagining the woman as an unlikely Tellus Mater. In all these examples, plant imaginaries are twinned with a subversive female poetics/politics, where the erosion of the divisions between plants/ humans and nature/culture leads to wider dissolutions of patriarchal structures (and in the case of Ocampo, class).

 For ease of comprehension, quotes from the poem, originally in Mapudungun, are in English translation.

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Another term given to this complex, entangled coexistence in Latin America is the “pluriverse,” defined by Arturo Escobar as “a world where many worlds fit” (2020: ix). For Escobar, the pluriverse must replace the “dualist ontology” which for so long, across so much of the earth, has peddled “a cosmovision that divides the world into subjects and objects” and sees nature as readily comprehensible, controllable, and utilizable. In contrast, the pluriverse is a space of coexistence “with the full range of human and nonhuman beings in a collaborative manner that is wiser in its relationship with the Earth and with the flow of life” (2020: 3). The idea of coexistence and co-penetration has long been central to Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinking about plants in Latin America. Through creative endeavour, plants have been a primary way for imagining how humans might live collaboratively not only with vegetal life but with non-human nature more broadly. Natasha Myers has proposed the idea of the “Planthroposcene”—“an aspirational episteme and way of doing life in which people come to recognize their profound interimplication with plants” (Myers 2017: 299)—as a means by which humans might be able to survive the worst effects of climate change. For Myers, as throughout much Latin American culture, immersion in plant worlds opens up the possibility of living differently, with wide-reaching implications for society and politics. As has been traced throughout this chapter, recourse to plants has been fundamental to how Latin American writers, artists, and intellectuals have negotiated the relationship between humans and non-humans and sought to complicate questions about how we view and utilize nature. Marder defines “plant-thinking” as a diffuse term denoting both the thinking of and about vegetal life, which “situates the plant at the fulcrum of its world, the elemental terrain it inhabits without laying claim to or appropriating it” (Marder 2013: 8). Such a definition has parallels with the figuration of plants in much Latin American creative production, where the plantliness of vegetal life remains central to its identity and expression. Elaine Gan et al. forward that “Co-species survival requires arts of imagination as much as scientific specifications” (2017: 8). Within Latin American culture, plant imaginaries have long marked a serious attempt to think “beyond the human” (Kohn 2013), and to mediate environmental crisis in a world of change.

Works cited Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Cabrera, Lydia. El monte. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2006. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Carpentier, Alejo. “Problemática de la actual novela latinoamericana.” Obras completas: ensayos (vol. 13). México: Siglo XXI, 1990. 11–44.

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——. Los pasos perdidos. Madrid: Alianza, 1999. Carrasco, Davíd. “Cortés and the Sacred Ceiba: A Maya Axis Mundi.” The History of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Ed. Davíd Carrasco. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. 399–404. Coccia, Emanuele. The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. Cambridge: Polity, 2019. De Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Duchesne Winter, Juan R. Plant Theory in Amazonian Literature. London: Palgrave, 2019. Escobar, Arturo. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. French, Jennifer, and Gisela Heffes. “Introduction: Genealogies of Latin American Environmental Culture.” The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Eds. Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2021. 3–14. Gagliano, Monica, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira. “Introduction.” The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Eds. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2019. vii-xxxiii. Gan, Elaine, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Ghosts on a Damaged Planet. Eds. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2017. G1–G14. Gómez, Lelia, and Sara Castro-Klarén, eds. Entre Borges y Conrad: Estética y territorio en William Henry Hudson. Frankfurt and Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2012. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Gudynas, Eduardo. Extractivisms: Politics, Economy and Ecology. Rugby: Practical Action Publishing, 2021. Hall, Matthew. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: SUNY, 2011. Hecht, Susanna B. The Scramble for the Amazon and the “Lost Paradise” of Euclides da Cunha. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Holas Véliz, Sergio. “El arte de la palabra / The art of the word.” Poetry of the Earth. Trilingual Mapuche Poetry. Ed. Jaime Luis Huenún Villa. Carindale: Interactive Press, 2014. xv–xxiv. Hudson, W. H. Idle Days in Patagonia. London: Dent, 1923. ——. Far Away and Long Ago: A Childhood in Argentina. London: Eland, 1991. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Ocampo, Silvina, and Aldo Sessa. Árboles de Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Librería de la Ciudad; Galería del Este; Editorial Crea, 1979. Mancuso, Stefano, and Alessandra Viola. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Trans. Joan Benham. Washington: Island Press, 2015. Mora Curriao, Maribel. “Perrimontun.” Poetry of the Earth. Trilingual Mapuche Poetry. Ed. Jaime Luis Huenún Villa. Carindale: Interactive Press, 2014. 64. Marder, Michael. Plant–Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Miller, Theresa L. Plant Kin: A Multispecies Ethnography in Indigenous Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. Myers, Natasha. “From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing Gardens for Plant/People Involution.” History and Anthropology 28.3 (2017): 297–301. Nealon, Jeffrey. Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Rodríguez, Roberto Cintli. Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Schiebinger, Londa. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

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Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest. London: Allen Lane, 2021. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Wylie, Lesley. The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.

Ignacio Aguiló

Race Considered one of the first texts to address the devastating eco-history of Latin America, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Open Veins of Latin America, 1971) was written, according to its author Eduardo Galeano, to “dispel a little of the fog from questions always pursuing us: Is Latin America a region condemned to humiliation and poverty? Condemned by whom? Is God, is Nature, to blame? The oppressive climate, racial inferiority?” (1997: 266). Galeano references the fact that race and nature, and their relationships, have fundamentally shaped ideas, conceptions, and debates about Latin American cultures, histories, and societies, from the moment of the region’s colonization. This chapter presents an overview of the main topics, issues, and materials that combine race and environmental aesthetics in Latin America. It first examines key theories and concepts like coloniality and the Anthropocene, which help put the unprecedented ecological violence of the European invasion of the Americas—and the role the category of race played in this process—at the center of discussions about the emergence of modernity and capitalism. It then examines how specific notions about the interrelations between race and nature significantly shaped debates about nation-building and nationality in post-independence Latin America. Finally, it turns to how Latin American cultural production has engaged with the racialization of environmental catastrophe and nondualist non-Western ontologies, especially since the late 20th century.

Theoretical Approaches Sociologist Alberto Quijano (2000: 533) identified race as a basic axis of the coloniality of power. With this, he referred to the matrix of power and control over populations, sexualities, subjectivities, and forms of knowledge-production that emerged as a result of European colonial expansion, starting with the Americas. According to Quijano, this pattern endures today and is visible in the persistence of global disparities based, partly, on race. Quijano’s work is a centerpiece of the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program, which at the turn of the 21st century drew on dependency theory, world-system analysis, and post-structuralism (among other theoretical traditions) to formulate an account of modernity that broke with Euro-centric perspectives. Racial thinking, Quijano argued, was deliberately developed to legitimize colonial relations of domination in the Americas, structured to a great extent around the exploitation of Indigenous and enslaved African labor in large-scale mining and monocultural plantation ventures. Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, among other decolonial thinkers, have argued for the need to see racism and colonization as two intrinsically https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-023

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connected issues at the core of the development of capitalism—a project partly organized around and facilitated by resource extraction (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2005). Central to the system of classifying humans created by Europeans around the notion of race were two assumptions: firstly, that history was a teleological process that culminated in culture—identified with Western civilization—as the opposite of nature; secondly, that differences between Europeans and non-Europeans were not the product of power relations but the result of a natural order of things. Within this framework, Indigenous peoples and Sub-Saharan Africans were said to live in a ‘state of nature’, which was used to justify colonization and enslavement (Quijano 2000: 542). Thus, as was the case in other parts of the world, European imperialism was presented as a civilizing effort that would supposedly elevate non-Western people to a level of political maturity, cultural sophistication and religious truth (Mitchell 2013). The physical subjugation and exploitation of Indigenous and African people were accompanied by forms of symbolic violence aimed at repressing their worldviews, imposing upon them a reconfiguration of their relationship with non-human nature, understood in Euro-centric ways as an external entity to be economically exploited. A fundamental postulate of decolonial theory is that modernity is intrinsically a relational project. It did not emanate from Europe but was created in the exchanges between Europe and the Americas—and, eventually, other colonial places. These exchanges were defined fundamentally by the combined racialized violence against the natives and ecological violence against non-human nature. As Gabriela Nouzeilles (2002: 19) puts it: “The natural space and the body of the colonized other are the mirror on the surface of which the modern imperial subject contemplates himself and produces by inversion his own image.” In this sense, more recent decolonial thinkers (Walsh 2007; Escobar 2007; Alimonda 2011; French 2012) have expanded on Quijano’s elaboration to address the coloniality of nature, which would contain both the epistemological processes through which the Latin American flora and fauna were shaped by Europeans as property, and their exploitation by past and present extractive activities. Though not directly linked to Latin American decolonial theory, Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (2005: 8) have underscored the role of natural science in this process: “Colonial botany [. . .] was born of and supported European voyages, conquests, global trade and scientific exploration.” In a similar vein, Jill H. Casid (2005) identified cultivation and landscaping practices in the Caribbean colonies as a central technology for consolidating the structures of European imperialism. The link between environmental destruction and race in the colonial period has also been at the center of some of the discussions on the Anthropocene, a notion introduced in 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and limnologist Eugene F. Stoermer that argues that human influence on the planet has become so profound and ubiquitous that it has initiated a new geological epoch. Evidence for this would be the drastic increase in global average temperatures, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, ocean acidification, and sea levels (Zalasiewicz et al. 2008). Though at the time in which this text is being written, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) has not officially

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approved the Anthropocene as a subdivision of geologic time, the term has gained traction, not only in Earth Sciences but also in the Social Sciences and Humanities, as well as in the public sphere (Lövbrand and Biermann 2019), including Latin America, as illustrated by the Manifesto Antropoceno en Chile (Tironi 2019). Yet, debates exist about the Anthropocene’s GSSP (Global Boundary Stratosphere Section and Point) or Golden Spike —that is, its commencing date. Diverse boundary points have been proposed, including the latter part of the 18th century (which coincides with the invention of the steam engine) or the period of industrial development, demographic growth, and increase of globalized economic activity initiated in the aftermath of World War 2—and which extends into the 21st century—known as the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al. 2015). Earth system scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2018) have challenged these hypotheses’ excessive focus on technological advancement in the Global North. Instead, they have suggested 1610 as a starting date for the Anthropocene. They justify their proposed GSSP in that this year marks the lowest point in the decades-long diminution in atmospheric carbon dioxide in Arctic ice cores, produced by the death of approximately fifty million Indigenous people—the majority in Mesoamerica—due to the effects of Iberian colonization. By the early 17th century, around 90% of the preColumbian population had perished due to war, forced labor, famine, and, mainly, diseases brought by Europeans against which Indigenous people had no inherited biological immunities. This demographic catastrophe meant a drastic reduction in agricultural activity, wood fires, fishing, hunting, and other forms of human interference in the local flora and fauna, thus producing the drop in CO2 levels mentioned above. The relevance of Lewis and Maslin’s proposal lies in that it not only breaks with technocratic and Western-centric explanations of the Anthropocene but also connects the origins of the current climate emergency with colonialism and race-based violence in Latin America (Luciano 2015: 3). Mainstream theories of the Anthropocene have also received critiques for their understanding of humanity as an undifferentiated homogenous subject. Scholars of human ecology Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014: 63) claim that, by putting homo sapiens as a species as the actor liable for our current climate emergency, the Anthropocene presents it as a global problem to which we have all contributed and for which we are similarly accountable. Yet, historical evidence indicates that only a small percentage of the world’s population has been responsible for and has benefited from the dynamics behind ecological destruction—and this division follows along racial lines. Thus, focusing on human action as a universal factor disconnected from power considerations would conceal the centrality of colonialism and other race-based historical inequalities in producing the current environmental crisis. Recognizing the role of these structural inequities would mean acknowledging that poor non-white peoples in colonial and post-colonial societies have contributed significantly less to the current crisis than their wealthier counterparts but have been the ones who predominantly suffered and continue to suffer the effects of ecological degradation. Furthermore, it would

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mean recognizing that this is an inherent and necessary condition of modernity and capitalism. Other scholars have expanded this critique of the Anthropocene’s uniformized conception of humanity to expose the dynamics of environmental racism. For Chicanx Studies specialist Laura Pulido (2018: 117), for example, the Anthropocene has to be seen essentially as a ‘racial process’ and points toward the evidence that indicates that many of the developments that are said to have contributed to its emergence, such as industrialization, urbanization, and capitalism, have generally benefited white populations to the detriment of non-white ones. In a similar direction, geographer Kathryn Yusoff (2018: 68) suggested thinking of a “Black Anthropocene,” which, according to her, “poses the question as a redescription of the Anthropocene through the racializing assemblage from which it emerged, rather than claiming a space for Blackness within or outside the Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene has also been criticized by Latin American scholars Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017), Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (2018), and Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2017) for reinforcing the Cartesian dichotomy between culture and nature. This binary, as we saw previously, has defined Eurocentred modernity and its systematic exclusion of Indigenous and Afro-descendant organicist views of the world wherein humans and nature are not different and oppositional categories. For these authors, conjuring the non-human, as some Indigenous ontologies do, constitutes a modality of pluralism much more radical than multiculturalism or multiracial politics. The recognition of the rights of nature in the 2008 Ecuadorean constitution and Bolivia’s 2011 Law of Mother Nature—both promoted by Indigenous organizations and rooted in sumak kawsay or buen vivir, a contemporary social philosophy inspired by ancestral Andean cosmologies and axiology—have been hailed precisely as landmarks in that sense (even though, as will be explained later, the implementation of this and other environmental jurisprudence has been deficient in the context of a rise of neo-extractivism in the region). Gómez-Barris’s and others’ call to decolonize the Anthropocene drawing on Latin American Indigenous perspectives resonates with the work of scholars from US Native American and Canadian First-Nation communities, like Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd (2015), who have asserted the need to ‘indigenize’ the Anthropocene. Though all these propositions are valuable and necessary, it is essential to highlight that not all Indigenous cosmologies are identical and necessarily interchangeable, and discrepancies even exist inside communities and organizations. Not addressing this implies a risk of unwittingly reinforcing long-standing, widespread primitivist stereotypes of Indigenous people as ‘noble ecological savages’ that simplify and uniformize the multiple ways they relate to nature and limit their personal and political strategies (Conklin and Graham 1995; Varese 1996; Wade 2010: 127). Many see the very same concept of the Anthropocene as too hermeneutically limited and politically problematic and have called for its scrapping altogether. Malm and environmental historian Jason Moore (2017) have argued for the need to shift the

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focus from the Anthropos to the effects of the capitalist system’s demands for cheap labor, energy, food, and resources on ecological regimes, and have proposed the term Capitalocene. Political scientist Françoise Vergès (2017), among others, suggested speaking of a Racial Capitalocene to acknowledge that race—addressed but not elaborated in Malm’s and Moore’s works—shapes the totality of capitalist ecological dynamics. Around the same time, and along similar lines, science studies scholar Donna Haraway (2015) and anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) suggested theorizing the current era as the Plantationocene. By this, they aim to highlight how the racial, environmental, and economic dynamics operating around the plantation in colonial Caribbean societies played a dominant role in the structuring of modernity and the global market, the effects of which continue to be seen today (Wolford 2021).

Race, Nature and Nation-building Debates Concepts like coloniality and Anthropocene—and its alternates—are useful to think about the dynamics that gave rise to many of the processes we are experiencing today in Latin America and the rest of the world. Nonetheless, they risk assuming a direct continuity of attitudes and approaches toward nature and race from colonial times to the post-independence and present-day periods. A common criticism of the work by Quijano, Mignolo and other decolonial thinkers, for example, has been precisely a tendency to simplify historical developments and sideline particularities to benefit a systemic understanding of social processes where everything is part of a coherent totality (Castro-Gómez 2019). This applies to Quijano’s conceptualization of race, which is said to be articulated almost exclusively around biological structures from the early stages of colonization. Historical evidence disputes this argument and suggests that ideas of race in the Iberian Peninsula before Columbus’ voyage—organized around an intricate combination of notions about physiology and anatomy, lineage, morality and conduct, all variable and conditioned by the environment—found continuation in Latin America during the Conquest (Wade 2015: 37). Bodies were not understood as immutable but could be altered by nature: for example, Spanish conquistadores feared that the tropical climate could make them lose their facial hair, which was considered a sign of masculinity (Earle 2012). The above discussion constitutes a good reminder that notions like race and nature are not stable or fixed (even within the same epistemic frameworks) but instead are more frequently defined by a combination of stability and change (Cooper 2005: 18; Wade 2010: 3; French 2012: 162). This is quite visible in the debates about race and nature during the nation-building era in Latin America. By the 1820s, most of Spanish America had gained independence. and, in the decades that followed, racist legal frameworks and institutions inherited from colonial society were progressively dismantled as these new nations embraced republican civic egalitarianism. By the 1860s,

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slavery had been abolished in all independent Latin America, with the important exception of Brazil, where it ended only in 1888. Yet, even if Iberian racial jurisprudence was undone, racism continued in everyday interaction. In fact, it experienced the influx of new forms of racial thinking, which was becoming increasingly oriented toward the natural sciences—especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This contrasts with colonial Latin America, where color was an important marker of social status (with white skin being the most appreciated), but other factors like ancestry, lineage, residence, occupation, dress, legal status and behavior also determined one’s racial classification and identity (Cope 1994; Klein and Vinson III 2007). Ideas about race in the republican period were also powerfully shaped by environmental determinism, which maintained that climate and nature were crucial factors in determining the characteristics of a human race and its potential for progress (Miller 2007: 107). This European theory identified ‘moderate’ climes (euphemism for European) as conducive to civilization. In contrast, tropical and desertic climes in Latin America, Africa, and other peripheral and colonial territories (classified as ‘extreme’) could only produce lazy and backward people, existing in an earlier stage of human evolution compared to whites because nature imposed upon civilization. The influx of these ideas cast a long shadow over nation-building debates (Miller 2007: 110). They affirmed the impossibility of Latin American development due to a combination of large non-white and mixed populations and supposedly hostile climates. Nation-building intellectuals—primarily men of European background—generally embraced white superiority as a natural fact but adapted and sometimes challenged aspects of European theories about race and nature. In Facundo (1845), Argentine intellectual and politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento returned to the image of the desert so prominent in Spanish colonial chronicles to argue about the ‘barbarizing’ effect of the Latin American countryside. This, according to him, particularly affected Indigenous people and gauchos, the rural inhabitants of the Pampas, who were often mixed-race and sometimes Black (Zalazar 1984: 414). Even though Sarmiento saw them as inferior to whites, he did not consider the latter exempt from the negative influence of topography and nature: “the Spanish race has not shown itself to be any more given to action, when, in the American deserts, it has been left to its own instincts.” (Sarmiento 2003: 51) Sarmiento did not see this barbarism as permanent and definitive: it could be reverted through ‘civilizing’ practices, including a rational capitalist approach to nature (like the creation of small farming colonies and urbanization) which would contribute to Argentina’s development and the ‘improvement’ of the country’s racial stock. The idea of mejorar la raza, common among Creole intellectuals of the time, implied whitening, but also the production of nationals educated within the protocols of European modernity and capitalism. Both things, in fact, were conceived as interweaved. Sarmiento would eventually revise his ideas about race and the environment in Conflictos y armonías de las razas en América (Conflict and Harmonies of Races in the Americas, 1883), written at a time in which the influx of positivism had led to a more

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biologicist approach to racial issues. In this text, he expressed his pessimism about the possibilities of ‘improving’ the race by means of altering environmental factors. Brazilian author Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands, 1902) also engaged with environmental deterministic ideas within the Social Darwinism characteristic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—in his case, to explicate the differential degrees of development between Brazilian regions (Anderson 2008: 548). He characterized the sertanejos (the inhabitants of the arid north-eastern Sertão region) as an inferior ‘sub-race’—its supposed inferiority partly explained by the drought-stricken environment in which they live and their inability to dominate it. It was nature—the arid hinterland—and its product—the mixed-race sertanejos—that, for da Cunha, collaborated to obstruct Brazil’s modernization. The following quote, with its dense writing and positivist overtones, warms about the alleged detrimental impact of the desertic environment on Sertão people, whom, according to da Cunha, are already predisposed to be biologically, intellectually, and morally weaker due to miscegenation: [T]he juxtaposition of characteristics means an intimate transfusion of tendencies; and the corresponding long period of transformation is by way of being a period of debilitation so far as the capacities of the crossed races are concerned; all of which increases the relative importance of the influence of environment. Environment is then, as it were better, able to stamp its own characteristic features upon the human organism in process of fusion (Da Cunha 1944, 66).

There were, too, Latin American intellectuals who challenged these racist ideas. Writing in the 1890s, Cuban writer José Martí criticized Sarmiento’s views by arguing that, rather than the colonization of nature through the deployment of rational and capitalist means, the real path to national progress necessitated an environmental consciousness that looked after non-human nature and valued humans’ relationship with it. Implicit here was a recuperation of Indigenous and Afro-descendant epistemologies (Castro Herrera 2004: 5). Martí’s views about nature were connected with a strong anti-racist stance that he unfolded in texts like “Mi raza” (My Race, 1893), where he questioned the argument, emanating from European racial thinking, that whites were biologically superior: “Peace calls for the common rights of nature; differences in rights, being contrary to nature, are enemies of peace. The white man who draws apart isolates the Negro. The Negro who draws apart drives the white man into isolation” (Martí 1945: 127). His work also embraced a defence of the mestizo (mixed-race) condition of large segments of Latin American societies, decried by scientific racism of the time as leading to degeneration—as seen in de Cunha’s quote.1 In the following years, other intellectuals would also contribute to a recuperation of mestizaje, often drawing on the very pseudoscientific and biologicist protocols of European racial ideas they aimed to refute (Poey Baro 1994). Mexican writer and educator José Vasconcelos’ theory of the ‘Cosmic Race’, influenced by his study of plants, is probably the most well-known manifestation of this

 This concern with mestizaje implied at the time, among other things, a tightening of regulations over sexual practices and, especially, those of non-white women. See Guy (1991); Salessi (2000); Wade (2009: 32).

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(Quintana-Navarrete 2021). In the book of the same name, from 1925, and the follow-up Indología, published the following year, he argues that what he identifies as the four races of the world (“the Black, the Indian, the Mongol, and the White”; Vasconcelos 1997: 9) would naturally mix to create a superior race that would synthesise the best of each human group. Despite its defence of racial admixture and critique of white supremacy, Vasconcelos’ ideas sometimes reproduce some of the eugenicist notions they aim to impugn and cannot help relapsing into the racialist framework of the time. But even many intellectuals and politicians who believed in the natural superiority of whites during the late 19th century and early 20th century saw mestizaje a ‘necessary evil’, as they considered it a critical instrument to whiten the national population and dilute—and ultimately eliminate—Indigenous and Black phenotypes. Furthermore, contrary to the United States and parts of Europe, eugenic notions in Latin America were primarily shaped by Lamarckian theories about the inheritable condition of traits attained by living organisms during a single lifetime (Stepan 1996; Wade 2010: 31). Reformers and hygienists of the time assumed that, by altering the environmental and social conditions in which individuals lived, the contended degenerating effect of racial mixture could be reversed, and the racial stock of future generations improved. It is important to understand that all these 19th-century and early 20th-century debates took place against the backdrop of an export boom in Latin America propelled by industrialization in Western Europe and the United States. The liberal elites sought to re-articulate the region’s relationship with the world’s economy as a supplier of raw materials and importer of manufactured goods. Ericka Beckman (2013) coined the term ‘capital fictions’ to describe the writings of liberal free market supporters—including Sarmiento, Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and Colombian author José Eustasio Rivera—that, at different times during the 19th century and up to the first decades of the 20th century, manifested the optimism associated with this postindependence commodity boom, which they saw as the path to national progress and wealth. In this context, the state and capital pushed to advance the agricultural and mining frontier at the expense of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, which were expelled from their ancestral lands and/or suffered the effects of ecological destruction. Scientific racism was often used to justify this expansion: Indigenous and other non-white people were deemed lacking in civilization and unable to fully realize the pecuniary potential of the land.

The Environment and Race in Latin American Cultural Production Given the alternative relation between human and non-human nature found in several Indigenous and Afro-descendant cosmologies, it is unsurprising that, with the rise of ecocriticism, ecofeminism and other critical paradigms in Latin America in the past

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decades, many identify cultural products that engage with these ontologies as prime examples of distinctive Latin American forms of literary and artistic ecologism, which would differ from US American eco-criticism—and could overcome many of its problematic aspects (French and Heffes 2021: 4). Eco-criticism emerged in the Englishspeaking academia in the 1980s and 1990s around the notion of ‘wilderness’, with its roots in European and US American Romanticism, which pointed towards an ideal of a natural world untouched by human agency. Since the 1990s, this perspective has been criticized by second-wave ecocritics in the English-speaking academia (and postcolonial thinkers) precisely for its Western-centric anthropocentrism and erasure of native people’s presence in and claim to the land (Cronon, 1996; Guha, 2002). This problematic nature-first criterion was less influential in the Latin American tradition, where nonhuman nature is frequently in liaison with the human, under the influence of Indigenous worldviews. In fact, in a seminal article, Jorge Paredes and Benjamin McLean (2000: 23) contended that “neo-indigenismo and ecologism are two tendencies that [. . .] go hand in hand in Spanish America.” Though Paredes and McLean’s text mentions antecedents like the Popol Vuh (the 16th-century text that recounts the mythology and history of the Kʼicheʼ people), their taxonomy centers on contemporary production that has more firmly distanced from previous neglect of Indigenous cosmologies and openly challenges the political, epistemological, and environmental legacies of European imperialism. Under their classification, it is possible to include work by Indigenous authors, like Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (I, Rigoberta Menchú, 1983) by Guatemalan Kʼicheʼ Rigoberta Menchú or contemporary Chilean Mapuche poetry by Elicura Chihuailaf, Leonel Lienlaf or Juan Paulo Huirimilla, and non-Indigenous writers, including novels like La mujer habitada (The Inhabited Woman, 1988), Sofía de los presagios (Sofia of the Prophecies, 1991) and Waslala (1996) by Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli, La loca de Gandoca (Madwoman of Gandoca, 1992) by Costa Rican Anacristina Rossi, and Mundo del fin del mundo (The World at the End of the World, 1992) by Chilean Luis Sepúlveda, elements of Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz’s poetry, as well as Galeano’s essay writing (Marrero Henríquez, 2010). Paredes and McLean’s typology leaves out previous 20th-century trends, like the regionalist novela de la tierra, classical indigenismo, or the Boom, which for them would not constitute environmental literature, since they are still articulated around the binary nature/culture. In what seems to be an oversight, they also tend to omit works that engage with environmental knowledges of Afrodescendant communities in areas like the Colombian Pacific (Chocó). Steven Skattebo (2000) has challenged Paredes and McLean’s argument, arguing about the possibility of including part of the Latin American canon, like Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Mario Vargas Llosa, which, though principally defined by Euro-centric thinking, would nonetheless express Indigenous and Afro-Latin positions about nature. However, the extent to which this inclusion can be read as leading to fully-fledged ecological positions in these authors’ work is debatable. The rise of environmental literature at the turn of the 21st century manifests a general turn in Latin American cultural production more widely towards a more

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militant ecological position. This echoes not only the implementation of Indigenousinfluenced environmental legislation mentioned before but also a rise of environmental conflicts in the region as a response to the crisis of neoliberalism and the intensification of neo-extractivism (Svampa 2015, 2019). Neoliberal capitalism’s continuous need for ‘cheap nature’ has meant the expansion of the extractive frontier towards territories that in the past were deemed unproductive, as well as a drastic increase in the scale of activity—facilitated by recent technological developments. Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other non-white groups have been disproportionally affected by the systematic advance over their territories and communities of agribusiness, timber, oil and mining companies—with the complicity or apathy of national and local governments. The consequences of neo-extractivism have configured in Latin America a contemporary scenario where the environmentalization of protest runs parallel to the racialization of environmental degradation (Leff 2000; Zibechi 2013). In this sense, some works have drawn conceptual connections with Robert Nixon’s discussion of ‘slow violence’ in the Anglophone, postcolonial context (2011) and Joan Martínez Alier’s ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (2003) to address the situations of nonwhite peoples in Latin America (as well as Chicanxs in the United States) and their portrayal in contemporary literary and cultural expressions, some of it produced by members of these affected communities (Martín-Junquera 2013; Kressner, Mutis and Pettinaroli 2019). It is particularly these cultural products that are redirecting the discussion in the arts towards a heightened awareness of the centrality of environmental issues. An interesting example is provided by Killa (Moon, 2017), the first full-length fiction film by Runa Indigenous filmmaker Alberto Muenala, from Ecuador. The plot touches on a topic addressed previously in Latin American culture: a foreign mining company pushes an Indigenous community out of their ancestral land with the state’s connivance. Yet, whereas earlier works, including the novel El tungsteno (Tungsten, 1931) by Peruvian writer César Vallejo and the film Lloksy Kaymata/¡Fuera de aquí! (Out of Here!, 1977) by Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés, present a very similar narrative under the prism of a socialist-inflected viewpoint according to which struggles are organized around economic issues, Alberto Muenala puts the opposing views of nature advocated by the neo-extractivist logic and Andean ontologies at the center of the conflict around mining. The narrative of El tungsteno and Lloksy Kaymata! centers around the denunciation of Indigenous exploitation and land dispossession as a manifestation of US American neo-imperialism and internal colonialism. In Sanjinés’ film, in actuality, Andean people are described chiefly as campesinos, thus emphasizing class position over ethnic identity. In Killa, on the contrary, the land needs to be protected and defended not only because it is the means through which material subsistence is guaranteed but because it exists in a nurturing and reciprocal relationship with the community. For example, a voice-over narrator representing the Kichwa/ Runa viewpoint tells the spectators:

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In our Cosmos, we are children of Taita Imbabura and Mama Cotacachi.2 We are children of the corn, of the rivers. We have been guardians of the Earth for many years, during which humanity and nature were one. However, this equilibrium was broken when humans poisoned their hearts with greed, and a materialistic thirst started to end the lives of all creatures who co-exist on Earth (03:33–04.48).

The quote, with its reference to ‘our Cosmos’, indicates that tensions and confrontations in the film are not purely ideological but are primarily ontological. Killa favours what, following Arturo Escobar (2020) and others, we could denominate a pluriversal perspective, wherein what is clashing are oppositional worlds—a vision quite distant from the calls for Marxist revolution and agrarian reform in Vallejo or Sanjinés’ works. Cultural products like Killa illustrates the shift in past decades towards new ways in which the fights against racism and ecological destruction are being brought together in Latin American cultural and literary production and Latin American societies more widely. But, as shown, they also participate in long-standing dynamics and debates about the various connections between race and the environment that have fundamentally shaped and continue to shape Latin America.

Works Cited Alimonda, Héctor. “La colonialidad de la naturaleza. Una aproximación a la Ecología Política Latinoamericana.” La Naturaleza colonizada. Ecología política y minería en América Latina. Ed. Héctor Alimonda. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2011. 21–60. Anderson, Mark D. “From Natural to National Disasters: Drought and the Brazilian Subject in Euclides Da Cunha’s Os Sertões.” Hispaniai 91.3 (2008): 547–557. Beckman, Ericka. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Biermann, Frank, and Eva Lövbrand. “The Conceptual Politics of the Anthropocene: Science, Philosophy, and Culture.” Anthropocene Encounters: New Directions in Green Political Thinking. Eds. Frank Biermann and Eva Lövbrand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 23–84. Casid, Jill H. Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Castro Herrera, Guillermo. “José Martí: para una cultura latinoamericana de la naturaleza.” Polis 2.7 (2004). http://journals.openedition.org/polis/6362 (22 September 2022). Castro-Gómez, Santiago. El tonto y los canallas. Notas para un republicanismo transmoderno. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2019. Conklin, Beth, and Laura R. Graham. “The shifting middle ground: Amazonian Indians and eco-politics.” American Anthropologist 97.4 (1995): 695–710. Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. Cope, R. Douglas. The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

 Imbabura and Cotacachi are volcanos in the Western Cordillera of the northern Ecuadorian Andes.

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Da Cunha, Euclides. Rebellion in the Backlands. Trans. Samuel Putnam. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1944. Danowski, Déborah, and Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro. The Ends of the World. Trans. Rodrigo Nunes. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. De la Cadena, Marisol, and Mario Blaser. A World of Many Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Earle, Rebecca. The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Escobar, Arturo. “Political Ecology of Globality and Difference.” Gestión y ambiente 9.3 (2006): 29–44. ——. “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program.” Cultural Studies 21.2–3 (2007): 179–210. ——. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. French, Jennifer L. “Voices in the Wilderness: Environment, Colonialism, and Coloniality in Latin American Literature.” Review (Americas Society) 45.2 (2012): 157–166. French, Jennifer, and Gisella Heffes, eds. The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017. Guy, Donna J. Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6.1 (2015): 159–165. Killa. Dir. Alberto Muenala. Prod. Corporación Rupai and Runacinema. Ecuador, 2017. Klein, Herbert, and Ben Vinson III. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kressner, Ilka, Ana María Mutis, and Elizabeth Pettinaroli. Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World. Eds. Ilka Kressner, Ana María Mutis, and Elizabeth Pettinaroli. London: Routledge, 2019. Leff, Enrique. “Pensar la complejidad ambiental.” La complejidad ambiental. Ed. Enrique Leff. México: Siglo XXI Editores, 2000. 7–53. Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. London: Yale University Press, 2018. Lloksy Kaymata—¡Fuera de aquí! Dir. Jorge Sanjinés/Grupo Ukamau. Bolivia, 1977. Luciano, Dana. “The Inhuman Anthropocene.” Avidly: A Channel Los Angeles Review of Books, 22 March 2015. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.” Cultural Studies 21.2–3 (2007): 240–270. Malm, Andreas, and Alf Hornborg. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” The Anthropocene Review 1.1 (2014): 62–69. Marrero Henríquez, José Manuel. “Ecocrítica e hispanismo.” Ecocríticas: literatura y medio ambiente. Eds. Carmen Flys Junquera, José Manuel Marrero Henríquez and Julia Barella Vigal. Frankfurt and Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2010. 79–89. Martí, José. “My Race.” Trans. Rachel Loughridge. Phylon 6.2 (1945):126–128. Martín Junquera, Imelda. Landscapes of Writing in Chicano Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Martínez Alier, Joan. The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Cheltenham, Gloucestershire: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002. Mignolo, Walter. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005. Miller, Shawn Williams. An Environmental History of Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2013.

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Moore, Jason W. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44.3 (2017): 594–630. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Nouzeilles, Gabriela. “Introducción.” La naturaleza en disputa: Retóricas del cuerpo y el paisaje en América Latina. Ed Gabriela Nouzeilles. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2002. 11–38. Paredes, Jorge, and Benjamin McLean. “Hacia una tipología de la literatura ecológica en español.” Ixquic (2000): 1–37. Poey Baró, Dionisio. “‘Race’ and Anti-Racism in Jose Martí’s ‘Mi Raza.’” Journal Contributions in Black Studies 12 (1994): 55–61. Pulido, Laura. “Racism and the Anthropocene.” Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene. Eds. Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 116–128. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology 15.2 (2000): 215–232. ——. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21.2–3 (2007): 168–178. Quintana-Navarrete, Jorge. “José Vasconcelos’s Plant Theory: The Life of Plants, Botanical Ethics, and the Cosmic Race.” Hispanic Review 89.1 (2021): 69–92. Salessi, Jorge. Médicos maleantes y maricas. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2000. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. Trans. Kathleen Ross. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Schiebinger, Londa L., and Claudia Swan. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Eds. Londa L. Schiebinger and Claudia Swan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Skattebo, Steven Clarence. An Ecocritical Analysis of the Voices of Nature in Latin American Magical Realism. PhD Dissertation. Iowa City: The University of Iowa, 2000. Steffen, Will, et al. “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.” The Anthropocene Review 2.1 (2015): 81–98. Stepan, Nancy. The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Svampa, Maristella. “Commodities Consensus: Neoextractivism and Enclosure of the Commons in Latin America.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 114.1 (2015): 65–82. ——. Las fronteras del neoextractivismo en América Latina: Conflictos socioambientales, giro ecoterritorial y nuevas dependencias. Bielefeld: Bielefeld University Press, 2019. Tironi, Manuel. “An Introduction to ‘The Anthropocene in Chile: Toward a New Pact of Coexistence.’” Environmental humanities 11.2 (2019): 465–466. Todd, Zoe. “Indigenizing the Anthropocene.” Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. Eds. Heather Margaret Davis and Etienne Turpin. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015. 241–54. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Vallejo, César. El tungsteno. Lima: Universidad de Ciencias y Humanidades, 2011. Varese, Stefano. “The Ethnopolitics of Indian Resistance in Latin America.” Latin American Perspectives 23.2 (1996): 58–71. Vasconcelos, José. The Cosmic Race / La raza cósmica. Trans. Didier T. Jaen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Vergès, Françoise. “Racial Capitalocene.” Futures of Black Radicalism. Eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin. London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2017. 72–82. Wade, Peter. Race and Sex in Latin America. London: Pluto Press, 2009.

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——. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press, 2010. ——. Race: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Walsh, Catherine. “¿Son posibles unas ciencias sociales/culturales otras? Reflexiones en torno a las epistemologías decoloniales.” Nómadas 26 (2007): 102–113. Wolford, Wendy. “The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111.6 (2021): 1622–1639. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene.” GSA Today 18.2 (2008): 4–8. Zalazar, Daniel. “Las posiciones de Sarmiento frente al indio.” Revista Iberoamericana 50.127 (1984): 411–427. Zibechi, Raúl. Brasil potencia: entre la integración regional y un nuevo imperialismo. Bogotá: Ediciones Desde Abajo, 2013.

Matías Ayala Munita

Resilience The notion of resilience is used in a diverse range of disciplines, which have different implicit theories, methods, and objects of theory. Resilience is spoken of in politics, history, business, administration, urbanism, and the list goes on and on, as if the productivity of this concept could expand like a contagion.1 Two disciplines in particular have determined the prevailing meanings of this concept: ecology and psychology. Located in different epistemological domains, they have enabled this broad conceptual range. These two disciplines present the relation of a certain type of unit—of varying size and complexity—with larger environment. In ecology, the notion of resilience was proposed by C. S. Holling in 1973, where he defines it as the capacity of a complex system to remain cohesive during alterations (Holling 1973: 17). The idea of resilience was inspired by the concept of homeostatis in post-war cybernetics. Homeostasis indicates a system’s capacity to rapidly return to its previous equilibrium after being altered, without fundamentally changing or being harmed. Thus, for cybernetics, as well as ecology, its object is a “complex adaptive system.” However, in ecology those systems are not merely modular, but rather found in an open network of agents, interrelations, and simultaneous processes. A complex adaptive system is a system that has a large number of interrelated parts and agents with an adaptive capacity. The multiplicity of internal relations and their openings grant them resilience in the face of external disturbances. Many things from immune systems, the stock market, a society to the biosphere can be understood as a complex adaptive system. On the other hand, in psychology, the first studies focused on child development in adverse environments such as poverty and other “risk factors” (Martin-Breen and Anderies 2011: 34). In this discipline, the emphasis is obviously individual and resilience is understood as a vulnerable subject’s capacity to be exposed to adversity, poverty, and traumatic episodes and get out of them in a “positive way.” For psychology, resilience is a sort of counter-trauma, thus both the unconscious and the anachronic temporality of the traumatic return are negated in favor of the consciousness that is affirmed in linear time and interpersonal relations. In short, resilience both in ecology and psychology speaks of exposure to power relations and violence, but approaches them from the capacity to be resisted. With

 The Stockholm Resilience Center (https://www.stockholmresilience.org/) represents one attempt to the elevate the concept to the rank of a discipline and institutionally order the meanings and scope of the concept. Translated by Liz Mason-Deese. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-024

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this, it removes the focus on material, physical, extractivist, and colonial violence implicit in the concept and, in turn, hides the structural precarity and vulnerability of subjects and communities, animal, plant, and living systems. At the same time, it supposes a linear temporality in which alterations are conceived as mere “difficulties” and “obstacles” that are overcome and left in the past. Therefore, the figure of trauma as an inscription that returns with anachronistic insistence and, going even further, the very idea of the unconscious, are obliterated. Resilience has become a key word in contemporary neoliberal discourse. Although this concept presupposes that subjects and groups—defined as “free” and able to make decisions—find themselves more profoundly limited in their capacity for autonomy and agency. In a state of increasing neoliberal precarization as a strategy of governmentality, subjects and groups must conceive themselves as flexible and adaptable individuals (Lorey 2016: 28). Furthermore, faced with generalized insecurity, resilience has become a normative concept, an ideal for being able to adapt and survive (Chandler and Reid 2016: 15). It is for these reasons that resilience has taken off so much during the recent decades of deepening neoliberalism in Latin America and the world. A critical notion of resilience, on the other hand, must take the precaution of doubting the limits—whether of the subject or the complex system—that suffers disturbances, shocks, and violence. There is an implicit methodological individualism to the dominant idea of resilience: first, it assumes the separation between the singularity and its environment and, second, it infers that the singularity will be able to stay cohesive, with stable identity, functions, and processes while it adapts to an external disturbance. Therefore, ecology affirms that disturbances have a “threshold” or a “breaking point” in which that identity disappears and in which the system can no longer continue to regenerate itself (Walker 2020: 11). A critical notion of resilience must work not only with the porous borders between subjects, objects, and systems, but it must also question the very notion of thresholds in which the singularity, identity, and the living are articulated. Thus, as an open concept, resilience should affirm an opening to change and to deforming one’s own identity or, even more, an opening to metamorphosis. At the same time, it should always be conceived “beyond the human” (Walker and Cooper 2018: 385), that is, understood based on the tension between singularities and their multiple open relations. Aesthetic production in Latin America allows for thinking about a critical notion of resilience in a cultural register. First, due to the fact that living Indigenous communities themselves are a characteristic example of resilience in the present. Second, because, environmental aesthetics that are critically articulated with the present have emerged from those communities. In this way, what I propose reading in Jaime Luis Heunún’s (1967) book of poems Reducciones (2012) should be understood based on this critical notion of cultural resilience. Reducciones speaks of the persistence of the Huilliche people through a collection of subjects, spaces, and discourses that unfold in a temporal arc that crosses from the past to the present of the 21st century. The

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Huilliches are the branch of the Mapuche who live toward the south, approximately between the current cities of Valdivia and Osorno. Reducciones does not aspire to maintain the unity of the Huilliche people and continue the repetition of vociferous slogans, but rather, it lies halfway between the spectral of memory and political resistance, between singularity and the collective, humans and the non-human in transpose, on the literary plane, a critical notion of cultural resilience. Reducciones carries out a type of work of mourning but also a literary update of the decimated population through a broad gallery of characters. Likewise, it represents spaces and territories constantly being “reduced” by the Chilean state and the capitalist machine and its accumulation by dispossession. Huenún, however, does not limit himself to chronicling and lamenting the past, but rather he brings it to the present to see the possibilities for resilience. More than mere neoliberal adaptation, Reducciones understands cultural resilience as the cultural and symbolic practices that are updated as anachronistic conjunction and a possible political project. These relations can be spatial, interspecies, plant, inorganic, or material. From this point of view, a notion of cultural resilience can be read in Huenún’s work that remains between the systemic and individual notions to remain indeterminate between the organic and the inorganic, the singular and the multiple. To understand this work, it is necessary to briefly reconstruct how Mapuche poetry has developed in Chile over recent decades. One of its persistent motives is to interrogate its own cultural tradition in relation to the relentless historical violence and requirements of the present. The traditions becomes relevant on being recreated to keep itself alive, while the cultural discourse seeks to have a political aspect that unites different territories and forces, geographic, social, and cultural spaces. In this scenario, the poetry genre has been very important in the general resilience of Mapuche culture since it was one of the first cultural practices that was accepted by Chilean official culture at the end of the 20th century. In the early 1990s, along with the consolidation of the Chilean political Transition, poets such as Leonel Lienlaf and Elicura Chihuailaf began winning some of the most reputable national awards (Crow 2013: 184). This acceptance by official culture did not stop those writers from advocating for Mapuche territorial independence and being capable—some through their works and others in interviews—of criticizing the actions of successive Chilean governments. This Mapuche tradition is a significant example of cultural resilience in the field of environmental humanities. On the other hand, it has taken Chilean poetic tradition—fairly significant in local literary culture— and reconfigured it in a very interesting way. Thus, it starts to allow for reading Chilean poetry based on Mapuche poetry, and not only the other way around. In other words, it is no longer only a matter of looking for features of Neruda in Chihuailaf’s poetry, but now Chihuailaf’s poetry allows for reading Neruda in a new way. There are a series of styles and axes to Mapuche poetry that shift according to the author’s geographic origin, whether they live in urban or rural areas, whether the writing is bilingual or monolingual, among other determining factors, as well as the traditional factors of education level, social class, and gender. This diversity can be

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understood through two general perspectives. The first emphasizes the continuity of Mapuche culture over time, and the other its discontinuity and displacement. However, both are modulations of poetic discourse as cultural resilience. The first, exemplified in Lienlaf and Chihuailaf’s poetry, develops a relationship that is interpenetrated with nature, as the mark of a historical territory, of a cyclical plant temporality, and mythical opening that coherently organizes the different spaces, collectivities, and subjects (García Barrera n/d). Some critiques have understood this as the poetry traditionally from Mapuches of the central zone (Park 2007: 156-157). The second strategy is based on diaspora and dispersion. In general, its authors are urban or Huilliche (Mapuche from the South) and several of them write in Spanish since they are already the first or second generation living in the city. These authors—such as, Jaime Luis Huenún, David Añiñir, and Daniela Catrileo—ask, from the 21st century, how to maintain the resilience of Mapuche culture in urban space, distanced from “traditional” places and in an intensely mediatized culture. Some critiques have proposed this separation as generational: the first are the poets who aspire to cultural continuity (in the 1980s and 1990s; in the latter group, from 2000 on), instead, “it is not the same cosmovision as those ones and they do not seek to return to what once was. They do not distance themselves from the past with nostalgia, regret, or disdain. They do not consider hybridity shameful, problematic, or a negation of their past, it simply is” (Park 159). In this scenario, Jaime Luis Huenún writes poetry based on a wide range of knots and problems of Mapuche-Huilliche culture in this moment of cultural interpenetration. He knows that the past and future must be creatively articulated to change the present, and strategies of resilience must arise from there. Reducciones, which is his most ambitious book to date, is composed of a sum of poetic scenes, character portraits, dramatic monologues, and lyrical reflections about a Huilliche community located in Chauracahuín (the Huilliche name for the province of Osorno) that has been attacked and reduced. The collection of voices and spaces assemble a text that lies somewhere between a record of the chronicle of extinguished lives and Western poetic elaboration, family memory, and the Mapuche community. Huenún has been characterized by articulating cosmopolitan literary affiliations with geneaological and cultural affiliations. Already in the titles of his books such as Puerto Trakl (2002), Fanon city meu (2014), and La calle Mandelstam (2016), the names of the poets Georg Trakl, Ossip Maldelstam, and the postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon can be seen. In these books, the author connects disparate elements: Western literary traditions, Huilliche affects and histories, awareness of the violence of history, subjective elaborations and the mobile of the decentered present. Working with contradictory elements is the hallmark of this poet who writes in Spanish with awareness of the “violence of the letter” inherent in the language’s history. Therefore, Huenún demonstrates a textual and literary awareness like few others among Mapuche poets: he writes in Spanish, the language of the Empire and the Republic, although it is also the code of his formal knowledge (he studied Spanish Pedagogy Pedagogy at university). Furthermore, Spanish is Huenún’s mother tongue, therefore, it is also the language of affects and

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memory. The resilience of Mapuche culture, Huenún proposes, has to be in a third space, neither completely Chilean or Mapuche, but always within poetic discourse itself. The poet has spoken of a “champurria” language and practice, as a sort of unstable and fragmentary mixture among assymetrical and unequal pieces. In contrast with Chilean national cultural discourse—which still tends to be taught in schools—of the population as a result of a mestizaje that heals conflicts, Huenún, instead, resides in a place of the impossibility of harmonic synthesis. Reducciones is temporally ordered and covers an arc from the Conquest and arrival of the Spaniards to the present in which subjects appear articulated around dispossession and physical and cultural violence. Toward the beginning, he imitates the colonial speech with which conquistadores and settlers confront the Huilliches who they must educate in their own language. Thus begins the poem “Che Sungún” (a name from the Huilliche language, as explained by a footnote). Che Sungún E fablan lingüa bárbara, vuesa merced, como cogida del rayo, torcida reciamente al modo de las frondas en tierras de espesuras Non caigo en el sentido desta idioma de árboles, áspera como pellejo de merino soleado. ¿Será de faz montuna o dirá piedad de amor? No creo sea fácil Darlos al catecismo Sin convertirlos antes Al acento espaniol. Che Sungún And they speak a barbarous tongue, your lordship, as if snatched from lightning, tightly twisted in the manner of fronds on land with thickets. I can make nothing out of this language of the trees, rough like the sunned hide of a Merino sheep. Will it be a wild face or will it say pity and love?

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I don’t think it will be easy to teach them the catechism without converting them first to the Spanish accent.)2

This poem is a dramatic monologue that is presented with a clearly ironic meaning: on the one hand, it reaffirms the centrality of Spanish as an imperial language, but, on the other hand, it clearly establishes the absurdity of its discourse. Its civilizational fantasies degrade the native language and associate it with plants and animals (trees and Merino sheep), while also excluding it from Catholicism. The dramatic monologue is the characteristic procedure of the first section of Reducciones—entitled “Entrance to Chauracahuin”—in which Spanish and Huilliche characters make a counterpoint of experiences that tears down the hegemony of the traditional imperial and republican narrative. Although Spanish characters predominate in this section, they present an ironic and critical inversion of their imperial discourses. Additionally, the subjectives in specific communicative situations deconstruct, based on the particular, the official discourse, both of the victim and the attacker, while broadening the affective and experiential arc. In contrast, in this section there are lyrical poems that present spaces and plant species in an aestheticized way: the images are defined and contrasted, they make up a harmonious arrangement, which is able to form a “natural landscape.” Nature, as for other Mapuche poets, is presented as a place of articulation between the collective and the historical, the animal and the plant, the human and the divine. A source of recognition of historical territories, of food and work in the community, of Mapuche cosmogenic relations, in the face of this complex backdrop, the dramatic nature of violence, dispossession, and death in its temporal unfolding stands out even more. For example, this poem from the beginning of Reducciones that takes the place of an introduction: Los viajes, las vigilias 1 Izamos la bandera de nieve en nuestros huesos, —las estrellas de la muerte río arriba— y caímos al barranco. Fuego hicimos, blanco fuego en la noche aullante de las piedras. Cómo te llamas, río. Ciál es tu nombre, árbol. Dónde te mueres, viento.

 All poems by Jaime Luis Heunún in this chapter are translated by Cynthia Steele.

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Escuchan los caballos ahora el rumor de nuestra sangre en el sueño. Mañana uno de ellos caerá bajo el hacha de nuestra hambre. En la roca lucirá su cráneo como un sol diminuto en el limpio amanecer de las montañas. The journeys, the vigils 1 Raising the flag of snow in our bones, —the stars of death upriver— we fell into the ravine. We made fire, white fire in the howling night of stones. What’s your name, river. What are you called, tree. Where do you die, wind Listen to the horses now the rumbling of our blood in dreams. Tomorrow one of them will fall beneath the hatchet of our hunger. On the rock his skull will gleam like a tiny sun in the clean mountain dawn.

In this poem, the color white brings together the snow, bones, and stars. Death, dreams, collective hunger (“the rumbling of our blood / in dreams”) and plant space are combined in a halfway point between human mourning and the stones. The lyrical enunciation of Reducciones establishes a dialogue between the subject and nature and the community. At times, it could be located close to the poetry of Chileans Jorge Teillier and perhaps Pablo Neruda, in particular, due to how it weaves together enunciation in the first person plural and the rhetoric of apostrophes and personifications of elements of the landscape, for example: “What’s your name, river. / What are you called, tree. / Where do you die, wind.” If this indicates a communicative and harmonious relation with nature in traditional poetry, in contrast, in Huenún’s poetry— due to it being represented as Huilliche cultural resistance—the relation between the human collective and the plant environment is not conceived as separate in the way of the Western division between nature and culture. This lyrical poem, instead, seeks to articulate the mourning of the decimated Mapuche community in the plant space itself. And while this mourning could also be considered a projection between the

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absent human and the vegetable space, the separation between the two is presented based on a historical reflection about colonial and national violence. Cultural resilience in these poems is a spatial and social mediation in which Western categories, such as nature and history, are disputed and placed in tension. For Huenún—as in Amerindian epistemologies—one must operate critically “interweaving the two opposing worlds in a dynamic and contentious frame, in which they interpenetrate one another without ever fusing or hybridizing” (Rivera Cusicanqui 2015: 302). The relation between bodies, their memory and exhibition is the central theme of the section “Four Funerary Songs” that reproduces three 19th century anthropological photographs of Indigenous peoples and one of an open and numbered skull. Between natural history and history itself, the anthropological section in museums is an indicator of biopolitical state intervention (Andermann 2007: 40). Huenún’s appropriation in “Four Funerary Songs,” inverts the direction of the national narrative to present it as a history of violence. A final note in the book accounts for the textual transcription taken from recent volumes published by the University of La Plata (Huenún 2012: 167). Literary appropriation has become a widespread procedure in the 21st century through the expansion and massification of the internet (“cut and paste”) and the collage and montage of avant-garde filliation (Goldsmith 2015: 24) and Huenún uses it freely. The Mapuche-Huilliche genocide, the expropriation of lands by the Republic of Chile, and the forced civilizational “integration” are concentrated in the figure of “reduction” in this book. Reduction, is defined by the RAE: “In colonial America, the population nucleus in which disperse Indigenous peoples were grouped, with the goal of evangelizing them and cultural assimiliation.” On the one hand, then, there is reduction of the population and territory, of language and culture. However, on the other hand, “reductions” can also allude to the literary, historical, and cultural imagination that Huenún carries out to select subjects, discourses, and spaces with which he symbolizes, broadens, and expands the collective experience of dispossession. Indigenous reduction is, then, expanded by Huenún’s literary imagination to produce cultural resilience. For Jaime Luis Huenún, the Huilliche people is a gallery of characters, including family members, ancestors, neighbors, and acquaintances, in the last half of the book. The section “Reductions” starts with autobiographical prose: “I come, by paternal blood, from a Huilliche stock that still maintains a diminished settlement in the redoubts of Quilacahuín, a locality located 35 kilometers northeast from the city of Osorno” (Huenún 2012: 99). Thus, Huenún, through biographical data, broadens the subjects, personalizing them with first and last name in diverse spatial and plant locations (rivers, islands, forests, etc.). The collectivity is reduced to individual subjects, collective property to private property, the Che sungún speaking of poetry written in Spanish. Below is one of these portraits:

Resilience

José María Huaiquipán cabalga en círculos sobre el río de los cielos Me han llorado mis mujeres y mis padres en el mes de las cosechas. Que me he muerto gritan ellos en las lomas mientras cortan los trigales sembrados por mi mano. Vi mi vida reventada por las balas y cubierta por las flores de febrero. Vi mi sangre confundirse con la sangre del caballo que ahora monto sobre el agua. Ya no sangro y soy más joven en el viento que levanta mi caballo sobre el río. No recuerdo ya mi casa ni los bosques que de noche atravesé borracho. Sólo escucho el canto de los árboles donde duermen los pájaros del sol. Y las voces de los hombres en las lanchas atestadas de vacunos y corderos. Miran ellos mi cara transparente donde brillan las estrellas de la tarde. Miran ellos mi rastro en la espesura de las aguas que bajan hacia el mar José María Huaiquipán rides his horse in circles over the river of heaven My women and parents have cried over me during the month of the harvest. That I’ve died, they shout to the hills, cutting the wheat fields sown by my hand. I saw my life cut short by bullets and covered with the flowers of February. I saw my blood mingled with the blood of the horse I’m now riding over the water. I’m no longer bleeding now and I’m younger than the wind that lifts my horse over the river. I can’t remember my house or the woods that I crossed through drunk that night. All I hear is the song of the trees where the birds of the sun sleep. And the voices of the men in boats packed with cattle and lambs. They see my transparent face where the afternoon stars shine. They see my imprint in the thicket of the waters that descend to the sea.

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In this dramatic monologue, the recently deceased Huaiquipán speaks as a new specter. Specters are a form of life that embodies a virtual remnant or a spiritual survivor of the subject. Furthermore, it is a popular figure that crystallizes a series of subjective and social tensions around the conjectural survival of individuals. Viveiros de Castro proposes that Indigenous perspectivism starts from a “sociospiritual continuum”— which includes humans, animals, and spirits—that can take on different bodies, species, and living forms (Viveiros de Castro 2010: 29-30). In the poem, the subject finds himself passing between the living and the dead, the human and the plant, the social and the landscape. The poem carries out the work of mourning and, at the same time, is a poetic chronicle of that death. Andrea Echeverría proposes that Huenún follows the “amulpüllün,” the Huilliche funerary ritual as a restoration of memory. Echeverria argues that “the people remembered in [Reducciones] did not have amulpüllün for various non–explicit reasons, which could include the lack of public office, not being people with much status in their communities or having had an unexpected or violent death” (Echeverría 2017: 840). Recovering this funeral ritual would be the work of poetic mourning and recording memory. Between mourning and resistance, between the past and the present, Reducciones by Jaime Luis Huenún overlaps natural and symbolic space, subjective and collective elements, cultural resilience and literary text. Additionally, it is eminently political poetry since it knows it must articulate with the present to be an articulation of social changes. Therefore, almost at the end of the book, there are poems dedicated to Mapuches who have recently been killed by the Chilean state apparatus: Jaime Mendoza Collío in 2009 and Matías Catrileo in 2008 (Huenún 2012: 155-179). The text “In David’s ruka” is proposed in dialogue with the present, surely dedicated to the poet David Añiñir, whose proletarian and urban literary style he emulates. Reducciones ends with the poem “Testimony” in which he recalls his grandmother—also alluded to in the first line of the book—who is the subject who tells the collective stories to the poet and allows him to connect family experiences with political ones, memory and history. “We will continue writing about grandmothers, Salazar . . .” is the verse repeated in that poem in which the personal and the collective are linked. The cultural resilience that is articulated in Jaime Luis Huenún’s Reducciones starts from a balanced unit (the Huilliche community of Chauracahuín) that is not only altered by the Conquest, but also passes the “threshold” or “breaking point” of alteration in which identity is placed in doubt and the system can no longer regenerate itself. Rather than decree a simple extinction, this critical notion of resilience demonstrates how the text attempts to articulate that spectral identity and delves into an anachronic temporality. On the other hand, beyond the violence, dispersion, and reduction of Huilliche territory, the text attempts to achieve a certain unity, in a coming community. The book brings together elements to produce a change toward collective articulation. Reducciones, in this way, takes on the historical disturbance of the Huilliche people and aspires towards an ability to adapt, change, and reorganize themselves through mourning, memory, poetic discourse, and political organization. Therefore, it is this book itself

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that produces this community based on its own historical, linguistic, and cultural experience. In other words, the book itself is a resilient act, and one that proposes a critical notion of resilience through its poetic praxis. The critical notion of cultural resilience that emerges from Reducciones displays the porous borders between Mapuche culture and Chilean poetry, between mourning and resistance, between the living and the non-living. Articulated on the literary plane, it proposes a community that is open to change and to deforming its own identity in order to be able to maintain itself. More than mere adaptation to the neoliberal order, cultural resilience must be rooted in updated cultural and symbolic practices, such as, for example, the political project and Mapuche cultural recognition. In this way, it will be possible to weave together the singular and the collective, the past and the present. Resilience as a processual and deconstructive figure demonstrates how both the subjective and the collective are a complex system open to multiple relations, dissimilar temporalities, and diverse scales. Reducciones, by Jaime Luis Huenún, undoubtedly is able to do all of this in an exemplary way at the beginnings of the 21st century.

Works Cited Andermann, Jens. The Optic of the State. Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Chandler, David, and Julian Reid. The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. Crow, Joanna. The Mapuche in Modern Chile. A Cultural History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. García Barrera, Mabel. “La construcción del relato mítico ancestral en el arte y la poesía mapuche actual”. Papeles de trabajo – Centro de Estudios Interdisciplinarios en Etnolingüística y Antropología Socio-Cultural 20 (2020): 43-56. http://www.scielo.org.ar/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1852– 45082010000200005 (14 April 2023). Echeverría, Andrea. “La representación del ritual funerario mapuche en Reducciones de Jaime Huenún”. Latin American Research Review 52.5 (2017): 838-853. https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.218. Esposito, Roberto. Bios. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores, 2007. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Escritura no–creativa: gestionando el lenguaje en la era digital. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2015. Holling, C. S. “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems”. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973):1–23. Huenún, Jaime Luis. Reducciones. Santiago: Lom, 2012. Lorey, Isabell. Estado de inseguridad. Gobernar la precariedad. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2016. Martin-Breen, Patrick, and J. Marty Anderies. Resilience: A Literature Review. Bellagio Initiative, Brighton: IDS, 2011. https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/20.500.12413/3692/BellagioRockefeller%20bp.pdf (14 April 2023). Park, James. “Discursos y poética mapuche–huilliche actual: cambio generacional y diferencia territorial”. Alpha 24 (2007): 139-162. http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0718-22012007000100009. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. Sociología de la imagen. Miradas ch’ixi desde la historia andina. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2015.

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Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Metafísicas caníbales: Líneas de antropología postestructural. Buenos Aires: Katz editores, 2010. Walker, Brian. “Resilience: what it is and is not”. Ecology and Society 25.2 (2020): Art. 11. https://doi.org/10. 5751/ES-11647–250211. Walker, Jeremy, andMelinda Cooper. “Resilience”. Posthuman Glossary. Eds. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 385-388.

Gabriel Giorgi

Strata Any critical conversation on environmental aesthetics and environmental humanities will, almost inevitably, touch upon the radical dislocation of time that defines our current planetary crisis. Debates on (neo)extractivism, climate change and the Capitalocene1 cannot escape the fact that inherited conceptions of history and narrative, deeply modeled by anthropocentric configurations, are challenged by the increasing pressure of non-human scales and non-anthropocentric perspectives. The very notions of Capitalocene, as it is well known, rests on temporal magnitudes beyond the human—that is, on the premise that the traces of capitalist activity will remain after our species (or even capitalism!) has disappeared. We can say, with François Hartog (2020), that we are experiencing a new “regime of historicity” in which a multiplicity of temporal scales, human and non-human, are juxtaposed and in friction with each other, complicating any progressive and teleological conception of history. In the same vein, as Dipesh Chakrabarty noted early in 2009, the entanglement of historical time and deep or geological time (what he would call later “the planetary”) exercises a new pressure on our conceptions of historicity, persistently grounded on humansocial scales (Chakrabarty 2009, 2020). From a different angle, Mary Louise Pratt, drawing on the Bakhtinian legacy, speaks of the Anthropocene as a “chronotope” articulated from a vantage point of a future of extinction, thus challenging not only received ideas of progress but the very place of the human in the emerging “planetary imaginaries” (Pratt 2022). This temporal seism is one of the key questions addressed by environmental aesthetics: the need to rethink and elaborate new frames of temporal intelligibility that help us better comprehend the current crisis, sense its shifting configurations and guide our collective action. New grammars of time are needed; narrative forms in particular confront a fundamental challenge to their traditions and genres. This new relevance of deep time, of geological scales and non-human temporalities, however, comes with specific inflections in relation to its political resonances. Many sharp arguments against the notion of Anthropocene, starting with its very name, are focused on how it tends to override or at least understate the colonial forces that subtend the climate crisis. While some interventions insist on the fact that the environmental crisis includes but is not reducible to capitalist expansion (Chakrabarty 2020), others

 As is well known, the notion of Anthropocene has been challenged from several angles, most of which point out at the fact that the agent responsible for planetarian transformation is not the universal “Anthropos” but a variety of agents—Plantaciocene, Wasteocene, Eurocene, and so forth. For the purpose of this essay, I will stick with “Capitalocene”, proposed by Jason Moore (2015), that sheds light on the intersections between coloniality and capitalism as the vantage point to think current debates on ecological disaster and environmental justice. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-025

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argue that there is no Anthropocene without the European colonization of America and, later, of the rest of the globe; that there is no environmental crisis that is not tied to a mode of production at the same time colonial and capitalist involving the subjection of racialized populations together with non-human worlds (Moore 2015) Focusing on the Atlantic slave traffic and the plantation system as the point of departure for the Anthropocene, Malcolm Ferdinand speaks of the “double colonial fracture” as the inner core of colonialism. This double fracture, articulated in the plantation as the its underlying model of colonial relation, shatters both human worlds (the racialized populations starting with the slave traffic), and non-human worlds (Ferdinand 2020). Elizabeth Povinelli, in a similar vein, talks about the “ancestral catastrophe” as the insurmountable condition of modernity, haunted and shaped by the constant return of colonial violence upon Indigenous populations and on the non-human worlds. Finally, Latin American feminisms invoke the notion of “cuerpo-territorio” (body-territory or land-body) to visibilize how gender violence and inequality are inseparable from the dispossession of land and the destruction of territorial communities (Gago 2020). The discussions about the Anthropocene, as one defining feature of our time, then, the many layers of the colonial-extractive machine that models our modernity, and that insists, in the present, on new forms of violence and destruction. How can we think, narrate, articulate in images and words the “double colonial fracture” Ferdinand speaks of? How do we re-narrate our histories of antiracist, anticolonial, antipatriarchal and anticapitalist struggles at the historical threshold in which “environmental justice” and ecological disaster frame our political and cultural vocabularies? How do we keep producing political awareness of the violence of racialization that is proper to colonialism and at the same time focus on the many layers of environmental destruction it carries out? How can we narrate these multiple and heterogeneous “unmakings” and “remakings” of worlds? These are some of the key questions at work in environmental aesthetics, questions that gravitate, insistently, on the issue of temporality and the ways in which the account of human struggles around coloniality are articulated with the times of the mineral, the geological, the vegetal and the animal, with cosmic forces that are now at the center of the cultural imagination and the political debate alike. Bringing the colonial to the core of the debate on the Anthropocene means, to begin with, to be reminded that the “shock of the Anthropocene” (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2015), comes less of a “shock” in some latitudes than in others. The entanglement between historical and geological times is hardly big news in regions shaped by colonialism and extractivism such as Latin America. Given the fact that Latin America has been a global laboratory of capitalist extraction for more than five hundred years (Moore 2015), the preoccupation with the entanglement between geological time and social time, between the human and the non-human, between ancestrality and futurity has been a crucial feature in Latin American cultural traditions for a long time. If our present feel the urge of these discussions due to the ongoing environmental crisis, the cultural archives show many examples of the longue durée of these issues in our region.

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In what follows, I will focus on literary narrative production from Latin American in order to show, on the one hand, how a new sensibility attentive to non-human forces and agents necessarily imply a reconfiguration of narrative forms and genres and, with it, a new sense of time; and on the other hand, how this new sensibility also illuminate extractivism and colonialism as the “ancestral present”, to use once again Povinelli’s formulation, shaping Latin American cultures, that is, as a specific temporality that ties the present and the future to the recurring past of colonial violence and the resistance of Amerindian cosmologies in face of the devastation brought by colonization. By looking at contemporary aesthetic forms we re-activate latent temporalities always at work, even if they go unnoticed, in the cultural archives as well as in marginal, subaltern cultural memories, such as Indigenous and Afro-descendent traditions underscored by anti-colonial critiques. Our challenge is to understand how sedimented temporalities, ancestral memories, temporal arrangements between human and non-human emerge or surge—as insurgencies—in the making of the contemporary.

Museums, Archives, Collections: Narrative Strata Current debates about the environmental crisis, intensified by cultural imaginaries and media narratives about the “end of the world” are inseparable from a transformation of aesthetic forms that respond to the increasing pressure of non-human forces—the forces of a planet that cannot be conceived any longer as stable and predictable. A few years ago, Indian writer and critic Amitav Ghosh interrogated the ways in which the modern novel—that for him is exemplified by the realist European novel—had foreclosed its ability to give an account of phenomena of big massive magnitude such as climate change and environmental catastrophe. In his reading, the Western bourgeois episteme limited the novel’s ability to narrate such big events and to articulate the agency and perspective of non-human forces: “it is precisely by excluding those inconceivably large forces and by telescoping the changes into the duration of a limited-time horizon, that the novel becomes narratable” (Ghosh 2016: 61). Ghosh’s argument illuminates the ways in which modernity created frames of temporal intelligibility defined by the episteme of the European bourgeoisie, its science and its sensorium, deeply invested on calculus and predictability. However, in contexts of colonialism and relentless extractivism such as Latin America these temporal frames were neither stable nor entirely functional to the expectations of capitalist extraction and the emerging local bourgeoisie. The “extractive zone” (Gomez Barris 2018) was never fully dominated nor subjected to total control by the colonial elites nor the creole bourgeoisies—and literary narration captured this instability. The resistance of nature to be turned into resource presents insurmountable challenges to the aspirations of the realistic novel in the region, as illustrated by the novela de la tierra, where the struggle to dominate nature and make it available to extraction – and therefore, to turn it into

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an intelligible colonized territory (Andermann 2018)—face the recurrence of animated, uncontrollable forces that move between the non-human and the supernatural. La vorágine, the novel by Jose Eustasio Rivera published in 1924, is perhaps the ultimate example of the difficulties of the realist novel to fully dominate and, to use Ghosh’s words, “telescope” the “large forces” at work in the extractive zone envisioned by capitalist expansion. The novel—in its interface with the extractive frontiers that functioned as violent laboratories of the sensible in Latin America—,.then, was always haunted by nonhuman perspectives and scales. These challenges to canonical Western narrative forms are, however, particularly intense in contemporary literary productions, interested in exploring formal configurations able to channel non-human perspectives and heterogeneous temporal scales, and in bringing new light to the entanglements between colonialism, extractivism and environmental crisis. Mineral, animal, vegetal agencies and forces bring their own temporalities to narrative forms that need to rearticulate their previous grammars in order to channel them. Museo de la bruma (Museum of Fog, 2019, by Chilean writer Galo Ghigliotto illustrates the challenges faced by narrative forms when they seek to account for the colonial grammars shaping the extractivist foundations of Latin American nations together with the non-human temporalities that emerge alongside them. The text reproduces a fictional “recovered” catalogue of an imagined museum in Punta Arenas, the furthest southern city in the Chilean Patagonia. The “exhibition” is composed by pieces (many of them imagined, others well documented) showing the brutal colonization of Tierra del Fuego during the late 19th century. At the same time, the museum connects colonial violence in Patagonia with genocides that shaped the 20th century—the Holocaust, in the figure of Walter Rauff, a Nazi fugitive who lived in Punta Arenas and was protected by the Chilean government, and the Pinochet dictatorship that ran a concentration camp in Isla Dawson during the 1970s and 1980s. In the historical configuration produced by the museo de la bruma, then, the indigenous expulsion and extermination2 and the consequent land appropriation by white settlers operates as the foundational violence that will reverberate from the colonial periphery—the very “end of the world” of the Patagonian frontier—to European modernity, and from the 19th century to the present. Moving between the documental and the fictional, between writing and exhibition, and juxtaposing the most disparate “pieces” —from the census of murdered Indians to the furs of exterminated species, from the legal case against Walter Rauff to Selk’nam traditional narratives—, Museo de la bruma find in the collection a formal

 Under the push of a gold rush and cattle farmers on both the Argentine and the Chilean side, Tierra del Fuego was colonized by white settlers in the last quarter of the 19th century. The settlers expulsed, killed and resettled the indigenous communities in the region, principally the Selk’nam community, but also Yamana and Menneken, among others.

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mechanism to bring together heterogenous temporalities without subsuming them within a dominant narrative frame. Most of the pieces of the collection, as the museum itself, are missing; the majority of the pages are composed an empty box and a description of the piece.

Figure 1: Page from Museo de la bruma (Ghigliotto 2017: 83).

This procedure allows the novel to include the most disparate materials as fragments belonging to different temporal lines and at the same time to underscore the violent erasure perpetrated by colonial violence. The missing pieces—the empty boxes that

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populate most of the pages—mobilize fiction to reconstruct the non-existent archive of violence at the same time that point towards its erasure as yet another iteration of colonial and genocidal violence. The missing pieces and the empty boxes, thus, function as echoes of a violence that, if cannot be fully reconstructed as historical archive, resonate in the present, tying the past and the present outside dominant frames of historicization—that of the nation-State, or the “global” history of the contemporary. A “dialectic non-image”, one may say, that point towards another idea of a museum, one that conceives it as a sounding board of the ways in which colonial violence shapes the present from its very erasure and its spectral remains. If, as Shimrit Lee says, “exhibition and colonialism went hand in hand” (Lee 2022: 104), by subtracting the image and leaving intact the mechanism of exhibition the Museo de la bruma combines erasure and reverberation as the temporality of the colonial. This procedure also allows a singular intertwining between human and nonhuman temporalities. The fragments of colonial violence against indigenous populations—the gravity center of the museum—are combined with images of land dispossession and species extinction. The piece 160, describing a photography of the corpses of Yaghan dogs (showed in Figure 1), is illustrative of the ways non-human worlds operate in the Museo. According to the text, the Patagonian dog was a species exterminated by the settlers during their violent encounters with the indigenous communities. The settlers kept the animal corpses to collect the fur—they thought them to be similar to the Fuegian fox, and therefore marketable—but later decided to abandon the project. The described photography (whose status is, again, uncertain: it may be purely fictional or well documented: the text deliberately eludes any clarification) is, then, that of a dispossessed indigenous land, with “hundreds” of animal corpses, as “stains” against the backdrop of the tundra. The piece refers at the same time to the remnants of a colonial war and the residue of a failed commodification; an evocation of an animal world and its place within indigenous life; a figure of extinction that, still, insists in its materiality as afterlife transforming the landscape; and fragments of matter between the organic and the inorganic that speak of the massive death brought by colonization. The pieces in the Museo’s collection of are thus juxtaposed as temporal layers that resist being subsumed or contained by one overarching narrative; on the contrary, they operate as narrative strata, as temporal “blocks” that inscribe their own sequences, their immanent duration, the multiple scales including social, economic, technological and territorial configurations, and that bring together human and nonhuman perspectives and traces.3 These narrative strata, however, are not just layers

 As analyzed by Deleuze and Guattari in the third chapter of Mille Plateaux, “The Geology of Morals”—somehow anticipating our current “geological turn” and the attention to deep time—the concept of strata brings a geological perspective in which minerals and rocks offer the model for the material composition of existence. Strata, defined by its “double articulation” between matter and expression allows Deleuze and Guattari to formulate the tension between territorialization and

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accumulated in the process of natural evolution; on the contrary, they bring to surface the traces of the extractive-colonial forces on materialities, territories, bodies and memories. The narrative operation of strata revolves around their endurance: they resist being incorporated or subsumed by the temporal progression of a modernity that would transcend the “primitive accumulation” of the colonial era.4 Strata remain, persist, insist: they embody the material obstinacy of the past. And this obstinacy is expressed by both human and non-human perspectives: the human voices from the past as well as the non-human traces on bodies, territories, rocks. The traces of the colonial are as pervasive and persistent in non-human worlds as in the human world. Instead of organizing these strata from the vantage point of a present that has overcome the violences of the past, the Museo de la bruma juxtapose them to the present indicating the persistence of the colonial in the nation-State, of the indigenous genocide in the Holocaust and the dictatorship, of land dispossession in the allegedly pacified national territory. Strata are thus the trace of the colonial—its writing—upon the material texture of the present. This is the formal procedure by which the Museo . . . articulate the “double colonial fracture” Malcolm Ferdinand speaks of: by staging the colonial traces on human and non-human worlds in a narration at the very limits of the narrative form. The format of the “catalogue” reduces to a minimum the role of the narrator: the narrative voice here is not the place where a dominant temporal perspective can be asserted. Quite the contrary: this is a museum of the disorder of time; instead of stabilizing

deterritorialization—and therefore, the very notion of becoming—without concessions to any teleological idea of evolution, that is, without the emergence of a synthesis or a new formation that subsumes the previous processes and movements. In this sense, the geological modeling of time allows for an analytical frame that gives an account of the emergence of new formations without losing sight of sediments and layers that are not metabolized by the latest strata. At the same time, by bringing geological time into the account of time the notion of strata dislocates any human-centered or biocentered model of temporality: neither human culture nor the living body but rocks and minerals are the vantage point to think about time. Strata are thus the index of interrupted temporalities, heterogeneous formations and divergent scales (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). They interrelate with each other, by articulation or friction, avoiding the models of temporality inspired by organic life. At the same time that they offer the blueprint of how matter is formed—in geological, organic and human formations—, they keep active a threshold of deterritorialization that produces the “aberrant movements” (Lapoujade 2014) that make possible new becomings. Interestingly, the deleuzoguattarian conception of strata revolves around the ideas of resonance and vibration (Buchanan 2021), an aural semiotics that speak of alternative ideas of expression and communication that place materiality at the center of sense instead of mind, language, perspective or even selfhood. Strata articulate, thus, the possibility of different velocities and scales that resist any unified or lineal conception of time, and at the same time inscribe the relation with the non-living and the non-human without subsuming them within bio-centered or human-centered temporalities (differing, in this sense, from the classic historiographic approach to strata by Koselleck (2018), entirely focused on the human social formations).  For a critique of lineal “sequentiality” between colonial formations and “proper” capitalist relations, see Ferreira da Silva (2019).

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a sequence between the pieces, and creating forms of intelligibility between past and present, the museum stages the interruptive force of the colonial past upon human and non-human worlds, and that keeps reappearing and modeling social and environmental violence throughout the 20th and the 21st century. The “ancestral catastrophe” Povinelli speaks about finds here a formal deployment in the use of the museum as a narrative device: a museum that not only disorganizes historical teleologies but essentially brings to the fore the dissemination of colonial violence over human and non-human worlds as the recurring force of capitalist accumulation.

Through the Extractive Cycle: La Compañía A comparable procedure can be found in La compañía (The Company, 2019) by Mexican writer Verónica Gerber Bicecci. La compañía takes us to Nuevo Mercurio, in Northern Mexico, a town that by 1950s saw the glories of extractive wealth offered by the mercury mines found in the area, now turned into devastated territory. Nuevo Mercurio embodies the typical extractive cycle: discovery, commodity boom associated with foreign investments (US need for mercury during WWII, in this case), subsequent abandonment and the long durée of slow violence manifested in health issues and environmental dispossession. The “boom and bust” cycle Ericka Beckman (2013) situates at the end of 19th century and the beginning of the 20th (what she calls the “Latin American Age of Export”), here reappears in the middle of the 20th century. La compañía narrates this cycle by bringing together disparate archival materials, from geological studies and astronomical data to health reports and labor struggles, thus compiling multiple perspectives and layers to the narrative of New Mercurio as extractive zone. It also includes a rewriting of “El huésped,” by Amparo Dávila, a fantastic short story from the 1940s, together with photos taken in Nuevo Mercurio now turned into a ghost town. If El museo de la bruma mobilized the museum as a narrative machine, here the installation is the procedure that inscribes multiple temporalities: La compañía’s first part (“a.”) was part of an installation at the Museo de Arte Abstracto Manuel Felguérez, in Zacatecas. The project moves then between different genres and media, between archive and fiction, excavating—the verb is key here—sediments of mineral extraction as well as social and cultural memory and thus dislocating any stable temporal perspective about the “extractive zone.” The format of the installation (as the museum in Museo de la bruma) is crucial to the narrative mechanism: it situates multiple materials within the temporal pause of the installation, thus allowing for a co-occurrence and friction between heterogenous fragments that cannot be subsumed by a unifying narrative. In the same manner, the installation brings to the fore the impulse towards exhibition: the text operates between

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images and text, between materialities and words, moving between the readable and the visible, and thus confronting a certain continuity from words to images and objects. In doing so, it illuminates the historical density of materialities made (and remade) by extractive and colonial forces—strata. Once again, strata emerge as a form of Anthropocenic writing: the writing of extraction, the writing of the trace left by the extractive forces that, if erased from official history, remain imprinted upon a multiplicity of materials, from intoxicated bodies and haunting specters to debris and ruins. Mineral activity, animal life (since a bat colony takes over the abandoned mercury mines), money fluxes, working class consciousness, the meteorites coming from space that produce luminescence and turn the area into “tierras raras” . . . the fact that they function as strata mean, as we have seen in Museo. . ., that they operate in relation to one another, but avoid being subsumed in a teleological narrative that ends with the commodification of the mineral and the subsequent ghost town. Strata highlight the resistance of the materialities and temporalities to be fully captured into a narrative: they remain as active perspectives. La compañia is, without doubt, the narrative of an extractive cycle and its deleterious environmental and social consequences, but at the same time it is the juxtaposition of multiple temporalities that, if articulated by the extractive cycle, are not reduce to it. In many ways, the extractive cycle operates as an activator of temporalities that exceed its own temporal frame. The territory is not subsumed into the narrative of its commodification, since we learn about the multiple minerals that compose the terrain (2019: 116), the structure of the mines (2019: 108), the specific process to distill mercury (2019: 130), the luminescence of the meterorites (2019: 189), the bat colony that occupied the abandoned mine (2019: 178), in addition to the social configuration around extraction—the town of Nuevo Mercurio also brings its own temporality, from prosperous site to the ghost town that we see in the images and, perhaps, as an emerging eco-tourist site (we get to read the project of an observation site around the bat colony); the toxic materials utilized by mining continue its deleterious effects long after the mine is closed, in a classic example of slow violence. From mineral life to social life and capitalist cycles: the installation as narrative device attracts a multiplicity of perspectives and temporalities that do not admit to be unified or synthesized by a genre of a dominant format. On the contrary, what comes to light is precisely the resistance of the materials to any unifying temporal frame, displaying the multiple perspectives conjugated by the extractive cycle, their differential sequences and their many sediments of violence. Museums, installations: these narrations stratify human and non-human temporalities, the living and the extinct, ancestrality and futurity. They percolate narration with heterochronies that are not subsumed by dominant temporalities of national progress, of capitalist development, not even of Anthropocenic crisis. And they do so by combining narrative strata that give an account of processes that are, on the one hand, human and socio-centered (telling stories of class domination, colonial forces, economic winners and losers, accumulation and dispossession: the repetitive stories of capital) and on the other hand, non-human processes and temporalities, including living and non-

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living forces, from meteorites to bats. By displaying the friction between these processes, strata allow us to sense material layers which are not fully metabolized by the extractive cycle nor entirely subsumed by the temporalities of capital. These narrative forms, on the contrary, mobilize frames of temporal intelligibility that allow us to sense the human cost and social consequences of extractivism at the same time that show its impact upon the non-human worlds, bringing their temporal perspectives and their irreducibility to human scales. And fundamentally, they help us situate the vectors of our sensible experience at an historical inflection when the pressure of the non-human dislocates the perceptions, the narrations, the cultural forms that have been modeled after anthropocentric models. Between human and non-human there is no coincidence, no amalgamation, but a radical disruption; these texts narrate precisely at that point of disruption.

Trembling of Human Time: Juan Cárdenas How does cultural imagination politicize these multiple temporalities? What happens to narrative grammars when “justicia ambiental” (environmental justice) moves from the margins to the core of political vocabularies?5 How this displacement reconfigures our cultural traditions of democratic struggle, including antiracist and feminist struggles? Can cultural production provide tools to narrate the assemblage between human and more-than-human worlds as central part of our political imaginaries, and as an active demand around the “double colonial fracture” that shapes our colonial past and present? Juan Cárdenas’s Elástico de sombra, a novel from 2018, may offer some clues to these questions. Closer than the previous examples to traditional novelistic conventions (although with twists that deserve our attention), in Elástico de sombra the narration follows the trail of a knowledge in danger of disappearance: that of esgrima de machete, or Colombian grima, an Afro-Colombian choreographic tradition that constitutes the main motif of the novel. In Cárdenas’ text, the old practitioners of Colombian grima are dying, the young are not learning the skill and the tradition is about to be lost. To avoid this scenario, Don Sando, the protagonist, goes to the mountains of Cauca and embarks upon the search of the last viejos in order to ensure the transmission of knowledge. A novel, then, about the lack of archive, about cultures and populations invisibilized in

 In his inaugural speech in August 2022, Colombian president Gustavo Petro, alongside Francia Marquez (a key figure in Cárdenas’ novel) situated environmental justice alongside social justice, signaling a displacement a new configuration of political imaginaries and vocabularies in the democracies of the region (Lula da Silva would also, later on, focused to a great degree his successful presidential campaign on Amazonia). This reconfiguration implies a radical shift in the human-centered demands of justice to a more-than-human dimension of the political that until recently was, in the best of cases, an afterthought in the ways the demands of equality and justice were articulated. For Petro’s inaugural speech, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXhj5g6USj0 (February 2, 2023).

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national culture and neglected by literary tradition, that illuminates the (non) place of Black bodies in Colombian national culture.6 At the heart of nationhood we encounter the foreclosed knowledge, and the colonial and racist grammars at work in the making of the white, criollo nation. However, this search for Afro-Colombian memory is inseparable from the interference of non-human agents and from a critical approach to dominant perceptions of nature. The search for cultural knowledge about grima is also the encounter with an estranged nature, inhabited by unmanageable forces. A nature animated by forces at war: Don Sando will meet with a supernatural agent7—a “Duende” or spirit who comes as wind—who tells the story of a battle with the Devil, “el innombrable” (the unnameable). We learn that the Devil forbade the transmission of tradition and that is the reason why esgrima de machete is about to disappear. The erasure of Black tradition, then, is the work of the Devil;8 cultural memory is a tableau of the war among more-than-human forces. We also learn that the Devil made a fatal mistake: the prohibition applies only to men, and women can become the new carriers of the tradition. We will immediately see this at work: Don Sando ends up in a minga, a rural protest for territorial rights against extractivism, led by Black and indigenous feminist activists. The war between the Devil and the Duende is echoed in actual (and urgent) ecological struggles; Colombian grima as a strategic choreography of war becomes, in a novel, a motif to represent the conflict between environmental activism and the forces of extractivist capital. This protest features prominently Francia Marquez, the territorial activist who would become, in 2022, the vice-president of Colombia. She says: no somos propietarios, somos los cuidadores, los guardianes de estas tierras. Los que sabemos cuidar la vida. Y por eso nos atacan, por eso nos persiguen, por eso nos desplazan y por eso nos matan (Cárdenas 2018: 65). [We are not property owners, we are the caregivers, the guardians of these territories. We are who know how to take care of life. And for that reason we are attacked, we are prosecuted, for that reason they displace us and for that reason they kill us.]

We know that Colombia is one of the nations with the worst record of violence and impunity against environmental activists. In this context, environmental struggle and the defense of territories as form of life becomes the gravity center of the political:

 Interestingly, one of the hypotheses about the origins of Colombian grima situates it in the cultural practices brought by Haitian soldiers who fought together with Bolivar in the Independence wars.  The “supernatural”, or sobrenatureza in terms of Marco Antonio Valentín (in dialogue with Viveiros de Castro’s work on Amerindian thought) refers to a natural world composed by multiple perspectives and at permanent conflict. These multiple perspectives include the human and the non-human, typically animals and spirits (Valentin 2018).  For an anthropological reading of the cultural traditions around the devil in Afro-Colombian cultures, see Taussig (1980).

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“Nosotros no queremos tierra, queremos territorio!” (We do not want a piece of land, we want territory; Cárdenas 2018: 65), says Francia. Cárdenas’ novel makes of nature a political theater of war between multiple agencies, from human to non-human, juxtaposing heterogenous layers and multiple temporalities—the Devil and the Duende, the territorial struggles and the antipatriarchal stance. The quest for the colonial memory foreclosed by the white nation—the AfroColombian past that is inseparable from the slave traffic and the Black Atlantic—is thus also the encounter with the more than human worlds. By mobilizing popular traditions about devils, duendes and witches, the novel situates current political struggles—with names from actual events: Francia Marquez—in connection with the non-human forces at work in nature. Temporalities operate—once again—as strata: the ancestral past of slavery and independence wars, the actual fights against extractivism and the supernatural, revealed at the heart of the historical time. These strata refuse any synthesis, operating, instead, as friction between layers of time that dispute the dominant national narrative of progress and mobilize other energies—the Afrocolombian archive, the supernatural forces—to narrate the political in the present. The temporality of the political—that is, the collective temporality—is no longer exclusively human: it also includes an animated nature that conveys supernatural forces. “El ritmo”, says Don Sando, “es el temblor del tiempo humano” (Rhythm is the trembling of human time), a trembling made of “el movimiento de la materia y la materia del movimiento” (the movement of matter and the matter of movement) (Cárdenas 2018: 110). Following the rhythm of racialized bodies in esgrima de machete, the multiple historical and cultural marks imprinted upon them, the racial memories turned into an art of war, and their links with more than human forces, Don Sando discovers the struggle at the heart of our political reality: a trembling of human time, when the very idea of justice takes place between the human and the non-human.

Laboratories of Time Cárdenas’ Elástico de sombra together with Museo de la bruma and La compañía as well as other texts, including Enciclopedia de cosas vivas y muertas (a text and installation by Adriana Salazar Velez from 2019), or the indispensable A queda do céu, by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, from 2010, trace a new cartography of cultural imaginaries in which the human and the non-human are not only agents but fundamentally temporal perspectives shaping collective narratives. They emerge at a historical moment when environmental and territorial struggles increasingly gravitate at the center of the political languages and disputes. A historical moment that dislocates any unified temporality, and therefore poses a challenge to narrative forms. Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza speaks of “escrituras geológicas”, or geological writings, to designate those texts that “desediment” layers of memory that are not exclusively human,

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(nor living), but that are inextricable from the earth, the rocks, the debris, from all material inscriptions that resituate human stories within the complex coordinates of the planetary (Rivera Garza 2022). These “escrituras geológicas” are an example of our attempts to reconfigure the frames of temporal intelligibility in a present shaped by ecological disaster and environmental struggles. From the mineral to the supernatural, from diverse layers of ancestrality, from other configuration or assemblages between human and non-human, these literary narratives offer, once again, the formal tools to respond to some of the key questions of our present: How to narrate collective life when the non-human, from the geological to the supernatural, claims its place at the center of the political disputes and therefore as a part of the very idea of the common? What formal tools are available for this new configuration of time? What organizations of the sensible can host such a dislocation? These are the laboratories of time of our present: differently from previous historical configurations, our reinventions of time cannot avoid the pressure and, hopefully, the alliance with the non-human.

Works Cited Andermann, Jens. Tierras en trance. Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje. Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados, 2018. Beckman, Ericka. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean–Baptiste Fressoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. London: Verso, 2016. Buchanan, Ian. Assemblage Theory and Method. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Cárdenas, Juan. Elástico de sombra. Bogotá: Sexto Piso, 2018. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses”. Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222. ——. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1980. Ferdinand, Malcolm. Une écologie décoloniale. Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen. Paris: Seuil, 2019. Gago, Verónica. Potencia feminista o el deseo de cambiarlo todo. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2019. Gerber Bicecci, Verónica. La Compañía. Zacatecas: Museo de Arte Abstracto Manuel Felguérez, 2018. https://www.veronicagerberbicecci.net/la-compania-the-company (February 20, 2022). ——. La Compañía. Mexico, D.F.: Almadía, 2019. Ghigliotto, Galo. Museo de la bruma. Santiago de Chile: Laurel, 2019. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Gomez Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. A dívida impagavel. Sao Paulo: Oficina de Imaginação Política e Living Commons, 2019. Hartog, François. Chronos: L’Occident aux prises avec le Temps. Paris: Gallimard, 2020. Koselleck, Reinhart. Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. Pratt, Mary Louise. Planetary Longings. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.

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Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso, 2015. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Geontologies. A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Lapoujade, David. Deleuze, les mouvements aberrants. Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 2014. Lee, Shimrit. Decolonize Museums. New York: OR Books, 2022. Rivera Garza, Cristina. Escrituras geológicas. Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2022. Taussig Michael. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Valentin, Marco Antonio. Extramundanidade e sobrenatureza: ensaios de ontologia infundamental. Florianopolis: Cultura e barbárie, 2018.

Gisela Heffes

Toxicity Toxic Legacies Peruvian poet Eduardo Chirinos published, in 2013, a poem entitled “The Chernobyl Chronicle” which may be relevant to reflect on what has been developing lately in Ukraine and, more broadly, in the daunting world in which we live. This “didactic poem” was written when Chirinos himself was battling cancer, a disease most epidemiologists link with all sorts of toxins, and that ended his life in February 2016. Written as both a homage and an elegy to the American bison which almost went extinct, “The Chernobyl Chronicle” laments the fallout of a catastrophe that, as we all know, entailed a massive evacuation of the residents and the abandoning of “their homes, fields, steel factories, and nuclear plants” (Chirinos 2021: 343). Chirinos notes that while humans had to flee, nature was “liberated:” the beaver “returned to its lodge,” the “eagle to its aerie,” and “the wolf to monitoring the explosion of rabbits and deer” (Chirinos 2021: 343). In addition, the European bison, nearly extinct, “resurfaced.” Nature was thus liberated to become, Chirinos remarks, a hostage of a different and even worse catastrophe: “Biologists relate that all these animals live in constant danger, that their bodies are contaminated with radioactive material such as europium oxide, uranium oxide, zirconium alloys, and God knows what other toxins” (Chirinos 2021: 343).1 Today, almost 36 years after the infamous nuclear disaster, what Michael Marder defined as a “toxic mix of genocidal history and environmental destruction” (Marder 2016: 48), the Chernobyl exclusion zone is showing a rise in radiation levels due to the “disturbance to the region from troop movements” (Mousseau 2022). Yet it is unknown whether the turmoil is the result of “dust stirred up by vehicles” or of a potential “damage to any containment facilities” (Mousseau 2022). In the poem, Chirinos notes that the “explosion freed 500 times more radioactive material into the air than the atom bomb at Hiroshima” sending “a radioactive cloud” unveiling its shadow over, at least, thirteen countries (Chirinos 2021: 343). As the poem suggest, toxicity is everywhere, engaging the past and the future, neighboring spaces and far-off geographies, the known and the unknown. It connects the imminent threat posed to the world by the toxic ambition of a Russian dictator with the experiences and perceptions imagined and composed by a Peruvian writer based in

 The scenario described by Chirinos captures a paradox: on the one hand, the human health consequences of Chernobyl remain controversial since “cancer rates spiked in years after the disaster, especially thyroid cancers among children, leading to perhaps four thousand excess cases up to 2004” (McNeill and Engelke 2014: 29). On the other, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has since become a “de facto wildlife reserve teeming with wild boar, moose, deer, wolves, storks, and eagles, among other creatures” who roam in areas with radioactivity levels deemed unsafe for humans (McNeill and Engelke 2014: 29). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-026

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Montana. The mourning of the bison, the spread of radioactive material, the loss visà-vis the fight against a tumor, these are all stories that characterize the Anthropocene: a period that is defined in no small part by matters of toxicity. These “situated and local experiences” serve as an inventory of what art historian Susan Ballard described as “the transforming multispecies worlds of humans, nature, and the planet” (Ballard 2021: 5). If they tell “a different story of the Anthropocene,” it is one in which we might confront with a new and hazardous planetary future (Ballard 2021: 5). Toxicity matters because, as Stacy Alaimo suggests, “the substance of what was once called ‘nature,’ acts, interacts, and even intra-acts within, through, and around human bodies and practices” (Alaimo 2016: 1). By turning to “the agency and significance of matter,” Alaimo asks what “forms of ethics and politics arise from the sense of being embedded in, exposed to, and even composed of the very stuff of a rapidly transforming material world?” (Alaimo 2016: 1). Chirinos’ poem was originally published in the collection Thirty-Five Biology Lessons (and Three Didactic Stories). The “didactic stories” are all about extinction events, including the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and they address a “radically, rapidly changing world and the life-forms emerging within it” (French and Heffes 2021: 310). To be sure, Chirinos’ poems embody “the spirit of resilience” that is needed in these profoundly uncertain times; what’s more, they practice the “ancient art of lamentation for what is irreparably lost,” and in doing so disrupt the call to forgetfulness that is so prevalent in a society dominated by consumer capitalism (French and Heffes 2021: 340). Latin America has experienced since the arrival of Europeans the toxic dimension and fallout of imperialism and colonialism. Colonialism first; neocolonialism thereafter. As James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer (2014) note, the history of extractive imperialism in Latin America shows both continuities and changes. Race, colonization, violence and extractive imperialism are all intermingled and cannot be separated. Through distinct historical periods and factors, they composed a “regime of power, ideology and distribution of resource rents” (Petras and Veltmeyer 2014: 8). With the conquest and subsequent colonization, “subjugation by force, enslavement, abduction, transmission of language and religious indoctrination” was implemented in tandem with preliminary methods of extraction, such as “taxation and extortion from the indigenous people, which developed into alluvial (gold) and underground (silver) mining by enslaved or semi-enslaved indigenous and African labourers” (Girvan 2014: 50). From the onset, the role of the state and of private capital, the distribution of risk, and the division of the profits from initial resource extraction in the Americas were all negotiated by the Spanish crown. In addition, the degradation of the environment through extractive practices endured the long-lasting effects of mining, which left economically depressed communities and poisoned soil and water resources. Despite “certain historical precedents” for the ensuing evolution of the “role of foreign capital and the colonial or imperialist state in the hemisphere” (Girvan 2014: 50), life threatening toxic exposures brought about by the unequal distribution of risk, would not be directly addressed in any visible way until the 1960s, when environmental

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and antitoxic activists challenged “the disproportionate burden of toxic contamination, waste dumping, and ecological devastation borne by low-income communities, communities of color, and colonized territories,” as Giovanna Di Chiro has shown (2016: 100). The “risk society” described by German sociologist Ulrich Beck in 1986—the same year of the Chernobyl catastrophe—, an emergent phenomenon accelerated by the “continued development of industrial production” based on the dynamic of modernization and industrialization (Brulle 2000: 53), has been an inextricable component of the transition “to full-blown commercial capitalism in Europe” (Girvan 2014: 51). While we often understand toxicity as an environmental threat—the menace of contamination that traverses space and time, defies national boundaries as well as class, gender, race and ethnicity—what kind of politics are behind toxicity and which type of politics are catalyzed by toxicity? What are the reactions that toxicity generates, from communal efforts that look to alternative methods to make sense of environmental contaminants to artistic, cultural and literary interventions that engage with problems of interpreting and producing toxic narratives while trying, at the same time, to infuse a meaningful perspective that makes sense of it? Whilst the politics behind toxicity have been questioned by the environmental justice movement, an alternative politics has been further advanced by scholars and activists that, as Valerie Kuletz suggests, moves away from a “postmortem of an already disastrous situation,” to propose instead a “proactive scholarship” that points out patterns of environmentally destructive and socially unjust activity but also identifies resistance movements working for community and environmental survival (Kuletz 2009: 201). Such proactive scholarship points us toward solutions and encourages action rather than anxiety and paralysis. It encapsulates what researchers in the field of social sciences have defined as the political ecologies of toxics, that is, a transdisciplinary body of work that has increasingly taken up collaborative, decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist methodologies, which decenter the authority of academic researchers and position research as a form of community-led collective action (Theriault and Kang 2021: 6). It is mainly concerned about how relationships at different scales result in uneven patterns of toxic exposure, harm, and response, and attempts “to understand how social structures, cultural differences, and power dynamics shape the production, distribution, conceptualization, and embodiment of industrial toxics generated at any point in the capitalist world system” (Theriault and Kang 2021: 6). Extending through the material ground of toxic worksites to the discursive nature of toxic narratives, environmental poetics and art projects allows us to trace the intersections of the local and global, from the body to the environment and conversely, as a continual material flow. Here, I draw from Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality to capture the influx of toxic substances mobilized from production to consumption, exposure, sensory experiences and visual and spiritual violence, which “often reveals global networks of social injustice, lax regulations, and environmental degradation” (Alaimo 2010: 15). The experience of toxicity by all means reveals both the subject and object’s “porosity to material flows of different types and of the circulation” within its

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bodies of “foreign” matter, some of which “act upon it in a perverse or toxic manner,” as Mark Anderson has noted, following Nancy Tuana’s theorization of “viscous porosity” (Anderson 2021: 206). In this essay, I will discuss the convergence of toxic matters and matters of toxicity at the intersections of space and time, politics and history, and violence and affect through the conceptual framework of recurrence in its dual meanings of “happening again,” as well as of “return” and “repetition.”2 Drawing on the work of Mexican visual artist and writer Verónica Gerber Bicceci, specifically her two works, Conjunto vacío (2015) and La compañía (2019), I would like to argue that toxicity, as any other matter with agentic properties, expands, contracts, disrupts and ignites interactions among relational subjects and objects, constituting collective forms of social and cultural networking. From the angle of vibrant matter or a vital materialism, the connectedness between bodies, the landscape, and the actant toxins brings forth a “human-nonhuman collective” (Bennet 2010) that has a shared experience of harm. As such, it functions as a mechanism that relates and assembles human and nonhuman flows. By referring to “agentic properties” I take specifically a new materialist stance. In other words, I am primarily interested in how accounts of matter from quantum physics suggest an “active” role for what has been considered “inert matter:” objects, whether plastic cups, chairs, or objectified forms of other life, are seen as playing a more active role in human affairs (Emmet and Nye 2017: 141).

Toxicity vs. Pollution In “Cultivating Ecological Practices for Troubled Times,” Josh Fisher et al. provide a definition of toxicity closely related to the “materiality of pollution,” and inquire into the “co-production of pollution/toxicity” as “two sides of the same coin, one overflowing boundaries and the other seeping in” (Fisher et al. 2021: 1). This brief essay introduces a collection of articles for a special issue on “Pollution and Toxicity” focused on entangled elements such as the materiality of pollution/toxicity although not intending to formulate a “unified new theory of pollution or toxicity” but, on the contrary, to reflect the “troubled ecologies” (Besky and Blanchette 2019) of “late industrialism through a broad range of scholarly perspectives, theoretical alliances, and methodological and epistemological approaches” (Fisher et al. 2021: 2). In addition, it seeks to demonstrate the value of “juxtaposition, counterpoint, and interference” by evoking a working form of collaboration that, following Donna Haraway in her now classic Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), rejects totality and finality

 This concept is further discussed in my ongoing research project on toxicity, entitled Material Dissonances. Toxic Matters and Matters of Toxicity in Latin America.

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or, and as many “material feminists” have suggested, “honours the endless mutuality of making” (Garrard 2012: 19). Although this distinction/similarity seems to be appealing, pollution and toxicity differ despite their overlapping. Toxicity’s definition, according to the Oxford Dictionary, refers to the “extent to which something is poisonous,” the “effect that a poisonous substance has,” and the “quality of being very harmful or unpleasant” (my emphasis). The same Dictionary provides the following definition for pollution: the “process of making air, water, soil, etc. dirty; the state of being dirty,” the “substances that make air, water, soil, etc. dirty,” and “harmful or annoying levels of noise, or of artificial light at night” (my emphasis). Toxicity is the term used to describe the “extent,” “effect,” and the “quality,” whereas pollution is defined as a “process,” a “substance” and a “level” of something. Toxicity is the degree to which a substance or a mix of substances can damage an organism. The words “poisonous” and “harmful” are embedded in toxicity. Moreover, toxicity is more sequential: besides the measuring characteristic (the “extent” or “quality”) it also follows a cause-effect logic. According to Anna Stec in “Principles of Toxicology and Toxicity,” toxicity is the “amount of a poison that, under a specific set of conditions, causes toxic effects or results in detrimental, biological changes” (Stec 2010: 218). Toxicity can refer to the “effect on a whole organism, such as an animal, and as well as the effect on a substructure of the organism, such as a cell or tissue (cytotoxicity) or an isolated target organ, such as the lungs” (Stec 2010: 218). In the framework of environmental humanities, both terms have been used with frequency indistinctly. For instance, Serenella Iovino in a short essay entitled “Pollution” alludes to Herbert Marcuse’s definition: “Pollution and poisoning are mental as well as physical phenomena, subjective as well as objective phenomena” (2005: 175, cit. in Iovino 2016: 168). Following this argument, Iovino attempts to demonstrate “how pollution is an interplay of harmful material substances and harmful discourses and practices,” for which deficient environmental policies along with corruption, criminal complicities and lack of an appropriate epistemological apparatus “often cooperate with uncontrolled industrial activities and forms of maldevelopment in ripping the social fabric” (Iovino 2016: 168). Ultimately, this intertwining creates unequal protection, thwarts citizenship and damages human and nonhuman life (Iovino 2016: 168). While pollution may seem vaguer, toxicity relies on its dose to become (or not) toxic. As Anna Stec explains, dose “is the quantity of toxicant that comes into contact with the target organ or tissue, where it exerts a toxic effect, within the organism,” therefore, the size or amount or quantity of the dose causing a particular effect “is dependent on the absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination of the organism exposed to the toxicant” (Stec 2010: 218). Besides the magnitude, two other aspects matter for toxicity: the “route and site of exposure,” for they exert significant influence in determining the toxicity of a substance (Stec 2010: 218). Oliver A. H. Jones and Rachel L. Gomes, on the other hand, explain how terms such as “contamination” and “pollution” are often and mistakenly “used somewhat interchangeably” and offer the

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following distinction: contamination “is simply the presence of a substance in a given sample where there is no evidence of harm;” pollution “is contamination that results in, or can result in, adverse biological effects to individuals or communities” (Jones and Gomes 2014: 2). To this effect, Jones and Gomes conclude that “All pollutants are therefore contaminants but not all contaminants are pollutants” (Jones and Gomes 2014: 2). From these definitions it derives that toxicity is linked to chemical agents (thus to a harmful presence), and that pollution, while may not stem from a chemical origin may still be harmful: “not all contaminants or pollutants are chemical in origin and many “different forms of pollution” exist (Jones and Gomes 2014: 2).3 By analysing the aquatic environment, they demonstrate the distinctiveness of each pollutant found in the same site: from chemical pollutants (such as lethal and non-lethal toxicity), to biological pollutants (such as the spread of non-native and/or invasive species to new systems and/or the “excess nutrients giving rise to excessive growths of some organisms” [eutrophication]), and physical pollutants (such as temperature, pH level changes, noise and/or light) (Jones and Gomes 2014: 2). Ultimately, as Firdos Alam Khan argues in Biotechnology Fundamentals, toxicity, by extension, “may be metaphorically used to describe toxic effects on larger and more complex groups, such as the family unit or society at large” (Khan 2011: 558). With these distinctions in mind, I’d like to argue that toxicity operates as a force that relies on material actants (toxic actants) that, when they are not “contained” may have multispatial, multitemporal and multidimensional implications.4 I define the impact of toxicity, triggered by some type of contact, as a toxic experience.

Latin America and Environmental Justice To understand the “politics behind toxicity” it is important to address the emergence of the environmental justice movement both in the Global North and Global South and to determine their differences. Of course, we don’t want to “apply” a North-South perspective. Rather than conceiving these dynamics as unilateral, it is impelling to capture these concerns at the intersections of activisms, environmental negligence and institutional apathy. According to Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans and Rachel Stein, environmental justice is “the right of all people to share equally in the benefits bestowed by a healthy environment,” the latter being defined as the “the places in which we live, work, play, and  Max Liboiron, in Pollution Is Colonialism (2021), clearly elaborates on the difference between toxins and toxicants: while toxins are defined as “poisons produced in animal cells and other nonindustrial sources,” toxicants are described as “industrial chemicals produced in labs” (87).  With my colleague at the University of Vienna, Arndt Niebisch, we developed the notion of “uncontained toxicity,” a concept that engages with a discourse of mutation and inoculation in contemporary narratives that appeals to a toxic semiotic while rendering bodies and spaces phantasmagoric specters. See Heffes and Niebisch (forthcoming).

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worship” (Adamson et al 2002: 4). Specifically, environmental justice initiatives attempt to redress “the disproportionate incidence of environmental contamination in communities of the poor and/or communities of color,” to secure for “those affected the right to live unthreatened by the risks posed by environmental degradation and contamination,” and to “afford equal access to natural resources that sustain life and culture” (Adamson et al 2002: 4). In the US, as members of marginalized communities have mobilized around issues of environmental degradation affecting their families, communities, and work sites, they have also highlighted the crucial intersections between ecological and social justice concerns. This is because environmental justice movements around the world have grown out of convergences between civil rights movements, antiwar and antinuclear movements, women’s movements, and grassroots organizing around environmental issues. In this context, a new and conceptual lexicon has emerged to tackle the political ecologies of toxicity, such as “environmental racism,” which was coined by Reverend Benjamin Chavis, and defined as “racial discrimination” in environmental policy-making, and the enforcement of regulations and laws that deliberately target people of color communities—the most common residents of “toxic waste facilities” (Castañeda and Platt 2000: 2). Julie Sze, in Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger evokes the notion of toxic landscapes to voice community experiences of environmental racism, and to imaginatively convey the issues at stake in environmental justice struggles. Because toxic worksites have become places of health threatening “toxic exposures”—an unfettered expression of “raw power in a neoliberal landscape” (Sze 2020: 55)—, the anti-toxics movement of the 1980s became the basis for the Environmental Justice organization, which lied in diverse political projects that include, besides the civil rights initiatives, the organizing efforts of Native Americans and labor platforms and, to a lesser extent, the traditional environmental movement (Rechtschaffen et al. 2009: 3). Any attempt to understand how social structures, cultural differences, and power dynamics shape the production, distribution, conceptualization, and embodiment of industrial toxics generated at any point in the capitalist world system must take into account that this unequal scenario is the by-product of the convergence of at least three components (Theriault and Kang 2021): toxics as violence, which relates to structural violence (see also Nixon 2011); the implementation of “sacrifice zones:” originally described bounded spaces, such as nuclear waste sites, that are intentionally made uninhabitable in the name of national defense, development, or the like (Theriault and Kang 2021: 8.) In environmental justice scholarship, the term has since come to encompass any locale or region where polluters and policymakers knowingly burden marginalized populations with environmental harm (see Laura Pulido 2017). Finally, state-sanctioned violence which of course supports and overlaps with structural violence. In “As Above, So Below: Anti-Black Violence as Environmental Racism,” Willie Jamaal Wright argues that “uneven toxic exposure” is a “form of state-sanctioned violence” (2021: 795) which is inextricably tied to other aspects of racial capitalism in the

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United States, including institutional discrimination, mass incarceration, and extrajudicial murder. In Popular Environmentalism and Social Justice in Latin America, David V. Carruthers examines the disproportionate and negative environmental and social costs of global production endured by the communities of the Global South. One main question he asks is to what extent and in what forms have Latin America’s popular movements fused environmental dimensions into community struggles for social justice, and how do we recognize and analyze local and/or global forms of environmental justice consciousness and action (Carruthers 2008: 2). An important issue at stake here is whether the analytical tools of environmental justice open the doors to useful understandings that we might otherwise not capture (Carruthers 2008: 2.) However, data and resource limitations become not only a research challenge but also a practical and conceptual difficulty that Latin America faces, since unlike the US and Global North, the “paucity of systematic environmental and public health data” in most Latin American and Caribbean countries becomes an obstacle and may yield unreliable results (Carruthers 2008: 3). For instance, studies cannot rely on industry or official statistics given that they considerably downplay toxic threats (Cohen and Méndez 2000, cit. in Carruthers 2008: 4), and right-to-know laws are usually restricted and limited in reach and efficacy (Naumann 2004, cit. in Carruthers 2008: 4). At the same time, scholars like Enrique Leff have broadened this conceptual framework to consider cultural rights, Indigenous knowledge, genetic resources, and citizenship (2021). Unlike its counterpart in the US, environmentalism in Latin America generally begins with a stronger social justice component. Popular environmentalism in Latin America is distinct in that it takes shape in the arenas most directly salient to people’s lives and livelihoods and therefore “environmental resistance” weaves into existing struggles for social justice because people face environmental threats in every aspect of their daily lives. Carruthers appeals to the image of the rhizome to explore the pluralistic character of the environmental justice movement in Latin America, one that can be defined as a “diverse mosaic of existing popular struggles with an unmistakably environmental cast” that has evolved throughout Latin America (Carruthers 2008: 9). While the urban popular movements and shantytown dwellers’ organizations that have emerged in virtually all Latin American cities testify to the failure of development strategies that dispossess rural citizens at a pace that outruns the ability of urban expansion to absorb the displaced, women’s movements are remapping social relations throughout Latin America in human rights, community health, labor, and other campaigns for justice. Carruthers emphasizes that academic activism, spawning generations of “organic intellectuals” who keep one foot in the academy and another in the activist community tend to lead, support, or lend technical expertise to the tens of thousands of non-governmental organizations that have exploded on the scene to address virtually every dimension of social and environmental injustice. Similarly, Indigenous rights have been a powerful catalyst to mobilization throughout the region as native communities battle the forces that threaten to fragment them, displace them, and drive them toward cultural disintegration (Carruthers 2008: 9–10). Latin American’s human rights

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activism and legislation, on the other hand, increasingly incorporate “environmental rights,” and human rights campaigns have an established international reach, and campesino and farmworker identities have long been pillars of political participation in rural Latin America, as well as independent labor organizations in Latin America’s labor-surplus economies who still struggle to secure basic rights and protections for workers (Carruthers 2008: 10). All these movements take the form of a web of networked organizations that is unmistakably distinct, and to some degree, unique.

Toxicity as Recurrence Conjunto vacío (2015) is a book that, among many other prodigies, deals with the question of exile. As Gerber Bicecci points out in a recent interview, it is a book that addresses exile not as much as thematically but, on the contrary, in terms of the “effects” that exile inflicts on those who have left their countries, beginning with the exile of language.5 According to Gerber Bicecci, she was interested in talking about how this “traumatic” experience brings forward a set of situations that sometimes are completed throughout the process of exile but resumes later in the new and subsequent life. This “trauma,” then, remains and eventually it “remerges as a problem . . . a problem entrenched to that origin, the origin of the military dictatorship:”6 [Me] parecía que era importante hablar que en el interior de los cuerpos, de las personas, el trauma gesta una serie de situaciones que a veces terminan con el proceso del exilio y comienzan con esta otra vida. Pero a veces sigue estando allí y eventualmente afloran problemáticas, y son problemáticas que están enraizadas en ese origen, en este caso [el] de la dictadura.

As proposed earlier, I argue that toxicity operates as a force that relies on material actants, namely, toxic actants, that may entangle multiple ramifications. As a material existence, exile entails a toxic experience catalyzed by the recurrence of a set of conditions that “return” under a phantasmagoric form. These are lasting vestiges that haunt the future through the remnants of the disappeared. One may ask, hence, what are the afterlives that exile engenders in humans but also in nonhuman communities —as well as in landscapes and local environments? Drawing on the idea of exile as a toxic force that provokes trauma, and following Gerber Bicecci’s notion that the trauma caused by exile is recurrent (in its two meanings  See Planet Now! / Planeta herido: una conversación with Gisela Heffes and Verónica Gerber Bicecci. The Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University, Literal Publishing and The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). https://www.asle.org/stay-informed/planet-nowplaneta-herido-conversation-series-features-artist-veronica-gerber-biceccihosted-by-rice-university-lit eral-publishing-houston-mexico/. All quotations in this section come from this conversation (March 10, 2023).  My translation.

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of “return” and “repetition”), I propose to think of toxicity as connected to the notion of recurrence, that is, as a continuum that links the afterlives of political exiles with what I define as the “politics of exiling.” These politics become manifest through a set of extractive practices that besides “extracting” (natural) resources, they implement other extraction practices, such as the expropriation of bodies, histories, relationships, attachments to the land, and multiple temporalities. Thus, and through different/multi processes of extraction, they render instead conjuntos vacíos—or “empty sets,” following the English translation’s title of Gerber Bicecci’s book. However, the emptiness (that suspended hiatus) that defines the empty set captures an absent community—one could argue a ghostly assembly—that represents those who are no longer there (see Figure 1 and Figure 2).

Figure 1: Conjunto vacío (Gerber Bicecci 2015: 147).

Figure 2: Conjunto vacío (Gerber Bicecci 2015: 238 and 239). The “Y” represents “Yo” (I).

Furthermore, this collection of absences fluctuates throughout the textual and visual poetics of exile, recurring, by means of a toxic force, in La compañía (Gerber Bicecci 2019). The book rewrites Amparo Dávila short story “El huésped” (The Guest) by a work of montage that combines multiple registers, from writing and photography to archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, just to name a few. La compañía takes place in Nuevo Mercurio, an extractive site now abandoned after being depleted and populated only by ghosts, haunted remnants of a fractured future now turn into past, decay and ruins. Similar to Conjunto vacío, the extractive operations that took place in Nuevo Mercurio also provoked exiles; it alienated and estranged both human and nonhuman beings, as well as landscapes through the implementation of a toxic praxis that engraved the surroundings with the leftovers of economic and political development. While toxicity here flows, connects, disconnects, permeates in and out of different bodies, the book is designed and laid out in such way that contests the very idea of expropriation, extraction and dispossession. By extracting land and bodies, the extractive politics that served as the main premise for Conjunto vacío remerges in La

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compañía as a toxic recurrence, unearthing the buried corpses—the ghosts of political exile but also the ghosts of the politics of exiling—correlating the activities of the military dictatorship with that of transnational corporations (the name “la compañía” or “the company” lends itself to the ambiguity). Toxicity, which recurs over time and space, affecting organisms of different origins and species, is the afterlife of a trauma, an experience that resurfaces “as ghosts, as latent ghosts that all in the sudden become active and transforms from invisible to visible” (see Figure 3 and Figure 4):

Figure 3: La compañía (Gerber Bicecci 2019: 14). Yo sumaría eso que dices, y que me gusta mucho . . . me gusta mucho la palabra remanente y me lleva directamente, o no tan directamente, pero me lleva después a la idea de los fantasmas, creo que hay una cosa con lo fantasmal, con los fantasmas del exilio que se quedan ahí y que de repente se activan y que son también hasta cierto punto invisibles hasta que ya no lo son, y creo que, y lo digo así porque creo que en ese sentido hay algo en la compañía también, algo como de fantasmal, algo que no se ve hasta que si se ve, hasta que finalmente se ve . . . (Gerber Bicecci 2023).

Notwithstanding the recurrence of toxicity, La compañia evokes a poetics of montage in the sense of disappropriation (as formulated by Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza in The Restless Dead; 2020 [2013]) but also by means of restoration that contests, and to some extent unsettles, the guiding principle of expropriation (by virtue of extractive politics and political alienations). True, toxicity is activated by its dose, the routes and sites that it traverses, showing that the scale of its itinerary renders Nuevo Mercurio a “toxic sink” (Grebowicz 2017: 60) that somehow defines these sites of

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Figure 4: La compañía (Gerber Bicecci 2019: 16).

dispossession. But La compañía, in addition to narrating—both textually and visually— the afterlives of the toxins that inhabit both the physical and bodily space, it also resists their effects by offering a counternarrative based on a generative model. The idea of a montage of voices, stories, spaces and experiences works, following Bolivian writer Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2015), as a way of bringing together all the voices while at the same time being accountable for the gaze that brings them together.

Conclusion To trace what Stacy Alaimo defines as the “traffic in toxins” (2010: 18) in the “risk society” in which we live today requires an understanding about “the substance of one’s self” which is interconnected with the wider environment, marking “a profound shift in subjectivity” (2010: 19). While there are numerous examples at present both in literature and art, as well as our own natural and cultural environments of toxicity as recurrence, this conceptual paradigm catalyses an aesthetics of toxicity grounded in discourses on exposure, environmental (in)justice, bodily experiences, and material entanglements. Though presumably intangible, its fabric also complicates the traditional dichotomy between nature and culture, as both Conjunto vacío and La compañía show, by unsettling human exemplarity through a collage of voices that, rather than highlighting human power and grandiose triumphs, suggests, as Tim Lecain argues though a new materialist critique of the Anthropocene, “that we are neither particularly powerful nor especially intelligent and creative—at least not on our own,”

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and “these things should be understood as constituting who we are” (Lecain 2015: 4). From toxic legacies of the past to the toxic actants of our present, toxic bodies and voices, unearthed corpses and recuperated writers (such as the recovery—and by extension the homage—Gerber Bececci evinces to Amparo Dávila) are assembled in a “transcorporeal space” where, as Alaimo reminds us, “environmentalism, human health, and social justice cannot be severed” (2010: 21). In this sense, literature, and arts, and more broadly aesthetic expressions, not only transform toxic landscapes, but also “voice community experiences of environmental racism” (Adamson et al. 2002: 9) by conveying in a creative manner the issues at stake in the struggles for environmental justice.

Works cited Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, & Pedagogy. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2002. Anderson, Mark. “Differential Viscosities. The Material Hermeneutics of Blood, Oil, and Water in Crude and The Blood of Kouan Kouan.” Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema. Eds. Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2021. 205–228. Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010. ——. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Ballard, Susan. Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Besky, Sarah, and Alex Blanchette. How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Brulle, Robert J. 2000. Agency, Democracy, and Nature: the U.S. Environmental Movement from a Critical Theory Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Carruthers, David V. Environmental Justice in Latin America: Problems, Promise, and Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Chirinos, Eduardo. “The Chernobyl Chronicle.” The Latin American Ecocultural Reader. Eds. Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021. 342–343. Coronado, Castañeda Irasema, and Kamala Platt. Cultural Poetics of Environmental Justice: Where Borders Fuse. San Antonio, TX: Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, 2000. Di Chiro, Giovanna. “Environmental Justice.” Keywords for Environmental Studies. Eds. Joni Adamson. et al. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2016. 100–105. Emmett Robert, and David Nye. The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017. Fisher, Josh, Mary Mostafanezhad, Alex Nading, and Sarah Marie Wiebe. “Introduction: Pollution and Toxicity: Cultivating Ecological Practices for Troubled Times.” Environment and society 12.1 (2021): 1–4. Garrard, Greg. Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Gerber Bicceci, Verónica. Conjunto vacío. México, D.F.: Almadía, 2015. ——. La compañía. México, D.F.: Almadía, 2019. ——. Planet Now! / Planeta herido: una conversación with Gisela Heffes and Verónica Gerber Bicecci. The Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University, Literal Publishing and The Association for the

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Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). https://www.asle.org/stay-informed/planet-nowplaneta-herido-conversation-series-features-artist-veronica-gerber-biceccihosted-by-rice-universityliteral-publishing-houston–mexico/ (March 10 2023). Girvan, Norman. “Extractive Imperialism in Historical Perspective.” Extractive Imperialism in the Americas: Capitalism’s New Frontier. Eds. James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer. Leiden: Brill, 2014. 49–61. Grebowicz, Margret. Whale song. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., 2017. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Heffes, Gisela, and Arndt Niebisch. Uncontained Toxicity: The Dialectics of Loss and Control. Forthcoming. Iovino, Serenella. “Pollution.” Keywords for Environmental Studies. Eds. Joni Adamson et al. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 167–169. Jones, Oliver A. H., and Rachel L. Gomes. “Chemical Pollution of the Aquatic Environment by Priority Pollutants and its Control.” Pollution: Causes, Effects and Control. Ed. Roy M. Harrison. Cambridge: The Royal Society of Chemistry Publishing, 2014. 1–28. Khan, Firdos Alam. Biotechnology fundamentals. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2012. Kuletz, Valerie. “The Movement for Environmental Justice in the Pacific.” World in Motion: the Globalization and the Environment Reader. Eds. Gary M. Kroll and Richard H. Robbins. Lanham: Altamira Press, 2009. 209–224. Lecain, Tim. “Against the Anthropocene: A Neo-Materialist Perspective,” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 3, no. 1 (2015): 4. Leff, Enrique. Political Ecology: Deconstructing Capital and Territorializing Life. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Liboiron, Max. Pollution is colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Marder, Michael, and Tondeur, Anaïs. The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness. London: Open Humanities Press, 2016. McNeill, J. R., and Engelke, Peter. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Mousseau, Timothy A. “Why military action in radioactive Chernobyl could be dangerous for people and the environment.” PBS.org, March 3, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/why-military-action -in-radioactive-chernobyl-could-be-dangerous-for-people-and-the-environment (3 March 2022). Petras, James, and Henry Veltmeyer. Extractive Imperialism in the Americas: Capitalism’s New Frontier. Leiden: Brill, 2014. “Pollution.” 2021. OED Online. Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/defi nition/english/pollution (May 1, 2022). Pulido, Laura. “Geographies of Race and Ethnicity II: Environmental Racism, Racial Capitalism and StateSanctioned Violence.” Progress in Human Geography 41.4 (2017): 524–33. Rechtschaffen, Clifford, Eileen P. Gauna, and Catherine A. O’Neill. Environmental Justice: Law, Policy, and Regulation. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2009. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. Sociología de la imagen: miradas ch’ixi desde la historia andina. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2015. Rivera Garza, Cristina. The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation. Trans. Robin Myers. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2020. Stec, Anna. “Principles of toxicology and toxicity.” Fire toxicity. Eds. Anna Stec and T. Richard Hull. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2010. 218 Sze, Julie. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020. Theriault, Noah, and Simi Kang. “Toxic Research. Political Ecologies and the Matter of Damage.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 12.1 (2021): 5–24. “Toxicity.” 2021. OED Online. Oxford University Press https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/defini tion/english/pollution (May 1, 2022). Wright, Willie Jamaal. “As Above, So Below: Anti-Black Violence as Environmental Racism.” Antipode 53.3 (2021): 791–809.

Jens Andermann

Trance “Trance / Bath of stones / Dogfood / Epidemics / The old book of law / Tobossi / The holy tree / Secret language / Old gold / Taboos. . .,”1 the German-Jewish writer, journalist and ethnographer Hubert Fichte (1993: 436) begins a long, incantation-style verse section midway through Explosion, his 800-plus-pages “novel of ethnology”—Fichte’s subtitle—that was to become a centerpiece of his monumental, never completed 24volume Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (The History of Sensitivity). In the novel, which Fichte end-edited agonizing in hospital after unsuccessful emergency surgery, he recounts his years-long roamings through Brazil in pursuit of the sacred knowledges of Afrodescendent and Amazonian spirit religions while also cruising the gay undergrounds of Rio, Bahia and Manaus during the most brutal phase of the dictatorship following the 1968 “coup within the coup.” The passage, though not out of sync with the work’s almost breathless staccato rhythm and constant present tense, appears, at first, to reproduce in language the very experience of ecstasy Explosion is after. Yet, as so frequently throughout the text, direct purchase on epiphanic presence is denied or, rather, deferred here, as the passage we’re reading is soon revealed to be but a summary of another written text, a study of the Vodun temple Casa das Minas in São Luiz do Maranhão that Fichte’s narrator has picked up at a Copacabana used-books store. And yet: is Fichte’s poetic invocation of entrancement, despite those subsequent mediations, not also still in thrall to the very moment of extreme presence it conjures up? And could this not be so because, in fact, trance itself is a mode of mind-writing, every re-iteration of which is fundamentally an invocation of the ones that have preceded it, as well as of the multiple authors such “intertextuality” brings into play, not all of them human ones? And is not trance, therefore, also a peculiar kind of “environmental aesthetic,” opening up to one another’s presence the entangled agencies of humans, animals, and plants, of the ancestors and the earth- and sky-beings, of stories lived and yet to come? “With the tohé you don’t hallucinate, different it is,” as Ruth Cárdenas, the brujo Don Javier’s wife tells César Calvo (2011: 54), another writerethnologist, in Iquitos: “With the tohé, you see everything naturally, real as can be, only of another kind of real . . .” Although it is not in the text, trance as a threshold that opens towards another way of seeing the world (a Weltanschauung) permeates Fichte’s entire novel—and, for that matter, Calvo’s, as we shall see. It is what provides these “novels of ethnology” with their structuring absence, their “transcendental signified,” to borrow a key concept from Jacques Derrida’s (2001) classic critique of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Trance, indeed, is the différance of a kind of writing I suggest calling narrative trance-

 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English in this chapter are my own. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-027

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culturation, in a not-so-unintended pun on Ángel Rama’s influential notion that has become a cornerstone of Latin American literary and cultural studies. For, as Héctor Hoyos (2019: 9) has recently reminded us, “narrative transculturation” is itself a concept that was wrested by Rama from the materialist anthropology of Fernando Ortiz to the field of literature. It is therefore also highly performative, putting into (textanalytical) practice what it at the same time assigns to its literary references: namely, a kind of writing that, in Rama’s classic synthesis, successfully “re-integrates” itself into its “own linguistic community”—read: the rural, peasant or Indigenous milieu to which it “returns”—only to put this “linguistic system” to work, “not trying to imitate a regional dialect from outside, but elaborating one from within for literary purposes.” The transculturator, Rama concludes, works “at the possibilities of his own language [. . .] in order to construct from it a literary language according to the demands of artistic creation” (1997: 161). In relation to narrative transculturation, then, “trance-culturation” would be something like the return of the repressed, or indeed that of “ethnology,” with a vengeance, into the “literary language” and the conceptual apparatus constructed from it. Trance-culturation happens whenever someone (or something) unleashes the excess material which the “literary language” of transculturation has to contain and control in order to satisfy “the demands of artistic creation,” attending instead to a very different kind of demand involving existents both human and nonhuman, material and immaterial, whose claims on the text challenge, and frequently outrival, those of literary genre, style, or rhythm. In this chapter, I explore the possibilities the concepts of trance and tranceculturation hold for the environmental aesthetics as a field wagering on imaginative engagements with the more-than-human, opening a way towards fashioning new worlds-in-common. To unlock these potentials, however, we might have to let go of the very idea of “environment” for, as Yanomami activist and pajé Davi Kopenawa explains, “for us, what the white people refer to in this way is what remains of the forest and land that were hurt by their machines [. . .] The earth cannot be split apart as if the forest were just a leftover part” (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 397). Trance as a breaking-down of the confines of body and of species and as a reconstellation of alliances among existents in a cascade of becomings, I argue, is also a way of suturing the wound extractive violence, as a splitting-apart of the earth, has inflicted on “the forest and the land,” and of re-immersing the human, not in “environments” but in an extended matrix of selfhood as always already verging on the otherness it allies itself with. What I am interested in, at least for the purposes of this chapter, is however not the sensorial or psychedelic dimension of trance as rather the latter’s “amazingly rich theoretical content,” as Mircea Eliade (1964: 14) put it in his classic ethnography of Siberian and Arctic shamanism: the particular conceptual work trance realizes as a (nonwestern) analytic of the un/worlding events underlying individual and collective moments of crisis. In my own previous attempts at foregrounding the concept’s (eco-)critical potential, I drew on Gilles Deleuze’s engagement with the cinema of Glauber Rocha,

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where trance represented “a transition, a passage, or a becoming,” suspending diegetic continuity for the purpose of “produc[ing] collective utterances capable of raising misery to a strange positivity: the invention of a people” (Deleuze 1989: 222)—a people, I argued, that Latin American aesthetic production of the twentieth and twenty-first century also urges us to imagine as not solely human but rather as a kind of trans-species communitas in insurrection against the “immunitary” pact of extractive capitalism (Andermann 2018: 21–22). Here, instead, I pivot to a different (albeit not unrelated) field of dialogues between speculative ethnology and visionary shamanism, to characterize trance as an incessant alliance-making in the face of un-worlding catastrophe. For the sake of brevity, I shall limit myself to the medium of writing, which might at first glance seem counterintuitive given the much greater proximity of dance, sound and performance to ritual forms of entrancement. I shall first return to the notion of “trance-culturation” put forward in the opening paragraphs, to then turn the tables and argue for an idea of trance as itself being always already writing—an écriture across the boundaries of species and existents and thus also as a site of debate and (potentially) of understanding on matters of survival or—in Carlos Porto-Gonçalves’s (2008) expression—of “re-existence.”2

Travel and trance-culturation It is no accident that “trance-culturation,” as a formal gesture of exploding the textual form itself (in particular, that of the novel), had already proliferated in early twentiethcentury kinds of writing (such as the novela de la selva) on which transculturation and its literary ally, magical realism, were calling time. No less coincidental is its reemergence in several forms and modes of textuality ensuing on the latter’s own demise: testimonio, autofiction, “novels of ethnology.” César Calvo’s Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo (Three Halves of Ino Moxo, 1981), to return to a work already cited above, effectively combines elements of all three of these, at the same time as it un- and rewrites the jungle novel’s master plot of self-loss and re-encounter in the forest’s heart of darkness. Even though the journey from the Andes into Amazonia in search of the Arawaka shirimpiare Ino Moxo—Black Panther—born Manuel Córdova, the child of white caucheros, whose shape-shifting capacities saved his people from the genocidal violence of the rubber boom, still provides the main storyline, narrative time and space are in fact composed here through a series of ayahuasca-induced visions, as well as conversations with Indigenous and mestizo healers the central character bifurcates into. Trance, in Ino Moxo, is not the longed-for yet unattainable moment of pure presence at the text’s inner “vortex,” as, say, in José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine (The Vortex, 1924), but

 Through the notion of “R-existência” (re-existence), Porto-Gonçalves aims to think resistence not as merely reactive to instances of power but rather as the mode of insistence/endurance that is proper to Indigenous and communal forms of opposing the destructive effects of colonialism and extractivism.

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rather an alternative chronotope constantly threatening to collapse the novel’s forward-moving space-time arrow and to subvert the identities of its characters—including the narrator, who may or may not be the author César Calvo Soriano’s alter ego dreaming with his cousin-twin César Soriano Calvo’s mind-journey, or vice versa. Unlike in earlier iterations, associated with the more radical facets of literary regionalism, in which it worked as a disturbance that wrested the text away from the stylistic and generic conventions of realism, here trance–culturation turns itself into the structuring element of the textual form, blurring distinctions between what “happens” and what is “dreamed up.” As Ino Moxo/Manuel Córdova explains to the novice/narrator: The Asháninka say that to dream is to speak with the air, that during the dream one wakes to the life of another time, to one of the lives of the time of that life. What is being seen during the oni xuma is as real or much more real. Don’t doubt it for one second. You have truly traveled last night, although it may not be quite the usual form of truth (Calvo 2011: 283).

The effect of such entrancement is, however, not a “delirious” or chaotic kind of text but, as the above quote indicates, rather a highly instructional, even didactic one. Visions and dreams, in Calvo’s novel, give way to or are themselves accessed through, the shaman’s “debriefing” or interpretative commentary that ensues—frequently in the fashion of a conversation that resembles an interview transcript, the base material of ethnographic fieldwork. This kind of Traumdeutung acquires, then, a metafictional quality that is being assigned, moreover, to an Indigenous analytic, reflecting as it does on the text’s own discursive statute and on the fragile zone of translatability between two ontologies that it aims to carve out: Will you understand me? Because the Virakocha only admit, into their knowledge, the realities that pertain to the person, the intimate ones, not those that are universal and infinite [. . .]. Our river isn’t the only one, the Virakocha now accept. There are other rivers, they say. As if there were only rivers, and as if all those rivers were made of water and had two margins that end in the sea. They can’t conceive of a river having one, or three, or five margins. They can’t conceive of a river of still waters, of waters that retract. [. . .] Because things aren’t only real or only illusory, true or false. There is a multitude of intermediate categories through which things exist, many categories of real, at the same time and at different times (Calvo 2011: 250–251).

Trance-culturation, I suggest, in literary ethnofictions such as Calvo’s, is first and foremost the return of ethnology, with a vengeance, “working at the possibilities of the literary languages constructed from it” at different junctures of Latin American literary modernity. But this de-constructive work is carried out here “according to the demands” not of artistic creation—which, let us remember, in Rama’s reflections on the novelists of the boom, was shorthand for a kind of successful fusion of voice and writing that anticipated in textual form the postcolonial nation finally coming into its own—but of an altogether different agenda. Trance-culturation wrests modern compositional forms to the service of maintaining what Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2017: 66) call the “ethnographic present”: “the present of ethnos as opposed to

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the ‘historical present’ of the nation-state.” Ethnographic present is thus not the dehistoricized time of “primitive societies,” the fashioning of which as a negative double of national modernity had been the task entrusted to anthropology as a master discourse of Latin American academia. Rather, turning the tables on their discipline, ethnographic present for Danowski and Viveiros de Castro represents the active warding-off of the modern nation-state’s historical telos to insist instead on the ongoing validity (the “reexistence”) of what Elizabeth Povinelli (2021: 134) terms the ancestral present: “the endurant nature of ancestral existence” as a “practice of survivance.” The ethnographic present, as an active holding-on to ancestral existence and resistance against teleological or “accelerationist” ideas of history, is therefore anything but stable and unchanging. Its dynamic, as manifest in trance-cultural narrative production, is attuned to an “Indigenous praxis [of] regulated production of transformations that are capable of reproducing the ethnographic present (life-cycle rituals, the metaphysical management of death, shamanism as cosmic diplomacy), and thus to thwart the regressive proliferation of chaotic transformations” (Danowski and Castro 2017: 67–68).3 Because the ethnographic present, according to Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s glossing of Amazonian cosmologies, is but the interregnum between past and future times of transformation—“the epoch that began when pre-cosmological beings suspended their ceaseless becoming-other” and which will end “reabsorbing humans back into the pre-cosmological substrate where all differences continue to chaotically communicate with each other” (2017: 66–68)—this insistence on continuity, on reexistence, also requires a constant struggle on two fronts. It requires an appeasement of history and of prehistory alike, so to speak, the key tactic of which is precisely “the regulated production of transformations.” To put it another way, re-existence as a holding-on to the ethnographic present is the art of constant becoming—becomingwoman, becoming-animal, becoming-ancestor, becoming-other—that is the craft of

 What I call trance-culturation is therefore different from the kind of exclusive inclusion into the governmental practices of neo-extractive capitalism Povinelli thinks of as “geontopower.” Under the latter, those “primitives” or “Animists” who “fail to use the division of Life and Nonlife as a division of givenness” (as well as, we should add, to use the division between the Human and the Nonhuman as the biontological division of givenness) are entitled to some kind of symbolic and material compensation for the infringement of their “cultural” beliefs and values. At the same time, such recognition of “cultural difference” on the part of late-liberal governance can and must never threaten Western ontology’s exclusive purchase on truth: “Non-Indigenous people may appreciate these narratives as rhetorically provocative ways of conceiving the world but they are unlikely to consider them to carry the weight of truth, let alone compel states to treat these existents in an ethically and politically equivalent way to how they treat humans” (Povinelli 2016: 128). By contrast, trance-culturation as a mode of putting Indigenous analytics to work as a metafictional critique of the very kinds of textuality it draws into its service, very much does shift “the weight of truth” towards other ontologies, precisely because it grasps the character of the textual form itself as a territory in dispute. On the nonetheless very different political stakes of Indigenous and non–Indigenous authors and cultural producers (such as Calvo), see Smith (2021: 141–170).

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the shaman. Trance-culturation redeploys the latter in the form (already inherent in the original) of a poetics.

Shamanism and the aesthetics of survivance As we begin to see, then, trance is also a modality of historical materialism put into practice. Only that, rather than getting a handle on moments of crisis and transformation by way of concepts or ideas, in trance the shaman confers with “spirits” or “images” that are but the shaman-emissaries of other existents. Together, in a kind of cosmic diplomacy, these deliberate on how to safeguard in moments of danger the time of the interregnum as a transversal alliance among living things (which from the vantage point of the ancestral present can also include rocks, mountains, or rivers). Shamanism, to cite Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (2015: 173) influential re-assessment of this classic (Western) conceptualization of nonwestern spiritualities, is a form of political art centered on the cosmo-performative instance of trance as a sacrificial crisis of which the shaman is “at once officiant and vehicle” and where, unlike the priest, “it is the shaman himself who crosses to the other side of the mirror; he does not send delegates or representatives in the form of victims but is himself the victim: a dead in waiting.” As the one capable of transcending the boundary of his individual body as well as of its species-form, the shaman re-enters the zone of indiscernibility that allows him to confer with other existents who have similarly returned to (or rather: who always remain latently in) the protocosmic state of shared humanity which, in the present epoch that has succeeded the time of transformations, only one species at a time can occupy.4 Trance, then, among many Amazonian peoples is not so much a “human” state of mind that allows reaching out to other species-beings and to the denizens of the spiritual realm as it is a mode of potentiality to which all existents have recourse insofar as it activates the substance of humanity that is common to them all. It is a mode of communication that unlocks, in Eduardo Kohn’s (2013: 78) expression, “the semiotic quality of life—the fact that the forms that life takes are the product of how living selves represent the world around them.” It is important to note, however, that—regardless of who or what enters and activates this transversal semiotic realm—“there is no question of anarchical hallucinations and of a purely individual plot and dramatis personae,” to quote once more from Eliade’s (1964: 14) classic study. Trance, as opposed to individual and spontaneous forms of visionary depersonalization, is a “technique of ecstasy,” which follows a

 As Eduardo Kohn (2013: 143) points out, among the Ávila Runa of Western Amazonia, dogs are sometimes given hallucinogenic drugs “in order for people to communicate with [them] as conscious human subjects,” at the same time as their snouts need to be kept shut during this process to avoid them talking back and enticing people to enter into a canine subjectivity.

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very precisely preordained script. Just as art, medicine or psychoanalysis (aspects of which it shares), it is a craft passed on through an apprenticeship that often takes up the entire youth and young adulthood of the novice. As Davi Kopenawa explains in The Falling Sky—his book co-authored with French anthropologist Bruce Albert—, access to ecstatic, revelatory insight is but the result of lifelong learning, in which the pajé has to memorize not just the cast of ancestor-images (xapiri) that visit him in dreams, but also the community’s stories of foundation and of its experiences over time—the mythical repertoire and its relation to historical memory—as well as the modes of speech each of these demands: White people’s children must learn to draw their words by awkwardly twisting their fingers and constantly fixing their eyes on image skins. Among us, the young people who want to know the xapiri must overcome fear and let their elders blow the yākoana powder into their nostrils. It is painful, and it also takes a very long time [. . .] To us, what [the white people] call education is the words of Omama and the xapiri, our elders’ hereamuu speeches, and our feasts’ wayamuu and yāimuu talks (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 300, 313).5

The shamanic trance, then, far from being just a psychotropic-induced state of selfloss and abandon, is in fact a highly disciplined, regulated mode of speculative imagination that re-actualizes this mnemonic and rhetorical arsenal acquired by the pajé for the purpose of analyzing moments of contingency and of re-ensuring the endurance of the ancestral present. Trance, as a moment when the knowledge acquired through mnemonic study is mobilized to confront the as-yet-unknown, is thus also not unlike the speculative and experimental uses of writing in Western culture—poetry and narrative fiction—even though, at the same time, its ultimate purpose is quite the opposite: not to hold up to society the mirror of an ideal it has yet to realize but to ensure that this mirror-image shows the same face it had the day before and every day before that.6 The relation between trance and writing, then, with which we began this chapter, actually runs both ways as, in effect, every time the shaman enters into a state of ecstasy, he is also re-reading and re-inscribing the stories passed on from previous generations of shamans. In the remaining pages, I make a case for this shamanic world-reading and writing to be understood, unlike those of Western science and art, not as representing the world to the human but rather as reconfirming the humanness of the world in an actualization of the alliances with other “humanities”—such as those co-existents that manifest in the shaman’s body in the course of the trance. At the same time, I argue that

 In The Falling Sky, Albert and Kopenawa graph in boldface letters those words that Kopenawa used in Portuguese (rather than his native dialect of the Yanomami language) during their interviews, on which the text is based (see Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 10).  The work of Ticio Escobar (2007, 2012) has been key to understanding Indigenous ritual forms as fundamentally (though never exclusively) aesthetic experiences; see especially “El arte y el rito,” in Escobar (2012: 233–347); also “The Path of the Shamans,” in Escobar (2007: 211–259).

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Kopenawa’s and Albert’s work (which I take as exemplary for a contemporary strand of Indigenous epistemological and political production) alerts us to the waning of this worlding capacity of trance due to the combined effects of the advancing extractive frontier: the depletion of the Yanomami’s and their co-existents’ shamanic knowledgepower due to epidemics, physical violence, deforestation, species extinctions, the poisoning of soils by mining chemicals and agrotoxins, and so forth. It is to ward off this unworlding process culminating in the title-giving image of the falling sky, precisely, that Kopenawa and Albert resort to a kind of trance-culturation that strives, in a way that is different from Fichte’s and Calvo’s, to give an “imperfect account” in the medium of writing (or rather, in that of the recording, editing and translation of oral accounts produced for that very purpose) of the shaman’s world–historical apprenticeship. In Transculturación narrativa en América Latina, discussing the testimonial work of two Desâna intellectuals, Umúsin Panlôn Kumu and Tolamãn Kenhíri, Rama had argued that this “leap that makes an Indian enter the modern system of culture,” including the use of writing as “a system of graphic signs stripped of a body and skin,” for all its intrinsic and political merits, nonetheless amounted to an “atrocious impoverishment” in relation to the “organic community” that would once have congregated around the same narratives through ritual forms of “spiritual, physical, social participation” (Rama 2007: 100–101). But rather than figuring it only as the diminished remainder of a much richer, synaesthetic experience of revelatory knowledge-transmission, the idea of trance-culturation might help us read a work such as Kopenawa’s and Albert’s as a radical wager on the poietic quality of trance (beyond any particular mode of its iteration) and thus also as making a claim for the capacity of Indigenous societies to appropriate the tools of “modern” society for the purpose of novel “practices of survivance.” Kopenawa, in The Falling Sky, contrasts his own, relatively uneventful apprenticeship as a voluntary novice, under conditions of rapidly advancing incursions of white society into Yanomami territory, with those of preceding generations of young wouldbe shamans who used to undergo much longer and more complex initiations, including a prolonged dreamtime period of sexual cohabitation with female underwater beings in repetition of the foundational romance that brought the present world (and Yanomami society within it) into being. Whatever the conditions of their initiation, it is only once they have mastered the technique of ecstasy—once their earthly body has been un- and remade in the series of trials that include the memorizing and living-through (in “dreams”) of the community’s foundational feats—that shamans can embark into the mystical geography that opens up in the state of trance. In the cosmopoliteia of the living forest, where existents inhabit (as “humans”) multiple natures interconnected through the semiotic transversality of a “culture” common to all, shamanic trance provides the shared plane of reality among forms of being that diverge regarding the symbolic order each of them inhabits and regarding the imaginary ones they project on their others. As Viveiros de Castro (2015: 185) puts it, “the ‘totemic’ jaguar into which a human transforms himself ‘sacrificially’ is imaginary but the transformation is real.”

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Shamanic trance, as a cosmic multispecies diplomacy, ushers in “transversal communication among incommunicables, a dangerous and delicate mode of comparison between perspectives in which the position of the human is always in dispute” (Castro 2011: 171). But this disputed and therefore extended humanity is also the precondition here for an “ecological” mode of being in the world. Unlike, say, in Jakob von Uexküll’s neo-Kantian distinction of the physical environment (Umwelt) from its subjective experience (Innenwelt) on behalf of existents, which has remained influential in Western environmentalism,7 “ecology” is predicated here on the very propensity for becoming-other that is the real virtuality inherent in all forms of life. As Kopenawa asserts: The words of “ecology” are our ancient words, those Omama gave our ancestors at the beginning of time. [. . .] In the forest, we human beings are the “ecology.” But it is equally the xapiri, the game, the trees, the rivers, the fish, the sky, the rain, the wind, and the sun! It is everything that came into being in the forest, far from the white people: everything that isn’t surrounded by fences yet (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 300).

Kopenawa’s fear of impending catastrophe due to the waning of shamanic power in the present (of which he sees his own, impoverished array of xapiri spirits compared to those commanded by his shaman-elders, as living proof) is thus not, or not only, lamenting the loss of cultural richness and of ancestral knowledge in the wake of extractivecapitalist ethnocide. The notion of a waning of shamanic power refers to a wider process of unworlding, including but not limited to the demographic catastrophe suffered by the Yanomami people due to the violent expansion of the mining and agro-industrial frontier and to successive waves of epidemics (including the most recent Covid-19 pandemic, which in Brazil disproportionately affected Indigenous communities). Moreover, it also crucially includes the shamanic emissaries of all those other co-existents of the forest who are likewise exposed to the chaos-inducing influence of the xawara epidemic beings released, as Kopenawa tells us, in the “metal fumes” of the minerals and fossil fuels unearthed by white people from their cooling preserve underground: The forest is wise, its thinking is the same as ours. This is why it knows how to defend itself with its xapiri and its nē wari evil beings. The only reason it does not yet turn to chaos is that a few great shamans are still making their powerful spirits dance to protect it. But today, [. . .] more and more angry orphan xapiri are released as their fathers are devoured one after the other by the xawara epidemics. The spirits of the living shamans can still contain them for the time being. Buth without their work the forest and the sky will not be able to stay in place very long and remain as quiet and calm as we have known them until now (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 409).

If the forest is but the time and space of the ethnographic present—of survivance as an incessant remaking of alliances among multiple becomings—then in the absence of those in charge of managing these becomings a Hobbesian desert emerges of mutually

 Uexküll (1909); see also Feiten (2020).

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incommunicated, orphaned forces unable to re-actualize their inscription into the semiosis of the living. What Kopenawa anticipates in his vision of the sky collapsing onto the earth is, in fact, this incremental in-communication among existents unleashed on the selvatic cosmopoliteia by the xawara epidemic beings, shorthand not just for the sanitary catastrophe suffered by the Yanomami but also, furthermore, for the extractivist political and economic matrix from which it originates.8 In the world-ecology of the forest—which includes the multiple humanities living alongside one another as well as their shamanic counterparts continuously rewriting the shared source code of existence by dancing with one another on the mirror-like roof of the sky—continuity is bestowed by the shamanic encounter, the trance, which defuses the danger by channeling intense forces into becomings. Becomings, as Viveiros de Castro contends, are therefore the interspecies supplement to the “totemic” logic of filiation (of “extensive” alliance between clans and their animal ancestors) that organizes the social order of the village community. A becoming, by contrast, represents “the intense, counternatural and cosmopolitical alliance” (Castro 2015: 189) that unmakes and confounds species differences but thus also holds their unsettling potentials in check and channels them back into the very forces that make the forest grow: “The xapiri,” as Kopenawa puts it, “are the image of growth’s companions, they are her collaborators” (Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 143). Bereft of shamanic mediation and alliance-making, warns Kopenawa, the intense forces traversing earth and sky will no longer be able to actualize themselves in such becomings and, orphaned from their host bodies, will return once more to their protocosmic chaos, to the “time of transformations” ensuing on the collapse of the previous worldorder, reconvening to usher in the end of this one: “If all the shamans die, the sky will break apart for good, and no one will be able to do anything” (2013: 407). This, I would argue, is where trance-culturation comes back into the picture: as a counter-strategy to the advance of the extractivist-epidemic machine, by mobilizing the shamanic “technique” for the production of “text”—of an outward-reaching, and thus also profoundly transformative, redeployment of Yanomami modes of “speaking truth”. It proceeds in much the same fashion as the shamanic healing practice, where the foreign, catastrophe-inducing element (the xawara epidemic) is, literally speaking, forced to dance to the tune of Yanomami ontology, for, as Kopenawa explains When it really becomes too dangerous and they must save their people from death, our shaman elders even make dance the epidemic’s own image, which they also call Xawawari a. This image is the epidemic’s, but once it becomes a xapiri spirit, it bravely fights the white people’s dangerous metal smoke and joins the napënapëri spirits of their ancestors in their struggle against it (2013: 294).

What this passage suggests (one of the many instances of acute self-reflexivity that make The Falling Sky such a rich and complex text) is in fact nothing less than a poetics—a poetics of translatability among incommensurables by way of entrancement. It  On the centrality of epidemics in Kopenawa’s political ontology, see Andermann (2022).

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is important to remember that this poetics of trance-culturation emerges in a process that is in itself dialogical, or rather polylogical, as Bruce Albert explains it in his own afterword to The Falling Sky. His own conversations with Kopenawa, he says, have also always been mediated by the presence of other voices and of recording devices both mechanical and spiritual. Not only does Kopenawa’s text-structuring first person also embody “the voices of many shamanic ‘images’ of animal ancestors and cosmological beings,” he also took pains in orchestrating the recording sessions themselves as not “merely ethnographic interviews” but as “shamanic intercultural polylogues, alternating with traditional sessions about white people conducted with his father-inlaw and other Watoriki shamans” (2013: 448). In way similar to the shaman’s dreaming-up of the image-emissary of the epidemic, in order to force it “to become a xapiri spirit” and to fight against that which it represents, The Falling Sky takes hold of writing for the sake of trance-culturation. It does so to respond to a moment of radical unworlding, by making it enter an Indigenous domain of representation—not as mimesis or imitation but, as Viveiros de Castro (2013: 160) suggests, in the form of “disjunctive synthesis which connects-separates the actual and the virtual, the discrete and the continuous.” Trance-culturation, indeed, could be understood here as taking the “technique” of the shamanic polylogue into and against the extractive zone where it turns into a mode of activist speech (and action) that urges us, as readers, to enter and engage with, an “intercultural” space that is modelled on the cosmopoliteia of the living forest. As anthropologist Pedro de Niemeyer Cesarino puts it The force of Kopenawa’s speculative thought is not a consequence of writing and literacy, although it is produced by systematic and critical comparison of events, accounts, and experiences. This critical systematicity, enhanced by his transformation into a shaman and international activist, is attached to another epistemology and its correspondent configuration of reality, whose instruments rest in the activation of the virtual multiplicity of xapiri for the production of thought (Cesarino 2014: 291).

Trance-culturation, then, amounts to a poetics of re–existence, of survival in a moment of extreme unworlding, against which it wields the “techniques” of Indigenous analytics in a way that is also radically innovative, extending a dynamic of alliance and/as becoming to the textual form itself. “The problem of precarious survival helps us see what is wrong. Precarity is a state of acknowledgment of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another,” as Anna Tsing (2015: 29) sustains. To acknowledge our vulnerability to others: perhaps this would also be a good way of summing up the lesson Kopenawa and Albert are imparting over more than 600 pages. Then, and only then, might a horizon of becoming—indeed, as Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2017: 122–123) put it, of “a ceaseless rebecoming-indigenous”—once more open up for (some of) us, and thus also for “a subsistence of the future.”

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Works Cited Andermann, Jens. Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Metales Pesados, 2018. ——. “La noche de los Xawarari: notas sobre epidemiología amazónica.” Heterotopías 4.7 (2021): 1–18. https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/heterotopias/article/view/33427 (April 10, 2023.). Calvo, César. Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo y otros brujos de la Amazonía. Lima: Grupo Editorial Peisa, 2011 [1981]. Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de. “The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits.” Inner Asia 9.2 (2007): 153–172. ——. Metafísicas canibais: elementos para uma antropologia pós–estrutural. São Paulo: Cosacnaify, 2015. Cesarino, Pedro de Niemeyer. “Ontological Conflicts and Shamanic Speculations in Davi Kopenawa’s The Falling Sky.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4.2 (2014): 289–295. Danowski, Déborah, and Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de. The Ends of the World. Trans. Rodrigo Nunes. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time–Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Athlone, 1989. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Abingdon: Routledge, 2001. 351–369. Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. Escobar, Ticio. The Curse of Nemur: In Search of the Art, Myth, and Ritual of the Ishi. Trans. Adriana Michele Campos Johnson. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2007. ——. La belleza de los otros: arte indígena del Paraguay. Asunción: Servilibro, 2012. Feiten, Tim Elmo. “Mind After Uexküll: A Foray into the Worlds of Ecological Psychologists and Enactivists.” Frontiers in Psychology 11.480 (2020): 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00480. Fichte, Hubert. Explosion. Roman der Ethnologie. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1993. Hoyos, Héctor. Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Kopenawa, Davi, and Albert, Bruce. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013. Porto-Gonçalves, Carlos. “De saberes e de territórios: diversidade e emancipação a partir da experiência latino–americana.” De los saberes de la emancipación y de la dominación. Ed. Ana Esther Ceceña. Buenos Aires: Clacso, 2008. 37x52. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. ——. Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Rama, Ángel. “Processes of Transculturation in Latin American Narrative.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 6.2 (1997): 150–171. ——. Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. Buenos Aires: El Andariego, 2007 [1984]. Smith, Amanda M. Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography After the Rubber Boom Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Uexküll, Jakob von. Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: Julius Springer, 1909.

Lisa Blackmore

Water Environmental Aesthetics proposes the analysis of physical landscapes and their mediation in cultural production as two intertwined threads that further our understanding of socioecological worlds. This chapter takes up that task in relation to liquid environments and water-related art. The first part explores territories, infrastructures, and systems of flow as “objects of appreciation” (Fisher 2005: 667) in their own right, whose aesthetic formations bespeak long histories of human relations to water and their related political ecological contexts. I refer to these as “hydrocultural formations,” that is, material aesthetic forms produced by human and non-human forces. Attending to physical environments of more-than-human water cycles reaffirms what scientists have long known about bodies of water: they exert their own aesthetic agency as active flows that move, sound, and sculpt other material bodies to create territories and thus challenge anthropocentric humanist paradigms of cultural criticism (Blackmore 2022). The aesthetic contours of hydrocultural formations are important to consider since they cipher the actions of waterbodies themselves and the impacts of historical contexts, contemporary socioeconomic dynamics, and ongoing struggles. The discussion below maps broad hydrological, hydropolitical, hydraulic, and climatic energies that shape aquatic environments in the region, and examines paradigmatic hydrocultural formations entangled in “the wider process of rationalization, state formation, and the emergence of ‘technoscience’” (Gandy 2014: 3) and in active claims for socioenvironmental and cognitive justice for “epistemologies of the South” (De Sousa Santos 2014; Escobar 2016). The second part of the chapter identifies aesthetic currents in artworks that invent channels to sense flows of more-than-human water cycles across multiple scales and registers, from the bodily to the infrastructural, the sacred to the contaminated. In material and metaphorical terms, water is much more than a chemical compound; its fluid forms interact with other matter in “liquid ecologies” that are “host to turbid histories of capital flows, philosophical currents, aesthetic traditions and residual traumas that connect distinct spaces, times and bodies” (Blackmore and Gómez 2020: 2). Liquidity and fluidity are thus also figures of thought for thinking beyond conventional and dominant epistemologies and aesthetics. Modes of hydraulic and turbulent flows have long been inspiration to writers and artists in Latin America (Pettinaroli and Mutis 2013) as well as scholars in the “hydrohumanities” (De Wolff, Faletti and López Calvo 2022). By identifying and analyzing key figures and dynamics in a select corpus, I chart how artists mediate the “interpermeations” (Neimanis 2016), “contact zones” (Pratt 1991) and modes of fast and “slow violence” (Nixon 2013) inherent in the Latin American hydrosphere, and explore how artworks imagine alternate water cultures and hydrocommunities engaged in speculative “ethics of care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), and socioecological and cognitive reparation. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-028

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Hydrocultural Formations Latin America and the Caribbean have vast and varied aquatic ecosystems, from watersheds containing 30 per cent of the world’s freshwaters (Sempris 2012) to the driest desert on Earth. Spanning Mesoamerica and Patagonia, Indigenous cultures’ socioecological patterns, relations, and rituals have emerged in tune with the water bodies and water cycles they honor as sacred life forces. Chinampas in Xochimilco, spiral aqueducts in the Nazca desert, palafitos in the Caribbean, canoe routes through the Amazon, and peatbogs in Karukinka/Tierra del Fuego, to name just a few hydrocultural formations, all index how ancestral cultures evolved by intertwining with water to articulate a “wet network of relations” and co-existence of earth and water bodies in (Neimanis 2016). Hydrocultural formations have historically materialized ancestral ways of relating to aquatic environments and climatic patterns that encompass morethan-human kinship with “earth beings” (De la Cadena 2016) expressed in origin stories and ceremonial culture (Borea and Yahuarcani 2020; Limón Olvera 2006); power hierarchies and communal stewardship of water (Bray 2013); and infrastructural and urban design (Dean 2011; Rojas Rabiela et al. 2009). Colonization in the early modern period radically transformed the lives and landscapes of hydrocommunities, imposing imported anthropocentric paradigms that rendered water a resource subordinated to human development, separating nature and culture, non-human and human waterbodies. European colonists attempted to displace autochthonous “amphibious culture” (Fals Borda 1984) exerting power through hydraulic systems (Bell 2014). Imperial projects that were “dreaming of dry land” (Candiani 2014) led to the draining of wetlands for settlements, crops and cattle raising in cities such as the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán and the muisca-inhabited Sabana de Bogotá (Rodríguez Gallo 2021). Through travel writing, cartography, and traveller artist representations (Manthorne 2015), “imperial eyes” (Pratt 2008) envisaged seas and rivers basins as access routes to Terra Nulis—a liquid infrastructure for territorial domination (Nemser 2017), the necroeconomics of the slave trade (More 2019). Extractive prospecting, primitive accumulation, and the evangelization of native communities made of waterbodies liquid graves that indexed genocidal violence against Indigenous and black bodies. The modernization processes that bridged the colonial and republican periods increasingly transfigured major waterways (such as the Magdalena, the Río de la Plata, and Orinoco Basin) into forms that approximate the “industrial sublime” (Nye 1994), imagining water courses as commercial and industrial infrastructures for riparian steam travel, sites of extractive industries, and, from the late nineteenth century onwards, hydropower generation and megadams. One paradigmatic example of how colonization and urbanization have impacted aquatic environments and produced environmental aesthetics of desiccation, contaminated flows, and hidden waterbodies, is the Valley of Mexico. Water covered 1500 of the lake basin’s 8058 square kilometers in pre-Hispanic times, where the Mexicas created a hydraulic environment that negotiated human coexistence with fluid dynamics

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through shoreline agriculture that worked with (not against) seasonal flooding; dams, irrigation canals and intercommunal raised bed horticulture (chinampas) that enabled populations to expand and prosper, as reflected in the famous map of Tenochtitlán, printed in Nuremberg in 1524 (Figure 1). Water was weaponized during the conquest of imperial Tenochtitlán as “the war between the Aztecs and the Spaniards and their indigenous allies was waged on and through human bodies, land, and water,” with both sides leveraging water (by flooding or cutting off its supply) to obtain the upper hand (Candiani 2014: 26). The defeat of the Aztecs is reflected in the receding waters of the Valley of Mexico, the desagüe (drainage) system of tunnels and canals initiated by the Spanish to drain Mexico City in 1607, gradually built until the late nineteenth century to confront persistent flooding and used as the sewage system for a growing city. Paralleling the Victorian hydroengineering response to the “Big Stink” in mid-nineteenth-century London, the modernizing program of the Porfiriato (1876–1911) materialized its will to “govern” water in the Gran Canal del Desagüe (Angostini 2003: 127), equating monumental water infrastructure to progress. As waterbodies were buried underground, attention was diverted to the monumental Cárcomo de Dolores pump station in Chapultepec Park (a water infrastructure designed to be visited and admired by the public). Mexico City’s rivers have been increasingly channeled into concrete tubes and covered by major highways (like the Viaducto Miguel Alemán, inaugurated in 1952). This long history dramatically transformed the physical

Figure 1: Map of Tenochtitlan, printed 1524 in Nuremberg, Germany, attributed to Friedrich Peypus (1485–1534). Left: Gulf of Mexico; right: Tenochtitlan. WikiCommons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Map_of_Tenochtitlan,_1524.jpg (April 10, 2023). Public Domain.

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aesthetics of the Valley of Mexico, rendering water a latent pulse and making the canals of Xochimilco a rare remnant of pre-Hispanic water culture. As Latin Americans continue to leave the countryside for cities, unstinting urbanization has caused nearbiological death for major rivers in cities like São Paulo and Bogotá. Landscapes of toxic foam and black waters full of waste co-exist, in these settings, with sanitation infrastructures that underscore the aesthetics of rivers as “organic machines” (White 1995). Beyond urban milieux, for millennia riparian communities have exploited rivers for artisanal extraction of aggregates and minerals but transnational capital’s mechanical extraction of water and minerals as “cheap nature” (Moore 2016) has had devastating effects manifested in landscapes of the Capitalocene. The privatization of water rights (as in Chile) exposes aquifers to water grabbing; in mining areas (like Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela), companies contaminate human and non-human waterbodies with lethal chemicals, like mercury; and in river basins like Colombia’s Cauca and Brazil and Paraguay’s Paraná, megadam construction (Figure 2) makes “developmental refugees” (Nixon 2011) of riparian communities, exacerbating long-standing forms of social and racial marginalization. These forces shape diverse hydrocultural formations that exist as physical realities and iconic images, which include landscapes populated by water-grabbing industrial agrobusiness and waterstarved communities reliant on cistern trucks; Amazonian riverbanks rendered as

Figure 2: Itaipu dam on the Paraná river, between Brazil and Paraguay, 2013. Photo by Deni Williams. WikiCommons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Usina_Hidroel%C3%A9trica_Itaipu_Binacional_– _Itaipu_Dam_(17174796329).jpg (April 10, 2023). Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

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pools of toxic mud by illegal mining; towering concrete walls built to stop the flow of water and divert it to hydropower plants, among others. The environmental aesthetics of extraction thus involve a visual politics in which corporate public relations, material infrastructures, and affected ecosystems and communities compete to disseminate contesting imaginaries and discourses. A paradigmatic example of this occurred in Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil, on November 5, 2015, when a dam at an iron mine collapsed, unleashing a catastrophic wave of tailings and water into the River Doce and out to the Atlantic Ocean (Figure 3). Owned by Samarco Mineração S.A. (a Vale and BHP Billiton joint venture), the dam “burst open, sending 62 million cubic meters of muddy waste down the Doce River, killing 19 people in floods and sending toxic brown water flowing toward the Atlantic Ocean, where it arrived two weeks later, contaminating beaches and towns” (Santos and Heimrich 2018: 34). As the wave of mud spread out to the sea, it displaced communities, inundated the river with mercury, arsenic, iron, killed wildlife and rendered all the regions it traversed—from the mining town through the Krenak Indigenous reserve and to the coastal port infrastructures— scenes of ecocidal devastation (Serra 2018). Amid environmental degradation, pressure from activist groups like the Aliança Rio Doce and Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (River Doce Alliance and Movement for Dam Victims) and ongoing criminal court

Figure 3: Image of polluted riverbed following the tailings dam collapse in Bento Rodrigues, Minas Gerais, 10 November 2015. Photo by Romerito Pontes. WikiCommons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Category:Bento_Rodrigues_dam_disaster#/media/File:(2015-11-10)_Visita_%C3%A0_Bento_RodriguesMG_070_Romerito_Pontes_(23146715464).jpg (April 10, 2023). Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

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proceedings, Vale launched Fundação Renova (Renovation Foundation), the official body tasked with social and environmental reparations, including creating new homes for displaced inhabitants of Bento Rodrigues. Simultaneously, it created an immersive, virtual Expedição Rio Doce (River Doce Expedition 2022) that offers audiovisual navigation of the river to showcase advances in ecosystem restoration. The restoration of the river has thus emerged as a leveraging device in corporate public relations (mirroring other postcatastrophe campaigns) and a counter-imaginary to the environmental aesthetics of pollution and devastation that reshape the contours of rivers in the “extractive zone” (Gómez Barris 2017).1 Desiccated waterbodies, straightened and channelized rivers, man-made reservoirs, megadams, and contaminated flows remain the dominant environmental aesthetics of the contemporary Latin American hydrosphere amid neo-extractivist economics, increasing urbanization and unchecked developmentalism. Human and climate-related stresses are generating additional aesthetic shifts, such as the disappearance of Lake Poopó in Bolivia and receding tropical glaciers in Peru and Colombia. The United Nations predicts that local and transboundary conflicts will worsen amid ongoing climate change and competing demands for water by urban, energy, and agricultural sectors (UNESCO 2020: 139). However, some settings offer hope of “future histories of water” (Ballesteros 2019) and emergent material-aesthetic shifts from contamination to care, exploitation to abundance in water cultures. If they are upheld and respected, which is a pending task (see Shade 2015), the declarations of the rights of nature in Ecuador (2009) and Bolivia (2010) along with water law reforms (like the deprivatization of water proposed in 2022 as part of the (rejected) reform of Chile’s constitution), and the legal personhood afforded to the Atrato River (2016) in Colombia, should bring change to hydrocultural formations through ecological restoration and more equitable access to water. At the grassroots level, the communal water committees as in Costa Rica (Ballesteros 2019), citizen science initiatives (e.g. Ríos to Rivers 2022), ecosystem restoration projects (e.g. Redes 2022), and transnational art-activism projects (e.g. Canto al agua (Song to water), 2022), signal the germination of environmental aesthetic strategies that cultivate “speculative ethics” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) of care, collaboration, and celebration in more-than-human hydrocommunities.2 Envisaging a large-scale shift in environmental aesthetics to equitable and healthy waterbodies, however, is for now more the realm of imagination than reality.

 Another key example is the Hidroituanguo plant built on the Cauca River in Antioquia, Colombia, where in 2018 a catastrophic failure in tunnels built to divert the river to enable construction of the megadam led to flooding downstream and loss of life in the town of Puerto Vallarta.  Ríos to Rivers is a transnational initiative founded in 2012 that “inspires the protection of rivers worldwide by investing in underserved and indigenous youth who are intimately connected to their local waters and support them in the development as the next generation of environmental stewards” (Ríos to Rivers 2022).

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Aesthetic Currents Spanning a range of media and aesthetic strategies, artworks that probe liquid ecologies are generative means to imagine ways of relating in the more-than-human hydrocommons of interpermeating bodies of water. This section identifies select aesthetic strategies whereby artists stimulate critical and sensorial engagements with fluids and fluid matter, examining how they stimulate sensitivity to the liquid basis of life and how they raise awareness of specific problematics that shape the contours of human relations to and through water in Latin America. The political philosopher Jane Bennett (2001, 2009) sustains that the body forms the starting point of our ethical dispositions toward life in all its vegetal, animal, mineral, liquid and even infrastructural forms. She proposes that it is as we dispose our body towards others’ suffering and misfortune that we begin to articulate the experience of recognition, empathy, and care. In a feminist vein, Silvia Federici (2020) also centers the body as a means of remaking and reclaiming modes of relating that are not captured by capitalist logics but are (re)generative of politics of solidarity and common wellbeing. This attention to embodiment as a critical sphere resonates with performance and action art produced from the 1960s to the 1980s, when ecofeminist artists across Latin America worked “intuitively with performativity, the physiological and biological dimension of their bodies, the recovery of nature-based forms of spirituality, the exploration of non-linear and relational structures based in the use of water and other fluids, and women’s gender roles” (Moñivas 2020: 129). By generating encounters between bodies, artists advanced modes of speculative inquiry into the basic fact that all life gestates through and is sustained by water. Their actions invite reflection on the ethical implications of this biological fact, which implies that mutual flourishing in the more-than-human hydrocommons depends on the health of liquid human bodies and non-human watery bodies that flow through each other. Examples of this orientation toward embodiment include the haptic and relational encounters with water that are central to Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s Água e conchas (Water and shells, 1966) from her Objetos relacionais (Relational objects) series, where the interactive work encouraged contact as a process of negotiation between human touch, enclosed liquid and solid matter via the malleable membrane of a plastic bag. Drawing on their backgrounds in martial arts, experimental dance and yoga, the Venezuelan performance duo, Yeni y Nan explored more fully immersive fluid environments in Integraciones en el agua (Integrations in Water, 1981; Figure 4), where they writhed, clad in full-body monochrome suits, inside large water-filled plastic membranes, before breaching the waters and emerging out onto the gallery floor. The focus on interpermeation with other waterbodies deploys a mode of posthumanist performativity that stages life as anterior to representationalist encodings of (human) language and storying. In so doing, it works with liquidity as “an active agent in the world’s becoming . . . not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency” (Barad 2003: 820).

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Figure 4: Yeni y Nan, photograph of the performance Integraciones en el agua II (1982) Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas. Photo courtesy the artists and Henrique Faría, New York.

Whereas these examples staged more abstract liquid encounters, other works have interrogated structural causes whereby humans pollute waterbodies. In her video performance Anónimo 3 (El río Cauca como otros tantos ríos del mundo y la tierra en general están siendo afectados por desechos contaminantes no digeribles que arrojan las industrias y los seres humanos. Residuos que alteran los componentes propios de la naturaleza . . .) (Anonymous 3 (The Cauca river like so many other rivers in the world and on earth that are generally being affected by non-digestible pollution that industries and humans throw into them. Residues that alter nature’s own makeup . . .), 1982), Colombian performance artist María Evelia Marmolejo urinates naked into a toilet in an open field, creating an analogy between the body’s abject flows and pollution of industrializing rivers, like the Cauca. Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña’s practice also weaves human and natural bodies together to critique pollutant, extractive relations, and to honor the “liquid indigeneity” (Merchant 2020) and menstrual flows that unite waterbodies in more fluid—and caring—continuum. Her film Kon Kon (2015) deploys poetic narrative, performative land art actions, song, and archival footage to lament and protest the cultural and ecological destruction of the maritime environment through the imposition of an oil refinery on sacred, ancestral wetlands. Echoing Vicuña’s contemporary works, which take up collective struggles in collaborative performances, Regina José Galindo and Carolina Caycedo also work at the intersections of art and activism, coordinating groups of human bodies to articulate

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collective defense of waterbodies. In Ríos de gente (Rivers of People, 2021), Guatemalan artist Galindo, involved thousands of Indigenous people in this performative work that campaigned against water extraction, having them hold up “an endless stretch of translucent fabric . . . —a river of blue [that] snaked through desert farms, town squares, and mountain terrains,” making visible victims of mining, hydroelectric and monoculture industries (Ou 2022: 149). Among the many Geocoreografías (Geochoreographies) she has developed in her long-term project BE DAMMED (2014–ongoing), Caycedo allied with Colombian social movement Ríos Vivos to create GEOCHOREOGRAPHY ORITOGUAZ (2015) a duo of aerial photographs of bodies lying on the banks of the Yuma (Magdalena) river spelling out phrases like “RÍOS VIVOS” (living rivers) and “YUMA RESISTE” (Yuma resists) in protest to the construction of the Oporapa dam in Huila. Caycedo’s work is an exemplar of contemporary art practice that is oriented to the fates of rivers and communities ensnared in industrial and extractive economies (Gómez Barris 2017; Blackmore 2020a, 2020b) and she works closely with activists across the Americas, producing processual works in the field and studio-based sculptural objects. In Serpent River Book (2017) Caycedo assembles a visual ecology of impacts of hydraulic projects on more-than-human river communities that intertwines these threads of her practice. The two-sided, tri-folding artist book takes an unfolding, meandering form that emulates a riverine course from source to mouth. It collages the official optics of corporate public relations and State-led development through maps, documents, diagrams, and satellite images, with a “countervisuality” (Mirzoeff 2011) of “submerged perspectives” (Gómez Barris 2017) of photographs, drawings, poems and testimonies from the ground and grassroots. Designed to be manipulated, moved and collectively performed, the book’s “figures of eddying water, the pleats of time, and the predominance of touch over sight all call into question the instrumentalization of water as a resource that powers industrial progress” (Blackmore 2020b: 24). Alongside Caycedo, Colombian artist Clemencia Echeverri and Brazilian artist-researcher Mabé Bethônico also interrogate the environmental aesthetics of extractive industries’ impacts of rivers, taking devastated lands and waves of pollutants as their figurative leitmotifs. In her multi-channel audiovisual installations Sin cielo (Without Sky, 2017) and Río por asalto (River by Assault, 2018), Echeverri edits aerial views of gold mining infrastructure and turbulent river flows onto multi-screen installations and projections, whose soundtracks engulf the viewer in “apocalyptic” scenes typical of catastrophic environmental degradation and infrastructural collapse (Tarver 2020: 90). Bethônico takes up toxic flows in her installation Speaking of Mud (2019), re-assembling two series of 16 pages of newspaper spreads covering the Mariana and Brumadinho disasters discussed above, in which the artist has cut out all text and left only images of the Doce river basin engulfed by industrial waste. Through this act of appropriation, she signals how the environmental aesthetics of disaster circulate predominantly in journalistic images and discourse but are apt to be metabolized and contested through art, as well as the theatre productions, legal processes (Santos and Heimrich 2018) and documentaries (such

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as the interactive, virtual reality Rio de lama (River of Mud, 2016) that offer critical commentary on these catastrophic events. In Speaking of Mud, the hypervisuality of disaster is set in counterpoint to the shady status of transnational capital, created through two additional photographs that sit alongside the newspaper cuttings, taken by the artist at the Swiss offices of Vale, the company responsible for the Brazilian mining disasters. In them, Bethônico’s hands hold up Le Monde showing a headline that reads “La peur des brésiliens à l’ombre des barragens” (Brazilians’ fear in the shadow of dams) but whose accompanying photograph has been cut out, and through whose void the viewer sees Vale’s building. Making visible and apprehensible systems of flow control—from visual technologies and media ecologies, through to the literal circuitry of dams to pipes—is a key aesthetic operation in art that addresses water. This operation plays out in literal terms through the representation of water as channeled flow while it also raises broader political questions about how hydraulics advances critical reflection on how “partitions” are made in the realm of the sensible (Rancière 2004). That is, artworks ask: What liquid flows get to be seen and heard, and which are rendered opaque or absent, and why? The relegation of water to underground channels in urban settings and the contamination of rivers are symbolize human paradigms of mastery over nature. Artworks that unearth such waterbodies seek to re-establish connections to them via sensory means and in so doing they raise questions about the historical and epistemological contexts in which this “partition” of (some) waters occurs in collective life. Mexican interdisciplinary artist Tania Candiani has a long-standing practice of evoking the submerged and contaminated flows through sound works. In Ríos antiguos, ríos entubados, ríos muertos (Ancient, channeled, dead rivers, 2018) she excavates the memories of twenty-one rivers that flow through Mexico City, translating the hydrographic maps of each into a coded composition that viewers reproduce by turning the handle of a wind-up music box, an antiquated technology where tuning forks create vibrating sounds from bumps on a rotating cylinder. The cylinder boxes themselves are mnemonic doubles for the huge concrete tubes that, below the perceptual surface of the city, keep rivers out of the human sensorium. As the installation is activated as a collective sound performance when visitors “play” the rivers, Ríos creates sonic deltas that pay “acoustic justice” (LaBelle 2020) to the present and ancestral hydroscape, restoring traces of it to the public realm. In so doing, Ríos joins a corpus of works that—through different media and at different times—enact gestures of bringing aquatic memories and lives to surface perception. These include historical works like the Cárcamo de Dolores pump station complex in Chapultepec Park, in Mexico City, the site of Diego Rivera’s sculptural depiction of the water god Tlaloc and underwater mural Water: Origin of Life on the Earth (1952) and Ariel Guznik’s Cámara Lambdona (2010), a contemporary intervention in the same space that sounds groundwater in the aqueduct (Carrillo Morell 2018). Situated in a State-run infrastructure in a public park, these artworks operate within the umbrella of official water culture. By contrast, and beyond the city center, María Theresa Alvez’ collaborative project The

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Return of a Lake (2012) charts the spontaneous re-emergence of a waterbody and its community regeneration (Alvez 2018), thus incentivizing attention to decolonial gestures that emerge from and through water, where the community restoration of chinampas (raised bed water-based agriculture) and rooting of territorial memory in the Valle de Xico Community Museum (Amaro Altamirano 2018) honor pre-Hispanic relating through water. In this broader context of the distribution of the sensible, the entanglement of waterbodies with political violence is a further aesthetic current that explores how authoritarian regimes have used oceans and rivers as unmarked graves and how victims appear in aquatic imaginaries in spectral forms. Water serves as a vehicle for video and film works that reflect on disappearance and conflict, including Chilean Enrique Ramírez’s three–screen installation Los durmientes (The sleeping, 2015) and Patricio Guzmán’s documentary El botón de nácar (The Pearl Button, 2015), which reflect on the dumping of bodies in the Pacific Ocean during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1989) and the colonial violence enacted in Chile’s watery geography (Depetris Chauvin 2020). In Caribbean art, liquids cipher conflictive processes of colonial economies in the work of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. In Everything is separated by water, including my brain, my heart, my sex, my house (1990) a portrait of a female body divided in two by a neoclassical column of water references different types of embodied liquids to “bind together the ocean water of the Atlantic passage with the bodies of the slave trade” (Gómez 2020: 37). In the sound and smell installation Matanzas Sound Map (2017) she explores liquid forms of violence in Cuba’s sugar industry by evoking the historical conditions of rum distillation in an interconnected network of blown glass vessels filled with treacly liquids. Also in the Caribbean, maritime flows are inseparable from contemporary migration and its human victims, where water creates a realm of “tidalectic diffractions” that intersects historical times, bodies, and their violent encounters (DeLoughrey and Flores 2020: 166). This is apparent in Dominican artist Tony Capellán’s installation Mar Caribe (Caribbean Sea, 1996), where the assembled mass of 500 turquoise and blue flip flops washed up on the coast evokes idyllic images of the sea while the barbed wire straps retrofitted into each one is a stark alert to the dangers faced by those who attempt to cross liquid borders. Deficits in reparations and emergent forms of cognitive and socioecological justice are important currents in water-related art as it reflects on the interpermeations of different forms and times of violence. In Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz’s Re/trato (2003), a video recording of the artist’s process of using water to paint a self-portrait on a concrete pavement and its rapid disappearance as trace, evokesthrough the vanishing liquid form the contested and fragile memory politics surrounding the country’s protracted civil conflict at a moment when the peace accords (signed in 2016) were still a distant horizon. Today, as transitional justice augurs a nascent “ecopolitical imagination” (Cagüenas et al. 2020) in Colombia, the Truth Commission recognizes rivers and ecosystems as victims of war (“La naturaleza herida por la violencia” 2022; Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición 2022) and “voices of water”

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are presented in exhibition spaces related to political violence (González-Ayala and Camargo 2021). In this vein, sound artist Leonel Vásquez, on commission by the Comisión de la Verdad, created a participatory work to explore how conflict permeates waterbodies. Presented on the seafront in Buenaventura—a major port on the Pacific coast in the Valle del Cauca, one of the regions most affected by ongoing violence—just weeks after the final Truth Commission reports were published on June 28, 2022, Río La Verdad (2022) made water a place of collective mourning for the entangled forms of violence suffered by the region’s populations and nineteen rivers, which include processes of displacement, contamination, and forced disappearance, among others. The installation (Figure 5) consisted of an eight-meter-long immersion pool where people could submerge and listen to an alabao, a traditional, afro-Colombian funerary lament declared national heritage in 2014 which is part of a soundscape of resistance, reparation, and reinvention in the Pacific region of Chocó (Pinilla Bahamón 2017). The project departed from Truth Commissioner Ángela Salazar’s insistence on the importance of listening to the voices of rivers through the songs and celebrations of riverine communities which had been silenced by Colombia’s violence as a way to “resonate through waters and cure them” (Vásquez 2022).

Figure 5: Leonel Vásquez, Río La Verdad, 2022. Photo courtesy the artist.

Also in the Chocó, the designation the Atrato River as a legal person in 2016 established official duty to bring reparations for the violence the interconnected forces of civil conflict and illegal gold mining caused to the river’s health and the well-being of its local communities, proposing deindustrialization, an ecocentric vision of governance and the defense of biocultural rights as legally binding objectives. This decision presented

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another setting where social and ecological justice are mutually implicated, rather than separate, and where aesthetic implications emerge in the question of how to translate the behavior and needs of the river basin’s more-than-human communities might be represented (broadly and in court) in ways that eschew anthropocentric framings. These challenges are only now being explored by in-progress projects (e.g. Gallón Droste 2019), which will remain a topic for future research in water-related environmental aesthetics. Related questions about how rivers think and how they express themselves are addressed in a wide range of works, from the performances cited earlier that consider liquid intelligence from posthuman perspectives, via contemporary artworks that reflect on vibrant matter in Amazonian waterworlds. Taking its name from Eduardo Kohn’s important more-than-human ethnography How Forests Think (2013), Ecuadorian artist Oscar Santillán’s How Rivers Think (2018) is an essay in sympoeisis (Haraway 2016)—a “making-with” an Amazonian river whose water and organic materials he collected and contained in eighty customized slides as living ecosystems that were projected onto the gallery space. Against the extractive methods of botanical expedition that mapped and represented waterways in the region to capitalize on their lifeforms, this assemblage of agencies and arrangements redistributes the task of representation between artistic intent and material semiotics, emphasizing the aesthetic force of liquid life beyond its use value. Indigenous contemporary art similarly insists on the immanent lifeworlds and enduring cosmologies that flow through the Amazon’s liquid territories. In Yanomami artist Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe’s abstract, graphic works, he draws on his personal experiences dwelling in the Upper Orinoco in the Venezuelan Amazon to isolate elements of the jungle ecosystem and cosmology, including its trees, rivers, and animals, on paper made from natural fibers (“Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe talks about his works” 2020). In a related vein, but in a more figurative aesthetic, Abel Rodríguez’s precise botanical illustrations, drawn from his personal experiences in the Colombian Amazon, depict periodic flooding in Ciclo anual del bosque de la vega (Seasonal changes in the flooded rainforest, 2009–2010) showing the cyclical ways that water marks time.3 Such vital waterworlds also feature in paintings by Uitoto contemporary artist Rember Yahuarcani, whose colorful, highly embellished works evoke the spiritual and shamanic dimensions of the Peruvian Amazon that are central to Indigenous more-than-human ontologies (Borea and Yahuarcani 2020). ✶✶ Amid the advances of extractive industries across Latin America, macro-scale infrastrutural projects, such as Peru’s China-backed Hidrovía Amazónica, and the challenges

 It is worth noting that Rodríguez does not consider himself an artist in the conventional Western sense. Quoted by José Roca, in a text for documenta14, he states: “We don’t really have that concept, but the closest one I can think of is iimitya, which in Muinane means ‘word of power’ –all paths lead to the same knowledge, which is the beginning of all paths.” See Roca (2017).

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Figure 6: Photo of the Muisca crop cultivation system being recreated by Colectivo Camellones y Zanjas in the Reserva Thomas Van der Hammen, Susa, Bogotá, 6 August 2022. Photo by Sergio Durán. Courtesy of Colectivo Camellones y Zanjas (María Buenaventura, Diego Bermúdez, Juliana Steiner, Lorena Rodríguez Gallo).

facing the path to reparations for bodies of water like the Atrato River, the meeting points of aquatic environments, their communities, and public platforms created by the arts are more important than ever to igniting imaginaries of socioecological wellbeing. The rise of large-scale art events oriented to water in Latin America, such as Libertad para el Auga (Guatemala, 2021), Bienal del Bioceno, Cambiar el verde por azul (Ecuador, 2022), and Inaudito Magdalena (Colombia, 2022), as well as national and transnational initiatives that bridge the arts, interdisciplinary water research and public engagement, such as TurbaTol (2022), Camellones y Zanjas (2022; Figure 6), and entre—ríos (2022), all signal that liquid ecologies are a leading concern in artistic and curatorial practice oriented to environmental aesthetics.4 More broadly, the examples of hydrocultural

 TurbaTol Hol-Hol Tol is an interdisciplinary arts-led initiative that advocates for the intertwined biocultural rights of wetlands and the Selk’nam Indigenous people in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. It is part of Ensayos, a nomadic collective convened by curator Camila Marambio since 2011. TurbaTol represented Chile at the Biennale di Venezia in 2022; see: https://turbatol.org/. Camellones y Zanjas is a collective project led by the Colombian artist María Buenaventura, curator Juliana Steiner, architect Diego Bermúdez and archaeologist Lorena Rodríguez Gallo, to (re)create the Muisca system of raised beds and channels in the Sabana de Bogotá. It is a commission for the Network Project for Colombia curated by Juliana Steiner as part of COMMON GROUND: An International Festival on the Politics of Land and Food (2022), initiated by the Center for Human Rights and the Arts and The Fisher Center

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formations and aesthetic currents cited above all offer further confirmation that the Hydrohumanities is an important field of inquiry at a time when climate instability and water stresses are on the rise, not just in Latin America but on a global scale. At the time of writing, droughts in Europe and China, among the worst in living memory, are inhibiting agricultural production, causing water scarcity, stopping hydroelectric production, and blocking riverine trade routes. Growing public awareness of these issues, and the urgent need for actions that improve the health of more-than-human water cycles, present opportunities for cultural practitioners to continue to imagine alternative water cultures based on ethics of care and concrete actions to safeguard the biocultural rights of hydrocommunities.

Works Cited Alvez, Maria Theresa. “The Return of a Lake.”: Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape. Eds. Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, and Dayron Carrillo Morell. Zurich: diaphanes, 2018. 51–60. Amaro Altamirano, Genaro. “Dissipating Darkness.”: Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape. Eds. Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, and Dayron Carrillo Morell. Zurich: diaphanes, 2018. 61–72. Ballesteros, Andrea. A Future History of Water. Durham: Duke Univesrity Press, 2019. Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3 (2003): 801–831. Bell, Martha. “Agua y poder colonial: ciclos, flujos y procesiones en el manejo hidráulico urbano en Lima durante el siglo XVII.” Boletín del Instituto Riva-Agüero 37 (2014): 75−121. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ——. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Blackmore, Lisa. “When Walls Become Rivers: Carolina Caycedo’s Serpent River Book.” Afterall 49 (2020a): 90−99. ——. “Turbulent River Times: Art and Hydropower in Latin America’s Extractive Zones.” Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art. Eds. Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez. London: Routledge, 2020b. 13−34. Blackmore, Lisa, and Liliana Gómez. “Beyond the Blue: Notes on the Liquid Turn.” Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art. Eds. Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez. London: Routledge, 2020. 1−10. Borea, Giuliana, and Rember Yahuarcani. “Amazonian Waterway, Amazonia Water-worlds: Rivers in Government Projects and Indigenous Art.” Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art. Eds. Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez. London: Routledge, 2020. 106–124. Cagüenas, Diego, María Isabel Galindo Orrego, and Sabina Rasmussen. “El Atrato y sus guardianes: imaginación ecopolítica para hilar nuevos derechos.” Revista Colombiana de Antropología 56.2 (2020): 169–196.

Lab Biennial at Bard College. entre—ríos is an art practice-led network that curates practice-research, interdisciplinary residencies, workshops, exhibitions, and publications. It was started by the author in 2019 as a platform for international collaborations in projects that reignite public connections to bodies of water; see http://entre-rios.net.

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Candiani, Vera S. Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Canto al Agua. https://www.cantoalagua.com/ (18 August 2022). Carrillo Morell, Dayron. “Aquatic Visions and Watery Sounds: Ruptures and Sutures in the Lacustrine Landscape of Modern Mexico City.”: Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape. Eds. Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, and Dayron Carrillo Morell. Zurich: diaphanes, 2018. 145–170. Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad, la Convivencia y la No Repetición. Cuando los pájaros no cantaban: Historias del conflicto armado en Colombia. Digital version published 28 June 2022. https://www.comisiondelaverdad.co/cuando-los-pajaros-no-cantaban (Aprl 10, 2023) Dean, Carolyn. “Inka water management and the symbolic dimensions of display fountains.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59–60 (2011): 22–38. De la Cadena, Marisol. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and Tatiana Flores. “Submerged Bodies: The Tidalectic of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Art.” Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art. Eds. Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez. London: Routledge, 2020. 163–186. Depetris Chauvin, Irene. “Memories in the Present: Affect and Spectrality in Contemporary Aquatic Imaginaries.” Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art. Eds. Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez. London: Routledge, 2020. 144–159. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. New York: Routledge, 2014. De Wolff, Kim, Rina C. Faletti, and Ignacio López Calvo, eds. Hydrohumanities: Water Discourse and Environmental Futures. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. Escobar, Arturo. “Sentipensar con la Tierra: Las luchas territoriales y la dimensión ontológica de las epistemologías del Sur.” Revistas de Antropología Iberoamericana 11.1 (2016): 11–32. Expedição Rio Doce. https://expedicaoriodoce.fundacaorenova.org/ (18 August 2022). Fals Borda, Orlando. Historia doble de la costa, tomo III: Resistencia en el San Jorge. Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1984. Federici, Silvia. Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press, 2020. Fisher, John. “Environmental Aesthetics.” The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 667–678. Gallón Droste, Elizabeth. “Navegar futuros por ríos de oro.” Latin American Futures 9.1 (2021): 75–85. Gandy, Matthew. The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014. Gaard, Greta. Critical Ecofeminism. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. Gómez, Liliana. “Acts of Remaining: Liquid Ecologies and Memory Work in Contemporary Art Interventions.” In Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art. Ed. by L. Gómez and L. Blackmore. Routledge, New York, 2020. 35–53. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. González-Ayala, Sofía N., and Alejandro Camargo. “Voices of Water and Violence: Exhibition Making and the Blue Humanities for Transitional Justice.” Curator: The Museum Journal 64.1 (2021): 183–204. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: An Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. “La naturaleza herida por la violencia.” Comisión de la Verdad. https://www.comisiondelaverdad.co/impac tos-afrontamientos-y-resistencias/la-naturaleza-herida-por-la-violencia (23 August 2022).

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LaBelle, Brandon. “Towards Acoustic Justice.” Law Text Culture 24 (2020): 550–572. Limón Olvera, Silvia. “Entidades sagradas y agua en la antigua religión andina.” Latinoamérica. Revista de estudios Latinoamericanos 43 (2006): 85–111. Manthorne, Katherine, ed. Traveler Artists: Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection. New York: Fundación Cisneros, 2015. Merchant, Paul. “Cecilia Vicuña’s Liquid Indigeneity.” Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art. Eds. Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez. London: Routledge, 2020. 187–204. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Moñivas, Esther. “Water, Women and Action Art in Latin America: Materializing Ecofeminist Epistemologies.” Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art. Eds. Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez. London: Routledge, 2020. 127–143. Moore, Jason W. “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” Anthropocene or Capitalocene?. Ed. Jason Moore. Oakland: PM Press/Kairos, 2016. 78–115. More, Anna. “Necroeconomics, Originary Accumulation, and Racial Capitalism in the Early Iberian Slave Trade.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19.2 (2019): 75–100. Neimanis, Astrid. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Nemser, Daniel. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Nye, David. The Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Ou, Cecilia. “Regina José Galindo: Ríos de Gente, produced by Maiz de vida, for the festival Libertad para el Agua, various locations including Monte Olivo, Comunidad Nuevo Montecristo, Lanquín and San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala, April 15, 2021.” The Senses and Society 17.1 (2022): 149–152. Pettinaroli, Elizabeth, and Ana María Mutis. “Introduction: Troubled Waters: Rivers in Latin American Imagination.” Hispanic Issues On Line 12 (2013): 1–18. Pinilla Bahamón, Andrea Marcela. “Alabaos y conflicto armado en el Chocó: noticias de supervivencia y reinvención.” Revista Encuentros 15.3 (2017): 152–169. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33–40. ——. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 2008. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury Collection, 2004. Redes – Restauración Ecológica y Desarrollo. https://www.redesmx.org/ (18 August 2022). Rio de lama. Dir. Tadeu Jungle. Brazil, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zQZqqSkJq0 (25 February 2022). Ríos to Rivers. https://www.riostorivers.org/ (18 August 2022). Rivera Cusiquanqui, Silvia. Sociología de la imagen: Miradas ch’ixi desde la historia andina. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2015. Roca, José. “Abel Rodríguez.” documenta14: Daybook. Eds. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk. New York: Prestel, 2017. Rodríguez Gallo, Lorena. “Permanencias y transformaciones: el territorio muisca en la Sabana de Bogotá en la segunda mitad del siglo XVI.” ACHSC 48.2 (2021): 363–398. Rojas Rabiela, Teresa, José Luis Martínez Ruiz, and Daniel Murillo Licea. Cultura hídrica y simbolismo mesoamericano del agua en el México prehispánico. Mexico City: Instituto Mexicano de Tecnología del Agua; Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 2009. Santos Junqueira Creado, Eliana, and Stefan Helmreich. “A wave of mud: the travel of toxic water, from Bento Rodrigues to the Brazilian Atlantic.” Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros 69 (2018): 33−51.

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Sempris, Emilio. “Climate Change and Freshwater in Latin America and the Caribbean.” UN Chronicle 46.4 (2012): 36–38. https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/climate-change-and-freshwater-latin-americaand-caribbean (25 February 2022). Serra, Cristina. Tragédia em Mariana: a história do maior desastre ambiental do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2018. Shade, Lindsay. “Sustainable Development or Sacrifice Zone? Politics Below the Surface in Post-Liberal Ecuador.” The Extractive Industries and Society 2.4 (2015): 775−784. “Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe talks about his works.” Colección Cisneros, 28 July 2020. https://www.coleccioncis neros.org/editorial/featured/sheroanawe-hakihiiwe-talks-about-his-works (25 February 2022). Tarver, Gina. “‘The Roar of the River Grows Ever Louder’: Polluted Waters in Colombian Eco-Art, From Alicia Barney to Clemencia Echeverri.” Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art. Eds. Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez. London: Routledge, 2020. 89−105. UNESCO World Water Assessment Programme. Water and Climate Change 2020. Paris: UNESCO, 2020. Vásquez, Leonel. Personal correspondence with the author, 7 September 2022. White, Richard. Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

Coda

Planetarity as Radical Heterogeneity: A Conversation with Mary Louise Pratt Jens Andermann: In this conversation we will talk about the scales when “reading for the planet,” in Jennifer Wenzel’s expression, when reading at a different scale in the face of global warming, of ocean acidification, and so forth, as you urge us to do in your latest book, Planetary Longings. Would you say that there is a singular or differential place for Latin American cultural and aesthetic traditions in this upscaling of our readings to the planetary dimension? And if so, how would you characterize such singularity? Mary Louise Pratt: What your question really makes me want to articulate very clearly is that planetary is not the equivalent of universal. In fact, it’s more like its opposite. For me, planetarity means grasping radical heterogeneity, figuring out how to think with radical heterogeneity, including the wide range of scales and of registers. Grasping radical heterogeneity and figuring out how to think with it is one of the challenges of planetarity. That term “planetary” evokes a vast range of non-trivial consequential singularities, some of them geographical and historical, others of different orders. Thinking like a planet, as some people say, means thinking across a broad range of scales and registers, and that to me is a key component of planetarity. Timothy Morton speaks of climate change as a hyperobject. And I think that is a fun term to use, meaning a conceptual fact that’s so large that you can’t properly comprehend it. When I say planetary longings in the introduction to the book, I see planetarity as the symptom and the product of the millennial shift, the millennial pivot from global to planetary and from the post to the geo. And this also means us pivoting from the post, which means looking with your back to the future, towards the geo, which means looking into what is the crisis of futurity, that is environmental catastrophe. So climate change names the destabilization of everything, but radical heterogeneity and singularity are also built into this reflection. Now, in terms of specifically Latin America, I love this question because the awesome singularity of Latin America is the reason we all study it and have been fascinated with it for our whole lives as scholars and as people. When I talk about Latin American singularity, I talk in three time scales: you’ve got the relatively recent time scale of the Americas as the site of experiencing European imperialism with all of its colonial apparatuses, its processes of dispossession and plunder and its genocide, and with the way it builds on top of the social formations and empires that were already there. Then you have what we all now talk about as coloniality, meaning colonialism’s endless afterlives that just continued to unfold across the hemisphere. At another temporal scale, you have the

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civilizational history of Latin America, the fact that human civilization unfolded in the Americas pretty much independently of Afro-Eurasia. And that to me is just a key aspect of the singularity of Latin America. I’m always astounded at how little recognition that gets, that people don’t get that there was a Neolithic in Mesopotamia, but there had to be one here too—at least one, maybe more than one. I think that fact that human civilization unfolded in the Americas independently of the rest of the world is a really, really fascinating thing. The emergence of largescale societies here, what gets called “the rise of civilizations”, has its own history here, a separate, singular history in the Americas. And we all know that metallurgy, agriculture, mathematics, all of this was invented here independently. It has its own history here and its own contours, and that’s just really fascinating. And when you start thinking planetarily, that kind of longue durée history really comes into play. When you think ecologically or environmentally, in terms of the even longer histories, when you move from humans to animals and plants, you’re looking at two hundred million years ago when the continents separated and the Americas were set apart, as was Australia. So America also has its own species history. I don’t know yet what to do with that fact, but it’s really interesting. I read about this thing that happened two and a half million years ago, called the Great American Interchange, when the isthmus of Panama rose up out of the water and animals and plants started migrating north to south, south to north. The Andean camelids were up in North America and they moved south and went extinct in the north, and a whole bunch of other animals like the armadillo moved up. I laugh when thinking the armadillo is the state animal of Texas, and I want to tell them it’s a mojado, it’s an undocumented migrant from the South. So all those timescales seem interesting if you’re thinking about singularity. But then, as literary, as textual scholars, we also need to think of the singularity of Latin American intellectual aesthetic and epistemic traditions. And I think climate fiction actually has a long history in Latin America, because modernism in Latin America is not urban, it’s urban and rural. Mário de Andrade wrote Hallucinated City and Macunaíma, and Graciliano Ramos’s Vidas secas is one of the great climate drought novels of the world. In fact, the literature of the Brazilian Northeast is full of incredible drought fiction: Morte e vida severina, for instance, wonderful texts. I think, when we’re looking back on that literature now, we have to figure out what different resonances it can have for us now, as we face the current panorama. Interspecies narrative is also everywhere in Latin American writing. No matter what text you read of García Márquez, there are animals in there. It might be the rooster and the colonel, there are always animals there. And in Juan Rulfo’s stories like “¿No oyes ladrar los perros?”. One of my favorite Rulfo stories, one called “Es que somos muy pobres”, is about this young girl. The narrator is a young girl, and the calf that was going to be her dowry has been carried away by a flooding river. And she’s sitting there now knowing that her life is going to have to be prostitution: there’s the river carrying away the red calf, the river of her own menstrual blood. It’s just a

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completely brilliant interspecies story, an ecologically grounded story about poverty. There’s just so many of those. Just reviewing modern Latin American aesthetics, the magic in magic realism, I realized, really helped me to think about it as carrying out what Amitav Ghosh has been calling for: to get out of the particularism of realism. It means precisely to have shifted scale. You both have the “minucioso” stuff of Carpentier, and then you have the epidemics and cataclysms in García Márquez: epidemics of butterflies and insomnia and rain and every other thing. All of us, everybody in this book, is rereading the Latin American canon now in terms of the new focuses, and I think there’s so much there and it always has been there, and that we’re going to revitalize the canon and understand it better. A lot of this is true in Canadian fiction too. Many years ago, one of the first articles I ever published was called “Canadian and Latin American fiction in the context of dependency.” It was hugely about geographic and interspecies imaginaries operating in both places. I think, in terms of Latin American singularity, what we’re all talking about is also the continuous generativity of indigenous intellectuality. One of the arguments I make in Planetary Longings is that indigeneity also did a millennial pivot. It has developed extroverted knowledge-making practices where the understanding now is not that we’re speaking of and for ourselves, but that we seek to change you and persuade you to change yourselves or none of us is going to make it. And so you find both indigenous expression being extroverted, reaching out to non-indigenous audiences, and you also find new pretty interesting collaborative forms, in books like Marisol de la Cadena’s or Davi Kopenawa’s and Bruce Albert’s, where the non-indigenous intellectual is not translating the indigenous person for the white person. It’s rather that the non-indigenous person is collaborating with the indigenous person to make this reader enter into indigenous cosmology and get it, inhabit it, in a much deeper way. In fact, you’re are asking the non-indigenous reader to transform their own subjectivity in order to read the text. That change in relationality. I think, is another piece of this that’s really interesting. It’s not singular to Latin America in the sense that this work is also happening in other places. What I say is that indigeneity globalized itself in the 1990s with neoliberalism and with multinationals invading everybody’s territory, but then it’s planetarized now in the 21st century. I don’t know how useful this distinction is I’m drawing between globality and planetary, but I want to name what I see as this pivot. Gabriel Giorgi: I wonder if we could stay with the question of indigeneity here. Listening to your argument about this pivot that indigeneity went through, and about indigeneity looking at the future, I wonder if you have reflected about the issue of ancestrality, which is a key term in environmental aesthetics, and how it connects

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with the futurology that you speak about in relation to indigeneity and the figurations of time. Do we have new figures of time, and how do they combine? MLP: I love that question. Ancestrality and the crisis of futurity, how do you conjugate that together? In Planetary Longings, I say I think indigeneity energizes itself from two forces. One is ancestrality, and that specifically means the continuity with the pre-colonial time when you were not indigenous. You were you. That’s my motto always or my lema, as I’m always saying: “No one’s indigenous until someone else shows up.” That continuity back to that pre-colonial, pre-indigenous moment, the claim of that and the knowledge of that is a defining dimension of indigeneity. At the same time, the other source from which indigeneity energizes itself is resistance or what Gerald Vizenor calls survivance—not survival, survivance—which means the work of building and thriving in a resistant context. That’s the other energy from which indigeneity energizes itself. And those two things, they’re just both there, I think, all the time. Ancestrality is not in contradiction with resistance nor is ancestrality the thing you are defending. What you are defending is the unfolding of your being as a community. I think the future then with indigeneity is not, and has never been, the preservation of the past, ever. People have liked to think about it that way. It’s never been that. It is the unfolding of the past into its future that includes the sustained relations to the ancestors. In North America you have the seven generations paradigm, which requires thinking back seven generations and forward seven. That’s just one way of thinking about it, or you can think about it in cyclical or spiral time. The future is just the past coming back around in whatever its next form is, so that you don’t have that past-future binary. JA: I also like the idea of “R-existência”, re-existence, that was coined by this Brazilian decolonial geographer, Carlos Porto-Gonçalves, which he writes with a capital R. Which is the same idea as survivance but he is insisting also on the fact that carrying on to exist is already an act of resistance, not only in response to the oppression of the colonizer but also as a carrying on to exist on one’s own terms. MLP: What I love in this moment, which I’m calling post-millennial, is that new concepts are popping up all over the place, and some of them live a long time and some of them, in two days we’ve learned what we’re going to learn from them and we move on. But there is just a lot of intellectual ferment and we need completely new sets of concepts to do this crisis of futurity thing that we’re doing. The vocabularies we had in the ’90s, they don’t . . . ya no sirven. They can’t do the work that needs to be done. But recent ones like Liz Povinelli’s geontology and Anna Tsing’s arts of living on a damaged planet, these are wonderful new terms to think with. JA: You mentioned migration and the great exchange in your previous answer. In a piece by Rob Nixon called “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” he makes the

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point that, whereas the environmental humanities talk a lot about place, belonging, rootedness, postcolonialism has focused more on questions of migration and mobility. What do you think is the role of mobility and migration in the Anthropocene chronotope? We already talked about how that can be looked at from a much larger time scale, but how then do we include the contemporary migrations here as well? Would this work primarily on a metaphorical level, such as the monstrous portrayal of killer bees you tackle in chapter two of Planetary Longings? Is there a space for a desdoblamiento as in the case of the Virgin of Zapopan, when we consider the environmental implications of contemporary migration? MLP: The most obvious point of entry into that topic is the reality of climate refugees, which we can see right now without being able to predict anything. As we speak a third of Pakistan is now underwater but nobody saw that coming. It’s a perfect example of the way we’re living with complete unpredictability because we don’t know what is coming. We know that we created the conditions where the climate is completely destabilized and out of our control, and we have no idea what will happen. And so it’s a different kind of migrancy when you’re fleeing from something, the refugiado versus the one who’s hoping to start a new life. Migration, in the future, looks to me like a war zone. It looks like a tremendous conflict zone—Sweden just elected a right-wing government mostly in response to immigration. What is predicted is that larger and larger stretches of the earth are going to become uninhabitable, including parts of the United States. You’re going to have populations forced to move to where other populations already live. You’re going to have those contact zones being created, and those can be collaborative events or they can be war zones, conflicted events. You are also going to have areas of the world becoming less uninhabitable, and more inhabitable for particular species. It looks like farming can move north in Siberia and in Canada but nobody has any idea how that would play out and who’s going to go live there and who (human or non-human) would be displaced. The thing is that everybody’s migrating: the animal species and the plant species are also moving north. Now, up where I spend the summer in Canada, about five years ago, coyotes showed up. We never had coyotes. We have coyotes now. Lots of them. Certain kinds of trees are appearing there, you never used to be able to grow a redbud tree there and now you can. Even though the winters are still winters, everything is moving around and not in ways that we can predict. Migration is going to be absolutely interspecies. When I talk to geographers about these changes the response is overwhelmingly managerial: ok, the monarch butterflies, their numbers have been diminished. Their milkweed food supply along their migration route isn’t continuous anymore. What we need to do is create a milkweed supply along a narrow corridor so they can come. One of the geographers I worked with was studying the shorebirds in New Jersey and their migration. How do you keep tabs on them and figure out how to help them get where they need to go? Well, you show up when they arrive in big flocks and you capture birds and you put the little chip on them and re-release them, and then you

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have somebody whose job is to track those birds. That’s what I mean by saying that overwhelmingly, our response to the destabilizations that we’ve created is still managerial. “We will manage this.” If twenty-seven frog species are going extinct in Central America, you have an incubator facility someplace that lets you keep pairs of those frogs alive and you try to get them to reproduce . . . It seems to me obvious that this managerial response cannot scale up to managing everything that is being interrupted, which would create the ultimate anthropocentric world. “We can’t control anything, but we can try to manage.” I find that depressing, but not everybody does. I think human migration is another one where there will be a managerial response that is going to include preventing people from migrating or telling populations that are going to die where they are, where they have to go. Maybe it’s the UN that does that. That’s going to involve imposing populations on places that don’t want more people. One of the big changes that we’ve had now, I think in the millennium, maybe it was happening in the ’90s too, is that south-to-north migration became a big business. In Mexico, people that were trafficking drugs are now trafficking people. The recruiter shows up in your Guatemalan village and says, “If you give me $5,000, I will take your fourteen-year-old and get him to Texas.” The farmer mortgages their land and turns the son over to the trafficker who takes him up to Ciudad Juárez. And of course, he’s not necessarily going to get him to Texas. Maybe he gets him across, maybe he doesn’t, or maybe he abandons him and he’s on his own. It’s a huge business. Migration today is shaped by trafficking. GG: Also, going back to indigeneity, there is forced migration, of course, in the dispossession of land, but also one that goes back from the cities, the urban peripheries, to the land, to reclaim land. So you have these two movements. This is something we are seeing in Argentina, there has been very little debate on this, but then you see a new generation of kids who say “Yo no soy pobre. Yo soy indio” (I’m not poor, I’m Indian). They’re moving from the urban periphery, where they are the poor, and go to reclaim their land and this then becomes the war zone. MLP: Indigenous land claims are not necessarily ancestral at all. It’s having a land base that is critical. This doesn’t have to be “my grandfather’s land.” You have a case I talk about in Planetary Longing, about the Mixteco, who are creating the “derecho a no migrar” (the right not to migrate) and they’re proposing that as a human right, but in the name of the collective, as a right of the community to not have its people have to go into the migrant stream. To me it was really fascinating that the Mixteco came up with that because, in California, they were the most innovative indigenous group in terms of maintaining relations with the communities back home. They maintained relations through videos. If there was a meeting back home, somebody took a video and brought it up to California and migrant community members watched it up there

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and sent a reply back. It was astounding, the kinds of apparatuses they set up. But nevertheless, they came up with the “derecho a no migrar.” JA: It’s interesting what you’re saying about migration and indigeneity producing the big backlash in Sweden. In fact, in Chile the big issue for the defeat in the constitutional referendum was indigenous rights, to the point that even the government actually promised to downscale these rights if the constitution would have been approved, which is indicative of what a hot-button issue indigenous land claims have become. MLP: Well, in Sweden they have their own Indigenous claims with the Sámi. GG: Shall we go on to the chronotope? Because we all love new expressions, new formulas, but also, as literally scholars, we are happy to see Bakhtin make a return in your work. In your chapter on “Anthropocene as Concept and Chronotope,” you characterize the Anthropocene chronotope as futurological rather than retrospective, unlike for prior geological markers such as the Holocene. What are the stakes here for narrative—which almost always uses the past tense—and for critique—which likewise tends to posit itself “after the object” it engages with? MPL: What I argue in Planetary Longings is the turn of the millennium inaugurates a crisis of futurity. I talk about the pivot from the post there, when we had postmodern, posthuman and postcolonial and post-everything, with our backs to the future. And then, do you remember?— the Y2K moment when we all were afraid, as we looked ahead to 2000, that the computers were all going to freeze, and everything would become different and unpredictable. We all believed that might actually happen. I feel like that was the moment where we all turned to look to the future. It was the Y2K moment. And we approached it with such trepidation, and that night the whole planet was thinking, “What’s going to happen to the—will the phone work? Will the lights go out?”. And nothing happened, which was fantastic. It was like an eschatological narrative that just fizzled like a firecracker that didn’t go off. I think that was when the knowing subject pivoted from looking back to looking ahead. Then, I think, the post became replaced by the geo, by the geohumanities and the geontology and so on. And for me the geo is the futurological thing. So you have a chronotope that is really different from what Bakhtinians would call a chronotope, because it’s not even like the chronotope of a science fiction narrative where it’s about an imagined future. The chronotope of the Anthropocene is the unimaginable future and it’s also the future imagined by someone other than a human, a future that ends up in being that belonging to a nonhuman thinker or a nonhuman entity that is perceiving what our destruction was. I think it’s a very unique chronotope, and it’s a crisis of narrativity because—you can do science fiction, speculative fiction, they call it now, imagining different versions of this, but the chronotope itself calls for something more radical than that.

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But I think it’s really important that everybody recognize that all the other geological ages were identified looking backwards. Anthropocene is an entirely different thing. I think the function of the Anthropocene was to enable that pivot towards a futurological position of thinking and knowing. I almost think that’s the only work it really has to do for us. Anthropocene—I feels to me like a concept that has done what it can do for us. It’s done what we needed it to do and I don’t think it can really do much more than what it has already done. I use Elizabeth Grosz’s concept of “the concept” all through the book—and I think there are a lot of concepts that follow that trajectory. They come, they burst forth and they create the change they needed to create, and then that’s all they can do and so then you drop them and you move on. I moved on to this planetary stuff, but others will move on to other vocabulary. JA: You speak of the Anthropocene also in terms of the crisis of the imagination that it unleashes, which would also entail a crisis of form, of the formal arrays that organize frames of intelligibility, narration, perception. How do you think this crisis of the imagination reconfigures how we understand the aesthetic and hence also the place and function of art in this historical configuration? MLP: What an amazing question that we all have to be thinking about. How does extinction become art? How could it become verbal art? How could it become musical art? What would be an aesthetic of extinction? Then there’s also: how can you do multispecies aesthetics? You guys have studied these really quite fascinating aesthetic experiments where there’s not so much an audience; rather you get people to come and participate in some material, placed construction of an experience in which other species participate and you participate with other species. And that kind of work, multi or interspecies work including between people and other creatures or people and plants or people and geological formations, feels like something that’s in its infancy. That requires an incredible retraining of our imagination to figure out what would be powerful to do there and what impact would it have. Then you want to look at narrative. We know now, for example, that trees are connected under the ground by these huge funguses. Could you write a novel with one of those as the protagonist and would it be readable? What is an event for a fungus? As someone said, “a hundred years is really young for a tree.” Then you ask could there be a multi-species audience for an aesthetic? We know plants like music—we know that, and animals like music. They make music. Do we create interspecies aesthetic projects in there where we work with birds and attract them? I don’t know. What new or repurposed genres could explore the interrelationship of life forms and the interactions with each other and with non-animate forces like air, fire, water, earth? Fire art would be a really good example here, flood art and fire art, they exist. Those are forms that can acquire expressive force in the context of environmental panic. You do have experiments like that. You have these books now, The Hidden Life

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of Trees, those studies in the sensibility of trees. I think this idea of creating new sensibilities and asking humans to develop new sensibilities is like—do you remember Doris Sommer’s book called A New Sentimental Education? It’s something like that. And there are experiments in animal fiction. There’s a novel called Fauna by a Canadian writer named Alyssa York that’s a really neat book. Looking back, you can see interspecies experiments in Latin American literature all over the place. Classic ones like Quiroga’s “Anaconda”, and things like that. I even thought, in the chapter on the novel of the Nineties in the book, now looking back, I feel like I could see harbingers of this coming. Mayra Montero’s Tú, la oscuridad is an extinction novel, it was one of the first ones that I’ve read. I think [Mario Bellatin’s] Salón de belleza is, among other things, an interspecies novel where you have this parallel social order in the acuario that provides a commentary on what is going on. In those novels in the Nineties, they’re kind of prophetic. A lot of them end with climate apocalypse. Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios ends with the flooding of Medellin and Montero’s book ends with a hurricane that destroys the boat on which the scientists are carrying the last example of this frog. And in [Ricardo Piglia’s] Plata quemada, it’s the fire that burns the money. So there’s these elements already in the Nineties, in narrative fictions. You feel, as we face this apocalyptic future, that the thing people want to focus on is the aesthetics of loss, the arts of losing. How are we going to aestheticize loss and damage and destruction? Among a group of anthropologists I was working with that are in Anna Tsing’s Damaged Planet book, some of them were developing an aesthetics of ruined landscape, meaning landscape where the marks of human activity have been absorbed back into the landscape, like an old fence or what was once a sidewalk or a road. That works, but it’s not ambitious enough for what we are going to need to do. The other thing is, we have arts of grief, we have the elegiac mode, but there’s got to be a burgeoning of projects to aestheticize the experience of loss and the fact of loss. I keep hoping for an aesthetics that will collectivize loss and grief. With COVID, we call recall a degree of we had collective public solidarity. We were all there banging our pots out the window. But there has not been any collective public mourning. And I think that’s very damaging for everybody. I think everybody’s carrying their losses alone. I kept thinking, “Why, at Fulton Mall, in my Brooklyn neighborhood is there not every Friday night, a candle vigil that you can go to and mourn your dead and mourn your own losses in the company of your fellow citizens?”. Not just your dead, also the job you lost. I would love to see ritual of loss become a much bigger part of this social paradigm. The other thing though, the bigger challenge, hit me when I was listening to the Canadian Cree writer Tomson Highway, who reminds us over and over that there has to be joy and laughter in all of this. We have to figure out how to make this happen, how there can be the freedom of joy and laughter in the face of catastrophic loss. And that feels, to some people that feels insurmountable. Tomson Highway, grew up way up north, off the grid, with his parents. His parents were trappers. As he said, he had an

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upbringing that no one has anymore. But where he grew up, amidst great hardship people learned to laugh, “I learned from my parents, that laughter is everything. There’s nothing more important.” he said. This is huge in Cree culture. One of his recent books was called Laughing with the Trickster: On Death, Sex, and Accordions. So the trickster figure is central for him, because it can turn anything into a parody of itself, or a joke. His view of climate apocalypse is the goddess of nature laughing, just sitting back and laughing at everything we did, and we have to laugh too. His new book just came out, it’s a memoir and it’s called Permanent Astonishment, which is another thing he advocates. It is fascinating to listen to him. This year, he was asked to give what are called the Massey Lectures in Canada, which are the big national lecture series that you will ask, you know, Latour to give. He’s an example to me of someone who we now know how to listen to. It’s the exact example of the extroverted indigenous thinker and artist who’s seizing this moment to just make this extroverted gesture and create the new knowledge that everybody really is going to need. GG: As I listen to you I was thinking of the tradition of collective mourning we have in Latin America, associated with human rights. But frequently the laughter is not there, the fiesta, the celebration. Maybe a little bit in feminism. But this is a real turnaround. MLP: It would be a turnaround. You remember in Chile, “La cueca sola”? The images of a woman dancing the cueca by herself because the man was absent imprisoned or disappeared, and that was part of the public rituals? JA: In Planetary Longings, you offer the work of Ed Burtynsky as an example of an artist who meets the challenge of the upscaling the Anthropocene demands us to realize. In one sense, that’s obvious because he just uses an even larger wide-angle lens and puts it in front of these large-scale scenes of destruction, right? But what else do you think Burtynsky’s work does for us, beyond just using the documentary capacity of photography? MLP: Yes. I don’t know if there can be a Burtynsky school. I think his experiment is a really powerful and successful one where he, first of all, he’s exploiting the privileged status of the aerial perspective. That satellite perspective, an aerial perspective, is clearly a big piece of the new climate aesthetics in both visual and other kinds of art. It’s really fun to acknowledge that. What fascinates me about Burtynsky is how blatant or explicit he is. The effort is blatant, completely concerted to aestheticize ecological damage in totally classic terms. His photographs, aim to be stunningly beautiful in classic terms, and at the same time just blow you away by the scale of the hyper-disaster. I really appreciate that a lot. He makes a tremendous effort to get those shots. I used to think this was

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the sublime, which is beauty and terror, but now I think it’s not. I think it’s a new— we need a new word for it. It’s something that’s the conjugation of beauty and horror, not terror but horror. He ought to give it a name, I think it would be great. That’s to me an example of someone trying to create this new sensibility that is needed, installing a new sensibility, a perceptive ability in his audience. Tomson Highway would call him a trickster. JA: Maybe working with the sense of uncanniness that you describe in the book as well. Forms that were already there and that are made to respond to phenomena that were perhaps also already there, but we didn’t see them. There’s a strange feedback loop going on. MLP: There’s a feedback loop. I think that it’s obvious that scale does not mean just the giganticness mountain of discarded tires or the fields of—there’s an incredible photograph of China of fields of canola, just a sea. That’s where the gigantesco is the important scale. It means that it’s trying to make it possible for the human imagination to grasp that we can dry up the whole Colorado River, we can cut down the entire Amazon rainforest. It’s like, deal with it, get it in your head that that can happen. He does that in a way I find fascinate because his photographs are beautiful to look at. They make you want to look, at least I do, I want to look at them—which is good because then you consent to have your sensibility transformed, which is I think what he wants. I would love to hear him interviewed just to see what he would say about that new sensibility idea. One of the things that I wanted to do, with this concept of planetary, is to name the need, among other things, to be able to think across many scales, and not just in a binary of macro and micro but way more complicated, and also across many registers. Indigeneity, for example, can express itself as a bolo tie with a turquoise on it, or it can express itself in the foundation of a new department in a university or a UN declaration or a revolution in Bolivia. It is a force that can articulate itself in any register and on any scale, and those ideas of register and scale to me are really helpful. I think the shift from ism to I-T-Y, for example, from colonialism to coloniality, marks the shift from system to force. Coloniality is a force like Indigeneity or like fire, that can make things happen any time it’s in play in a situation, and it can express itself in just about any form at any scale. Rather than a system operating with predictable regularity, It’s a force that’s in play and you can’t predict what it’s going to do, but you can predict that it’s likely to do something if it’s present. Indigeneity is like that too. The I-T-Y suffix seems to me often used as a marker of this idea that there’s a force. Humidity is another one. Earth, air, fire, water, heat, cold, wet, dry, are all forces that can operate across registers and scales. A river can wipe out a town, or a glass of water can spill on the table. I feel that the idea of thinking of Indigeneity, not as a state or an identity but as a force, and coloniality not as a state or an identity but as a force, can help bring human thinking and ecological thinking together.

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Cited Works Andrade, Mário de. Hallucinated City. Trans. Jack E. Tomlins. Seattle: Sublunar Editions, 2022. ——. Macunaíma. The Hero with no Character. Trans. Katrina Dodson. New York: New Directions, 2023. Bellatin, Mario. Salón de belleza. México, D. F.: Campodónico, 1994. Cabral de Melo Neto, João. Morte e vida Severina. São Paulo: TUCA, 1955. De la Cadena, Marisol. Earth-Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Highway, Tomson. Permanent Astonishment: a Memoir. Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2021. ——. Laughing with the Trickster: On Sex, Death, and Accordions. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2022. Kopenawa, Davi, and Albert, Bruce. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013. Montero, Mayra. Tú, la oscuridad. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1995. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nixon, Rob. “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Eds. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 233–251. Piglia, Ricardo. Plata quemada. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1997. Porto-Gonçalves, Carlos Walter. “O latifúndio genético e a R-Existência indigeno-camponesa.” GEOgraphia 4.8 (2002): 30–44. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Pratt, Mary Louise. Planetary Longings. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. Sommer, Doris. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ramos, Graciliano. Vidas secas. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1938. Rulfo, Juan. El llano en llamas. México, D. F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1953. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. York, Alyssa. Fauna. Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2011. Vallejo, Fernando. La virgen de los sicarios. Barcelona: Alfaguara, 1994. Vizenor, Gerald, ed. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. Trans. Jane Billinghurst. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2016.

List of Contributors Ignacio Aguiló is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), and the co-editor of Chile desde los estudios culturales (Santiago: Ediciones UFT, 2019) and Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America and the Caribbean (London: University of London Press, 2019). His research examines the intersection of race and cultural production in contemporary Latin America. Jens Andermann is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University and an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. He is the author of six books and several edited collections, most recently: Jardín (Santiago: Bifurcaciones, 2023), Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2023; Spanish edition from Metales Pesados, 2018), Natura. Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape, with Lisa Blackmore and Dayron Carrillo Morell (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018), and—with the Journal’s editorial collective—Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2018). His work has been published in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and German. Mark Anderson is Associate Professor of Latin American Literatures at the University of Georgia. He is author of Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe (University of Virginia Press, 2011) and coeditor with Zélia Bora of Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature (Lexington Books, 2016). He has published nearly two dozen articles and book chapters on the environmental humanities, and his new book on The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things: Literature and Environmental Ethics from Latin America is forthcoming. Matías Ayala Munita is Associate Professor at Universidad Finis Terrae (Santiago, Chile), with a Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is the author of several books of essays including Lugar incómodo: poesía y sociedad en Parra, Lihn y Martínez (2010), La poesía de Oscar Hahn: Anacronía, fantasmas, visualidad (2018) and Poéticas de lo viviente, lo animal y lo impersonal (2020), as well as of three volumes of poetry. He has edited La batalla de Artes y Humanidades (2020) and Una nota estridente by Enrique Lihn (2005). Laura Barbas Rhoden is Professor of modern languages, literatures, and cultures at Wofford College and served as Co-President (2020–2021) and Co-Diversity Officer (2017–2019) for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. She has authored two monographs, Writing Women in Central America (Ohio University Press, 2003) and Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction (University Press of Florida, 2011), as well as articles and essays on literary and cultural studies, the environmental humanities, and public engagement. Orlando Bentancor is an Associate Professor at Barnard College/Columbia University. He received his BA in Philosophy from the Universidad de la República (Montevideo, Uruguay) in 1997 and his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) from the University of Michigan in 2005. Before joining the Barnard faculty, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California (2005–2008) and he also held a visiting appointment at the department of Comparative Literature at Princeton (2007–2008). He is the author of The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Perú (2017), published by Pittsburgh University Press. Lisa Blackmore is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex. A specialist in Latin American Cultural Studies, Lisa works at the intersections of practice and research, combining writing on the arts and ecology with curatorial and audiovisual projects. In 2018 she founded the interdisciplinary research group entre—ríos, which stimulates connections to bodies of water through arts practice and public engagement. She is the author of Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space and https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-030

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Visuality in Venezuela 1948–1958 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) and co-editor of Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape (Diaphanes, 2018) and Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art (Routledge 2020). Ximena Briceño is a Lecturer of Latin American literature and culture at Stanford Univerisity. She is cocoordinator of the research group materia at Stanford. Her latest book, Visiones de los Andes: Ensayos críticos sobre el concepto de paisaje y región (Plural and University of Pittsburgh, 2019), co-edited with Jorge Coronado, is a collection of essays that study landscape with regards to literature, archaeology, art, painting, photography, architecture, environmentalism, and activism in the region. Adriana Michele Campos Johnson is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UC-Irvine. She is completing a project on visual infrastructures in Latin America and recently co-edited a volume with Dan Nemser for Social Text entitled Reading for Infrastructure: Worlds Made and Broken. Other publications include “Excess of Visibility/Scarcity of Water” (Discourse), “An Expanse of Water” (Liquid Ecologies in the Arts), “In-São-Paulo-Visible” (Revista Hispanica Moderna), “Visuality as Infrastructure” (Social Text). Valeria de los Ríos Escobar is Full Professor at the Institute of Aesthetics of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where she teaches courses on Theory and History of the Image, Cinema and Literature, and Theories of Cinema. Her research has focused on the relationship between literature, photography and film, in particular the work of Raúl Ruiz and Ignacio Agüero. Her current projects revolve around the Anthropocene and the new materialisms in audiovisual and literary narratives from Latin America. Her latests books are Vida animal. Figuraciones no humanas en el cine, la fotografía y la literatura (2022) and Metamorfosis. Aproximaciones al cine y la poética de Raúl Ruiz (2019). Ricardo Duarte Filho is an interdisciplinary scholar of Latin American cultural studies and a Ph. D. candidate currently completing his dissertation at New York University. Located at the intersection of cultural studies, environmental humanities, and critical race studies, his work adopts a broad temporal perspective to explore the intersections between extractivism, colonialism, and race. He is a co-editor of Inúteis, frívolos, e distantes: à procura dos dândis (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad X, 2019) and has published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, among others. In his doctoral dissertation, he explores how Brazilian extractivism converts racialized bodies into natural resources and how contemporary Brazilian artists are reworking this extractivist logic to advance decolonial futures. Sebastián Figueroa is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of New Orleans. He has previously taught at Haverford College, University of Pennsylvania, Universidad Austral de Chile, and Universidad de Los Lagos. During Spring 2021, he was Andrés Bello Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center. He is currently working on a book manuscript about the Atacama Desert during the global ecological crisis, where he focuses on extractivism and debris in literary texts, films, and artworks from Chile and Bolivia. Carolyn Fornoff is Assistant Professor of Latin American studies at Cornell University. Her work examines how Mexican and Central American cultural production responds to environmental crisis. She is the co-editor of two volumes in the environmental humanities: Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021). Her monograph, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change, is forthcoming with Vanderbilt University Press. Cynthia Francica is Associate Professor in the Literature Department at Adolfo Ibáñez University, Santiago, Chile. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. She

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has published in diverse media, including the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Estudios Filológicos and Estudos Feministas, and is in charge of the Fondecyt project “Beyond the Human: Female Bodies and Affect in the Contemporary Literature and Visual Arts of Chile and Argentina” (2018–2023). Gabriel Giorgi is Principal Researcher at Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Técnica (CONICET) in Argentina and Professor at New York University. He works on Latin American contemporary literatures, art and cinema, with a focus on the Southern Cone and Brazil. Biopolitics, the non-human, and queerness articulate many of his critical interventions. He has published Sueños de exterminio. Homosexualidad y representación en la literatura argentina contemporánea (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2004), Formas comunes. Animalidad, biopolítica, cultura (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2014; translated into Portuguese in 2016) and more recently, in collaboration with Ana Kiffer, Las vueltas del odio. Gestos, escrituras, políticas (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2020; published in Brazil in 2019.) He has also co-edited with Fermin Rodriguez the anthology Excesos de vida. Ensayos sobre biopolítica (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2007) Besides NYU, he has been visiting professor at universities in Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador. His articles have been published in the USA, Spain and Latin America. Gisela Heffes is a writer and Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Rice University. Her most recent publications are the co-edited volumes The Latin American Ecocultural Reader (2020), Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (2021), Un gabinete para el futuro (2022), and Turbar la quietud (2023). She is the author of Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment (2023), the novel Cocodrilos en la noche (2020; 2023); the poetry collection El cero móvil de su boca /The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth (2020); the collection Aquí no hubo ni una Estrella (2023) and of Ischia (2000; English edition, 2023). With George Handley she is the co-president of ASLE (The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment). Héctor Hoyos is Professor and Director of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, as well as Professor of Comparative Literature, by courtesy, at Stanford University. His scholarly publications include the monographs Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (2015) and Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America (2019), both from Columbia University Press. He is a former Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. Dana Khromov teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She earned her PhD in Hispanic and Portuguese Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, where she edited “Reframing Humans, Animals and Land in Contemporary Brazilian and Argentinian Cinema,” a series of essays on shifting notions of humans, animals and land in contemporary Latin American film. Her research takes a decolonial feminist approach to ecocriticism in an analysis of 20th- and 21st-century Latin American literature and film, with a particular focus on the erotic. Her work has been published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and Revista Iberoamericana. Michel Nieva is a science-fiction writer and a PhD Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Jamille Pinheiro Dias is the director of the Centre of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of London, where she also works as a Lecturer. She is currently a von der Heyden Fellow at the Franklin Humanities Institute’s Amazon Lab at Duke University. Her interests involve Amazonian cultural production, Indigenous praxis and conceptual frameworks, environmental issues, translation and activism in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil.

456

List of Contributors

Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor, Emerita, of Spanish and Portuguese and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, Emerita, at Stanford University. Her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992) is a key point of reference for Latin American studies as well as for postcolonial thinking in general. Her most recent books are Planetary Longings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022) and (with Phillip D. Gonzales and Renato Rosaldo), Trumpism, Mexican America, and the Struggle for Latinx Citizenship (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021). Jorge Quintana Navarrete is assistant professor of Spanish at Dartmouth College, with a Ph.D. from Princeton University. His research interests include Mexican culture (19th and 20th centuries), utopian studies, environmental humanities, and critical theory. He has published chapters in edited volumes and peer-reviewed articles in Hispanic Review, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, among others. His book Biocosmism. Vitality and the Utopian Imagination in Postrevolutionary Mexico is forthcoming with Vanderbilt University Press. Gabriel Rudas Burgos is Assistant Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, where he teaches Contemporary Latin American Literature and Theory. He has previously worked at several Universities in Colombia and the United States. His doctoral dissertation, “Narrativas inhumanas: Capitalismo extractivo, delirios animistas y representación textual,” analyzes the literary representation of human and non-human relations in contexts of extractive capitalism in narrative texts by Latin American Writers José Eustasio Rivera (1888–1928), José María Arguedas (1911–1969), and Juan Cárdenas (1978–). He has published several articles on the relations between aesthetics, modernity, and extractive capitalism. Carolina Sá Carvalho is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto, where she is also affiliated to the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability. She is the author of Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America, an examination of photography as a technology for documenting, creating, and understanding the processes of modernization in turn-of-the-century Brazil and the Amazon. Her new work examines mosquito-human relations and the aesthetics and politics of contagion in Brazil. Victoria Saramago is Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and in the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization at the University of Chicago. She is the author of the award-winning Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America (Northwestern University Press, 2021), which investigates how Latin American novels have interfered on and interacted with perceptions of environmental change. She is also the co-editor of Literature Beyond the Human: Post-Anthropocentric Brazil (Routledge, 2022). Her current book project, which has received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, investigates how Brazilian artistic practices have shaped perceptions of the production and consumption of electrical energy. Javier Uriarte is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the Latin American spatial imagination, the environmental humanities, travel narratives, the relations between war and representation, and the Amazon. He is the author of The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America (Routledge, 2020), and the co-editor of Entre el humo y la niebla: Guerra y cultura en América Latina (IILI, 2016), Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon (Liverpool University Press, 2019), and Latin American Literature in Transition, 1870–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2022). In 2021–22 he was awarded the Marcel Bataillon Senior Fellowship at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study to work on his project “Fluvial Poetics in the Amazon: Infrastructure, Displacement, Modernization”.

List of Contributors

457

Lesley Wylie is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Leicester. Her main interests are in the intersections between literature and the environment, especially in relation to the Amazon. Her books include Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks: Rewriting the Tropics in the novela de la selva (Liverpool University Press, 2009); Colombia’s Forgotten Frontier: A Literary Geography of the Putumayo (Liverpool University Press, 2013); and The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature (Pittsburgh University Press, 2020).

Index Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. 32nd São Paulo Biennial 215 1992 World’s Fair, Seville, Spain 109 abstract art. See also abstraction, scientific empiricism and 68–69, 69n3 abstraction 4–5, 74–76, 274 – extractivism and 311 – vs. indicative presentation 75–76 – mining and 304–308 – real 307–310 – violence and 299 abstractionism 234 acculturation 93 accumulation 36, 47, 306, 387 – by dispossession 313, 313n1 – primitive accumulation 9, 313, 313n1, 387 Aché 168 Acosta, Alberto 48, 261 Acosta, José de 304, 305 Acosta, Santiago 331, 331n6 activism 176 – art and 10–11, 47, 427, 428–431, 434–435 activists 49, 59. See also specific activists and groups “actor-network theory” 72, 73n6 Acuña, Cristobal de 219–220 Adamson, Joni 400 adaptation 369, 370, 371. See also resilience Adorno, Juan Nepomuceno 204, 211n7 Adorno, Theodor 68, 72, 82–83, 292 Aedes do bem 133, 135–136 Aedes mosquito 123, 126, 126n4, 129, 133, 134, 134n25, 135, 137 aesthetics 286, 288, 291, 293–294. See also environmental aesthetics; specific schools – aesthetic currents 427–433 – aesthetic experimentation 128 – of extinction 448 – “indigenous aesthetics” 291–292 – of loss 449 – planetary turn and 3–4 – re-conceptualization of 4 – of survivance 414–420 – African cosmovisions 13 African cultures 114–115 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110775907-031

African peoples – devaluation of 310 – enslavement of 286, 355 – suppression of world views of 356, 358 Afro-Colombian culture 390–392 Afro-Cuban traditions 346 Afro-descendant communities 362, 363 Afro-descendant cosmologies, human/nonhuman relations and 362–363 Afro-descendants 110, 409 – enslavement of 261, 273 – racialization and 261–262, 261n3 – tropicality and 114–121 Afro-descendant traditions 12, 13, 383 Afro-Latin worldviews, on nature 363 Agamben, Giorgio 37, 91–92n2, 95 “agential realism” 73–74 agribusiness 47, 221, 263, 364, 424 agriculture, technologies and 247 Aguilar, Yasnaya Elena 58 Aguilera Skvirsky, Karina 294 Aguirre, Dida 59 Aguirre, Lope de 190n5 Ahuja, Neel 131–132 Aira, César 294 Alaimo, Stacy 127n7, 396, 397, 406, 407 Albert, Bruce 14, 200, 259, 410, 443 – The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman 59, 200, 201, 292–293, 415–420, 415n5 – A queda do céu 392 Albert, Federico 318 Alegría, Francisca, La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro 164–165, 164–165n9 Alencar, José de 223 Aliança Rio Doce 425 Allende, Salvador 182 Allora & Calzadulla, Land Mark 279 Alonso, Carlos J. 194–195 Alonso, Manuel 345 Altamira Gathering of 1989, 263, 265n7 Álvares Cabral, Pedro 216n1 Alvarez, Walter 206n4 Alves, María Theresa, The Return of a Lake 239n9, 430–431

460

Index

Amaral, Tarsila do 113 Amazonian cosmologies 32 Amazonian culture 32, 277 Amazon rainforest 55, 59, 62, 190, 190n3, 191n7, 196, 199–200, 277, 329n3, 345, 350, 422, 433 – cultivation of 159 – Peruvian 60 – rubber boom and 262 Amazon River 190n3, 190n5, 192, 424–425, 433 Amazon River basin 232 “American Plantation zone” 13 American subjects, heterogeneity of 276 Americas. See also specific locations – colonialism and 8–9 – imaginings of 190–191, 190–191n6 – reinvention of 191 Amerindian cosmologies, resistance(s) and 383. See also Indigenous cosmologies Amerindian culture 166, 169 – Amerindian cosmologies and 383 – “Amerindian perspectivism” 277 (see also perspectivism; specific groups) – “Amerindian theory of literature” 18 Amerindian thought and experience 166 “ancestral catastrophe” 11, 382, 388 ancestral forms 10 ancestrality 11, 444 – borders and 217–218 – coloniality and 11–14 “ancestral present” 383 Andean cultures 97–98, 277, 358 – Andean ontologies 364 – Andean ways of being 288 Andermann, Jens 15, 38, 100n18, 200, 234, 240, 279–280, 282, 441–452 Anderson, Mark 11, 18, 398 Anderson, Warwick 123, 125 Andes 144–145n6, 193, 239–241, 288 – Andean highlands 235 – heterogeneity of landscape 276–277 – mining in 299, 306 Andrade, Jonathas de, Fome de Resistência – Fundamento Kayapó Menkragnoti (collective artwork) 12–13, 259, 263–268, 264, 265 Andrade, Mário de 113, 199, 442 Andrade, Oswald de 10, 113 – “Pobre alimária” (Poor brute) 234–235 Andújar, Claudia 168 Anglo-Peruvian Amazon Company 193

Anglophone ecocriticism 17, 28, 29–30, 39–40, 363 Anglosphere 10, 17 Angulo, Liliana 13 animal critique 94–95 animal fiction 449 animality 95, 100 – capitalism and 100–101 – human 100–101 – narratives of 93–94 animal rights 94, 95 animal(s) 80, 91–108. See also interspecies experiments; nonhuman representation; specific animals – (un)framing in Latin America 92–96 – “animal alliance” 100n18 – art and 67n1 – in García Márquez 442, 443 – imperialism and 92–93 – migration of 445 – transspecies literary agency 96–104 animal studies 38, 91–92, 94–95n8, 95, 96, 104–105 “animal turn” 91, 91–92n2 animism 286–288, 290, 293, 343, 345, 347–349, 350 Aniñir, David 372, 378 Anonymous, La Virgen del Cerro Rico de Potosí 286, 286, 288 Anopheles Annie 123, 136 Anopheles mosquito 123, 123n1, 123n2 anthologies 39 the Anthropocene 4–6, 9, 50, 56, 94–95, 158, 161, 164, 166, 169, 187, 358, 382, 445, 450 – capitalism and 161–162 – chronotope of 381, 447, 448 – crisis of the imagination and 448 – debates on 203–204, 206, 213, 356–359, 381n1, 382–383, 406–407 – decolonization and 358 – geology and 203 – GSSP (Global Boundary Stratosphere Section and Point) or Golden Spike 357 – ‘indigenizing’ 358 – infrastructure(s) and 236–241, 237n6, 238n7 – introduction of hypothesis 203–204, 356–357 – oil and 329, 329n3 – as ‘racial process’ 358 – slave plantations as model and motor of 317 – space and time in 281

Index

– toxicity and 396 Anthropocenic imagination 329, 329n3 anthropocentrism 226, 295, 363 anthropology 10, 236, 237, 289, 290, 291 anthropomorphism 86, 93, 198, 199, 347–349 anti-Cartesianism 285 anticolonial interdisciplinarity 291 anti-extractivism 58 anti-Indigenous racism 226 Antillean cultures 115 anti-tropicalism 113 antropofagia 10 Aonikenk, displacement of 152 appropriation 56, 247, 304, 305, 308, 310, 313, 314 Apu 286 Aquinas, Thomas 285, 286 Aragón, Edgardo, Mesoamérica: el efecto huracán 58–59 Arango-Correa, Catalina 16 Araripe Júnior, Tristão de Alencar 112–113 Araucanía 318, 319, 320 Araya, Venezuela 229–230, 239–240 Arboleda, Martín, Planetary Mine 299–304, 306, 307, 310 archeology 290 archival practices 14, 15, 17 archives 383–388 Argentina 113–114, 142, 229–230, 245, 248 – 2001 crisis in 246 – border with Brazil 219 – Chaco region 148–149 – collapse of welfare state in 246 – depletion of land capacity in 148–149 – desert in 143–144 – femicides in 249, 252 – infrastructure(s) in 238 – lithium and 56 – migration in 446 – military coup in 182 – railroad in 230, 232 – state oil companies in 253 Argentine cinema 7 Arguedas, José María 91, 101n22, 102n23, 102n24, 150 – Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí 97–98 – The Fox from Above and the Fox from Below 96–104, 105 – Yawar Fiesta 235 Aristotelianism 304, 307

461

Aristotle 67n1, 165 – De Anima 285 armadillos 442 Armiero, Marco 2 Arnold, David 3, 110 art(s) 15. See also specific artists and works – activism and 10–11, 427, 428–431, 434–435 – animal(s) and 67n1 – arts of living on a damaged planet 444 – aura of 83–84 – bioart 280 – environmental activism and 10–11 – extinction and 448 – of grief 449 – handicrafts and 224–225 – life and 217 – mechanical reproduction and 83–84 – reclaiming of territories and 218 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment 29, 30 – translation grants 39 Atacama desert 142n2 Atlantic Middle Passage 13 Atlantic slave trade 382 Atrato River 426, 432–433, 434 audiovisual productions, Indigenous 279 Australia 216 authoritarianism 431 automatization 247 avant-garde 4, 279 Ávila Runa 414n4 Aymara language 310 Aymara peoples 286 Aymara traditions 290 Ayoreo Totobiegosode 167 Aztecs 422, 423 Bailleres, Alberto 46 Baja California, pearl fisheries in 60 Bakhtin, Mikhail 447 Balkan, Stacy 39 Baniwa, Denilson 12, 219n11, 219n12, 219n13, 220n14, 222, 224, 267n9 – Children of the Corn 221–222 – Jaguar-Shaman performances 220–221, 222 – Não há cartografia no mundo dos pajés 219–220, 221 Baquero, Gastón 115 Barad, Karen 69n3, 70n4, 73–74, 86, 127n7

462

Index

Barba, Álvaro Alonso 305, 307, 309–310 barbarism 109. See also “civilización y barbarie” Barbas-Rhoden, Laura 11, 17 Bárcena, Mariano 204, 207–208, 213 baroque, vegetal 345–347 Barrerra, Jazmina 296, 297 Barrett, Rafael 150 – “Hogares heridos” (Wounded homes)” 149 Barthes, Roland 236 Basso, Ellen 80 Bate, Jonathan 349 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 3, 5 beads 265 beauty 3. See also aesthetics Beck, Ulrich 397 Beckman, Ericka 18, 53, 54n5, 276, 295, 362, 388 Bekwyikai 263–268, 264, 265 Bekwyiket 263–268, 264, 265 Bekwyiky 263–268, 264, 265 Bekwyitexo 263–268, 264, 265 Belair 336, 337 Bellamy Foster, John 247 Bellatin, Mario 449 Belli, Gioconda 363 Bello, Andrés 191 belonging 445 Benacerraf, Margot, Araya 229–230, 231, 239–240 Benítez, Fernando 237 Benjamin, Walter 68, 68n2, 81, 83–84, 85 Bennett, Jane 105, 427 Bentancor, Orlando 18, 50, 51, 285–286, 290, 295 – The Matter of Empire 299–300, 304–307, 308, 310 Bento Rodrigues, Minas Gerais 425, 426 Bera, Tristan 161–162 – A Film, Reclaimed 161–162 Bermúdez, Diego 434–435n4 Besky, Sarah 247 Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne 35 Bethônico, Mabé 429–430 – Rio de lama 430 – Speaking of Mud 429, 430 Beverley, John 28 Biemann, Ursula 62 Bienal del Bioceno 434 Bigelow, Allison 51n2, 294, 295 – Mining Language 299–300, 308–311 Binns, Niall 143n3 bioart 280 Biobío, Chile, clear-cutting in 320

Biobío River 318 biodiversity 159–160, 222, 316 biopolitics 95, 99, 182n9 – biopolitical critiques 37 – biopolitical thought 92, 94–95 – of colonization 128–129 – of empire 128 – of nation-building 128–129 biotechnologies, of vector control 135–136 Birri, Fernando, Tire Dié 229–230, 231, 233 “Black Anthropocene” 358 Black labor, enslaved 261 Blackmore, Lisa 15 Blackness, extractivism and 261–262, 261n3 Blacks. See Afro-descendants Black Studies 262 Blaser, Mario 6, 358 bodies 7, 173, 176, 257–270 – exploitation of 252 – extractivism and 253, 257–270 – feminized 246, 247 – floating 182 – gendered 176 – Indigenous 257–270, 261n3 – land and 257–270 – marginalized 176 – materialities and 253 – nature and 259–261, 279 – racialization of 176, 246, 261–262, 261n3, 267–268 (see also racialization) – representation and 279 – sexualized 173 (see also sexualization) – territories and 252, 253 (see also “cuerpo-territorio” (body-territory), notion of) – unpaid 246 – water and 427 bodypainting 265–266 body-soul dualism 285 body-territory, toxic 177–181. (See also “cuerpo-territorio” (body-territory), notion of) Boff, Leonardo 17, 33, 35, 36 Bogotá, Colombia 144–145n6, 424, 434 Bolaño, Roberto 95, 294 Bolívar, Simón 212, 391n6 – Carta de Jamaica 287, 288 Bolivia 56–57, 166–167, 290, 426 – 2011 Law of Mother Nature 358 – constitutional reform in 10 – lithium and 56

Index

– mining in 51, 299 Bonpland, Aimé 190 Bony, Oscar, La familia obrera 245–246, 245, 253 the Boom 194, 363, 412 borders 217–219 “Botocudos” 260, 260n2, 263 bourgeoisie 383 Boyer, Dominic 329n1 Braidotti, Rosi 94–95n8, 95 Brazil 15, 48–49, 113–114, 130–132, 192–193, 216n1, 279–280, 424, 424, 425, 425 – border with Argentina 219 – Campanha Nacional do Combate à Dengue 135 – climate refugees and 147–148 – dictatorship in 338, 409 – Dutch period in 274 – ecocritical concern in 162–163 – extractivism in 257–270 – Federal Constitution 216n2 – Indigenous arts in 225–226 – infrastructure(s) in 233–234, 237, 238 – Ministry of Indigenous Peoples in 10 – National Congress of 265n7 – oil industry in 331–332 – race in 361 – railroad in 232 – representations of 257–270 – slavery in 360 – spatial imagination in 147n13 – Zika in 133–134 Brazilian Cerrado 349 Brazilianness 223 Brazilian sertão 142n2, 145n8, 146–147, 147n15, 148 – definition of 146, 147n14 Brazilwood trees 49, 257, 263 Bressane, Júlio, A família do barulho (The Family of Disorder) 329, 332, 333, 336–339, 338 Briceño, Ximena 273 British Empire 32, 51, 207 British West Indies 274 Brum, Eliane 146 Brumadinho disaster 429 Bryce, Viscount 262 Buckland, William 206 Buckle, Henry Thomas 3 Buell, Lawrence 17, 29 Buenaventura, María 434–435n4 Buenos Aires, Argentina 7, 246

463

buen vivir 10, 35, 290, 358 Burgos, Elizabeth 292 Burtynsky, Edward 450–451 Butler, Judith 84, 95 Cabnal, Lorena 13–14, 252 caboclos 132 Caboco, Gustavo 224–225, 224n26 Cabrera, Lydia 346 Caccuri, Vivian 123n1, 133, 135n27 – Detail of Mosquito Shrine II 124 – Mosquito net for Mosquito Shrine 124 – Mosquito Shrine 123, 124, 125–127, 125, 126, 129, 134–135 – Mosquito Shrine II 123 Cáceres, Berta 59 Caixa do bem 133, 136 Caldas, Francisco José de 111–112 Calfuqueo, Sebastián 14, 184–185, 252–253 – Ko ta mapungey ka (Agua también es territorio/ Water is also territory 184–185 – Kowkülen (Ser líquido/Liquid Being) 185 California, migration in 446–447 Calvo, César 15, 60, 61, 416 – Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo 411–413 Cambiar el verde por azul 434 Campanha Nacional do Combate à Dengue 135 Campos-Pons, Maria Magdalena 431 Canada 445 Canadian fiction 443 Canal Feijóo, Bernardo 150 canals 231, 232, 290 Candiani, Tania, Ríos antiguos, ríos entubados, ríos muertos 430 Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge 344 Cano, Francisco Antonio, Horizontes 271, 272, 273, 281 canons, ecocriticism and 39–40 Canudos War 233 Capellán, Tony 431 capital, abstraction of 47 ‘capital fictions’ 362 capitalism 11, 47, 93–94, 104, 151, 175, 191, 247, 276, 278–279, 359–360, 362, 364 – animality and 100–101 – the Anthropocene and 161–162 – cannibalistic tendencies of 313n1 – coloniality and 305–306, 381n1

464

Index

– “contamination of” 99 – depletion of land capacity due to 148 – deterritorialization and 303 – developmentalism and 252 – empire and 137 – environmental crisis and 381–382 – extraction and 356 – extractivism and 60, 123, 137, 163–164, 253–255 – fetishism and 301–303 – global 1–2, 8 – infrastructure(s) and 237–238, 238n7 – labor and 330 – late 2 – material expansion of 230 – mining and 299–302, 305, 306, 308 – modernity and 47, 48 – nature and 203 – oil industry and 331–332 – parasitism and 255 – race and 356, 401–402 – real abstraction and 305–306 – sexuality and 100 the Capitalocene 4, 9, 62, 158n2, 203, 237, 238n7, 359, 381, 381n1, 424 Caquetá region 192 “carbon democracy” 330 carbon imaginary 141, 151 carbon levels 9, 356, 357 Cárcamo de Dolores 423, 430 Cárdenas, Juan 390–392 – Elástico de sombra 390–392 care 14, 134, 169, 176 the Caribbean 13, 30–31, 50, 114–121, 123n1, 422, 431. See also tropicality; specific countries Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela 261 Carpentier, Alejo 102n23, 295, 343, 363, 443 – El siglo de las luces 346 – Los pasos perdidos 345 – “Problemática de la actual novela latinoamericana” 343, 345–347 Carricajo, Elisa 253 Carruthers, David V. 402 Carse, Ashley 230, 231, 238 Cartesian dualism 92, 285, 349, 358. See also nature/culture divide cartography 219–220 – colonial 257 – Indigenous 266, 267–268 – remapping and 259, 259n1, 267–268

– settler colonialism and 259–260, 267–268 Carvajal, Gaspar de 190n3 Casa Arana 193 Casement, Roger 193 Casid, Jill H. 52, 257, 274, 356 casta system 310 Castilian 324 Castro, Azucena 38 Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de 165 Castro-Klarén, Sara 98, 98n14, 99 catastrophe(s). See also specific events and kinds of events – Latin America and 212 – Mexico and 204–207, 208–211, 211n7 – political 209–212 catastrophism 205–209, 206n4, 213 Catholic Church 32 Catholic culture 114, 115 Catholicism 286 Catrileo, Matías 372, 378 Cauca River 290, 424, 426n1 Caycedo, Carolina 15, 428–429 – Dammed Landscapes 280, 281–282 – GEOCHOREOGRAPHY ORITOGUAZ 429 – Serpent River Book 429 – Yuma: Land of Friends 280–281 ceiba 346–347 Ceiba pentandra (Mayas’ “World Tree”) 343 Celco 319 the Cenozoic era 207 centers 2 – vs. peripheries 52 Cerro de Pasco 59 Cerro Rico de Potosi 303 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 4, 6, 167, 273, 381 “champurriado” 321, 323 Chapultepec Park 423, 430 Characahuín 321, 372, 378 Chavis, Benjami 401 “Cheap Nature” 246, 247, 256, 331–332, 331n8, 364, 424 Chernobyl 395–396, 397 Che sungún 376–377 Chiapas 49 “Chicago Boys” 319 Chihauilaf, Elicura 18, 321, 363, 371, 372 Chilam Balam 347 Chile 109, 168, 239–241, 384, 426, 434–435n4, 447 – 2017 mega-fire in 319

Index

– Agrarian Reform in 319 – center-left government after Pinochet 319 – “Chilean miracle” 319 – clear-cutting in 320 – colonialism in 325–326 – Constitutional Convention in 2020, 326 – constitutional reform in 10 – Constitution of 1980, 325–326 – Decree No. 701, 319 – deforestation in 318–319, 320 – development in 320 – dictatorship in 168, 181, 182, 183–184, 313, 318–319, 325–326, 384, 431 (see also Pinochet, Augusto) – “estallido social” in 182n7 – extractive industries in 319 – femicides in 184 – forest boom in 318–319 – forest plantations in 313, 314, 317–319, 325–326 – German immigrants in 318, 322–323 – Indigenous communities in 319, 321–325, 326, 447 (see also specific groups) – Indigenous rights in 447 – infrastructure(s) in 237 – Ley de Bosques 318 – lithium and 56 – Mapuche-Huilliche people in 372–379 – mining in 54–55 – modernization in 320 – monoculture in 313–328 – neoliberalism in 313, 325–326 – social revolt of October 18, 2019, 326 – Transition in 371 – Water Code in 181–182, 181n6, 185 – water in 326 Chilean Andes 239–241 Chilean poetry 379 Chiloe 314n2, 318 China 56, 301, 433–434 chinampas 422, 423, 431 Chirinos, Eduardo, “The Chernobyl Chronicle” 395–396, 395n1 Chocó, Colombia 432 Christianity 285–286, 292–293, 322 – Christian dualism 274, 285–286 – Christian territorial ordering 274 – Indigenous cosmovisions and 277 chronotopes 447 the Chthulucene 4, 158n2

465

Cinema Marginal 336, 338 Cinema Novo 336 Cintli Rodríguez, Roberto 343 “circle of Toledo” 304–305 Ciudad Juárez 446 Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua 134 “civilización y barbarie” 96, 158, 158n3, 360 civilization, metanarratives of 98–99 civil rights movements 401 Clark, Lygia 427 class 176 – contagion and 127–128 Clastres, Pierre 216 Clicks modernos 168–169 climate 109–122, 360 climate change 157, 169, 203, 291, 317, 356–357, 441, 446. See also global warming climate crisis 109 climate fiction 442 climate refugees 147–148, 445 climatological time 118 climatology 3 CMPC 319 coal extraction 152 coal production 152 Cobra Grande (snake canoe) 220 Coccia, Emanuele 159, 169, 345, 350 coevolution 94, 95 coexistence 352 Cohen, Ed 131 Colebrook, Claire, The Posthuman Glossary 164 Colectivo Camellones y Zan 434 Colectivo Lamarencoche 245, 246 – La familia obrera (The working-class family) 245, 253 collections 383–388 collective action 187, 397. See also activism collective memory 182–183 collective mourning 184 collective narratives 392 collective temporality 392 Colombia 15, 55, 144–145n6, 193, 196, 232, 290, 390–392, 424, 426, 426n1, 434 – activist deaths in 49 – constitutional reform in 10 – designation of Atrato River as legal person in 432–433 – “drug war” violence and 53n3 – Truth Commission in 431–432

466

Index

Colombian grima 390, 391n6, 392 Colombian llanos (plains) 144–145 Colombian Pacific 363 the colonial, temporality of 11–12 colonialism 11, 104, 204, 207, 238n7, 261n4, 262, 279, 306, 313, 325–326, 357, 364, 383, 441. See also coloniality; colonization – Americas and 8–9 – capitalism and 305–306 – contagion and 123, 125 – deterritorialization and 303–304 – “double colonial fracture” 382, 390 – environmental crisis and 357 – extractivism and 17–18, 261–262, 261n3, 267–268, 285–286 – mining and 299, 302–303, 308–311 – monoculture and 313–328 – neo-extractivism and 11 – racialization and 259 – resistance(s) to 411n2 – ruins of 324 – toxicity and 396 – tropicality and 130–131 coloniality 11–14, 30, 92, 169, 359, 441, 451 – ancestrality and 11–14 – capitalism and 381n1 – contagion and 127–128 – co-production of 31–32 – criticism of 162 – epidemics and 123n1, 125 – interruptive force of 388 – of nature 356 – onto-epistemologies of/for relationality and 36 – of power 17, 31, 31–32n2, 39, 355 – race and 355 – spatial apartheid and 236 coloniality of power, race and 355 colonial pearl extractivism 60 colonial period 50 “colonial relandscaping” 52 colonial studies 18 colonial subjects 308 colonial violence 246–247, 261, 384 colonization 11, 116, 191, 274, 322, 382, 396 – biopolitics of 128–129 – hydrocommunities and 422–423 – race and 355 – racism and 355–356 Colorado River 451

Columbus, Christopher 50, 359 Commission on the Borders with Venezuela 193, 196 commodification 261 – of nature 276 commodities 247, 258–259 “commodities consensus” 56, 247–248 commoditization 252 commodity boom 362, 388 commodity frontiers 318 the commons 289. See also hydrocommons “companion species” 169 Comte, Auguste 3 “the concept,” concept of 448 “conceptual creep” 60 Concordia, Entre Rios, Argentina 232 “Conflicto Mapuche” (Mapuche conflict) 325 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association 30 connection 230, 232, 233–234 Conquest 142n2, 272, 274, 324, 343, 359 Conquest of the Desert 151 conquistadors 32, 274, 277, 359 Consejo de Todas las Tierras 325 conservationism 10–11, 102n23 “constructivist” critiques 19 contagion 195 – aesthetics of 129 – biological dimensions of 127–128 – class and 127–128 – colonialism and 123, 125 – coloniality and 127–128 – concept of 127–128 – etymology of 129 – extractivism and 130–131 – feminisms and 127, 128, 129, 137 – gendered intimacies and 133–137 – hygienic discourses and 136 – imperialism and 125, 129–132, 131, 137 – politics of 127, 129 – race and 128, 131–132 – social contamination and 127–128 – symbolic dimensions of 127–128 – technologies and 125 – tropicality and 125 – use of the term 129–130 contamination 99, 400 contemplative distance 279–280 Coordinadora Arauco Malleco 325

Index

co-penetration 352 Copi 95 Coricancha temple, Cuzco, Peru 277 Cornejo Polar, Antonio 10, 276 Coronil, Fernando 330, 331 corporations 174. See also specific corporations Correa, Valeria 253 Correo Semenal 150 Cortázar, Julio 15, 334n12 – “La autopista del Sur” 329, 332, 333–336, 339 Corvalán Pincheira, Máximo, Padece 165 Cosgrove, Denis 271–272 ‘Cosmic Race’ 361–362 cosmopoliteia 199–201, 418, 419 cosmopolitics 32, 225–226 Costa Lima, Luiz 18, 67, 82, 82n18, 84–85 Costa Rica 60, 426 countervisualities 277–278 COVID-19 127, 128, 132, 200, 449 COYOTE collective 161 creative ecologies 5, 7 Cree culture 450 Creole literary traditions 344 Creoles 360 the Cretaceous period 206n4, 207–208 criollo consciousness 288 criollo national histories 13 criollos 110, 111–112, 114–121 crisis of the imagination, the Anthropocene and 448 critical theory 29, 31–33. See also Latin American critical theory Crutzen, Paul 203–204, 356 Cuba 114–121, 294, 431 Cubanidad 114–121 Cucurto, Washington 113 Cuellar, José 232–233 “cuerpo-territorio” (body-territory), notion of 13–14, 174–175, 177–181, 252–253, 255–256, 265–266, 267n8, 382 cultivation 93–94, 356 cultural landscapes 271 cultural studies 37–38, 290 “cultural translation” 200 cultural uniformization 316–317 culture 93 – nature and 290–291 – “uneven development” and 8 culture industry, oil industry and 331, 331n6, 339

467

Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America 221–222 Cumes, Aura 173 Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil 224n26 Curvier, Georges 206 Cuzco, Peru 277 cybernetics 369 Da Cunha, Euclides 15, 68, 148–149n17, 191 – “Fazedores de desertos” 146 – Os sertões 146–147n11, 146–148, 233, 345, 361 Da Luz, Nuno 161 Dana, James 207–208 Danowski, Déborah 2, 3, 4, 166, 358, 412–413, 419 Darí, Amazonas, Brazil 219n12 Darío, Rubén 53, 362 Darwin, Charles 3, 97, 165, 206, 207 Darwinism 157, 206, 207. See also social Darwinism Dávila, Amparo 180, 404 Deacon, Terrence 73 De Beaumont, Elie 206 Debord, Guy 162 Deckard, Sharae 39, 53 decolonial theory 18, 174, 290, 348, 355–356, 359 decolonization 37, 40, 264–265, 264n6, 358 deconstruction 3, 291–292 deep time 381–382 Defoe, Daniel 334 deforestation 189, 192–193, 258, 313, 318–319, 320–325 degeneration 362 Deger, Jennifer 161 degrowth, need for 47 de-Indigenization 17 deindustrialization 2 De la Cadena, Marisol 6, 10, 32, 39, 76, 96, 259, 277, 278–279, 288, 295, 358, 443 De Landa, Manuel 204 DeLay, Brian 142–143 Del Casal, Julián 53, 54 De Léry, Jean 48–49, 59 Deleuze, Gilles 75, 75n1, 79, 79n15, 91–92n2, 204, 386–387n3, 410–411 Deloria, Vine Jr. 259 De los Ríos, Valeria 38 Del Río, Andrés Manuel 205, 207n5 De Man, Paul 291 demarcation, physical-material and ethicalaesthetic 222–224 dematerialization 1–2

468

Index

Demos, T. J. 5, 7, 12, 61–62 dependency 47 “derecho a no migrar” 446, 447 Derrida, Jacques 67n1, 68n2, 70n5, 74–75, 76, 82, 83, 91–92n2, 93, 95, 162, 291, 409 desagüe system 423 Desana 220 “desaparecidos” 182 Descartes, René 285 Descola, Philippe 76, 77, 80, 198, 345, 347 desdoblamiento 445 desertification 141, 151, 152 desert(s) 141–156, 144n4, 360 – definition of 142–143, 145–146 – desert imaginaries 141–142 – etymology of 145 – as the past 145 – travel and 144–145, 146n9 desire 175, 176 despaisamiento 282 destruction 146–147, 382 deterritorialization 386–387n3 – capitalism and 303 – colonialism and 303–304 – extraction and 300–304 – mining and 307, 311 devastation 141, 176, 281 development 231, 320. See also developmentalism – “developmental refugees” 424 – development strategies 46–47n1 – sustainable development 307 developmentalism 34, 93–94, 98–99, 245–248, 252, 253, 278–279, 281, 317, 331n6, 360 Devonshire, England 52 dialogue, praxis of 33 diaspora 372 Díaz, Porfirio 209 Di Chiro, Giovanna 397 dictatorship 168–169, 182–184, 313. See also authoritarianism différance 409–410 Di Lullo, Orestes 150 dinosaurs, extinction of 206n4, 207, 208 diplomacy 79–80 disappearance 168–169 discourse 73–75. See also representation disease control. See also epidemics, politics of, 128 dispersion 372 displacement 259, 445

dispossession 56, 176, 203, 252–253, 280, 281, 441 – accumulation by 313, 313n1 – gender violence and 382 – of Indigenous peoples 261, 261n3 – of territories 278–279, 446 – toxicity and 403–405 – of water 181–182 Djapa 263–268, 264, 265 Doce River 425, 429 the domestic 93 domestication 93, 356 domesticity 93 Domíguez, Patricia (in collaboration with Mujeres del Agua), La balada de las sirenas secas 183, 183 domination 93, 141, 273, 274, 276, 306, 331 domus, notion of 93 dose 399–400, 405 “double colonial fracture” 382, 390 Downey, Juan 168 drought 148, 184 drought fiction 442 “dualist ontology” 352 Duarte Filho, Ricardo 12–13 Dunlop, Carol 334n12 Duschesne Winter, Juan 350 Dussel, Enrique 33, 34–35, 35n5, 36 Dutch 32 “earth beings” 39 earthquakes 209–210, 211n7, 212, 213 “earth-writing” 231–232, 231n2 Ebola 127 Echeverri, Clemencia 429 – Río por asalto 429 – Sin cielo 429 Echeverría, Andrea 378 Echeverría, Bolívar 58 Echeverría, Esteban 141, 143–144, 150 – “La cautiva” (The Captive Woman”) 143–144 eclogue genre 67 eco-cosmopolitanism 169, 169n11 ecocriticism 5, 8, 9, 16, 27–44, 239n9, 362–363 – alternatives to 35–36 – Anglophone 17, 28, 29–30, 39–40, 363 – canons and 39–40 – critical theory and 31–33 – critique of 34–35 – cultural studies and 37–38

Index

– ecocritical turn in Latin Americanist thought 33 – vs. ecologism 363 – emergence and circulation of 29–31 – “first-wave” 10–11, 17 – Latin American critical theory and 31–33 – Latin Americanist 37–38, 39–40 – Latin American work in 1990s-2020s, 37–38 – literary studies and 37–38 – resituating 28–29 – second-wave 363 – waves of 29 – way-finding 36–37 – world literature and 39–40 ecofeminisms 174, 176, 252, 362–363, 427 ecological disaster 381n1 ecological thinking 348 – militant 363–364 ecologism 363 “ecologism of the poor” 160n4 ecology 216, 417, 418 – of contamination 99 – of devastation 141 – of domination 141 – feminisms and 174 – as interconnection of scientific disciplines 275 “ecology of selves” 78–79, 86, 96 eco-Marxist tradition 18, 247 eco-modernization 11 economics 290 “economy of death” 182n9 eco-theology 17 Ecuador 111, 279, 424, 426 – 2008 constitution, 358 – constitutional reform in 10 – extractivism and 58 Edwards, Paul 231 Eeckhoudt, Albert 274 ejidatarios 46 ejido 46 Ejido El Bajío 46, 47, 49, 59, 62 El Dorado, myth of 55, 190, 294–295 elegiac mode 449 elements 307 Eliade, Mircea 410 emancipation 94 embodiment 173–175, 427. See also bodies empire 47, 52. See also imperialism – biopolitics of 128–129 – capitalism and 137

469

– contagion and 125, 129–132, 137 – critical studies of 127 – extractivism and 47, 50–52, 51n2, 60, 137 – mining and 304–307 – politics and 129–132 – politics of 123 – racialized discourse of 57 Encina, Paz, Eami 167 the encomienda 9 energy – enslavement and 332n9 – “racialized equation of” 332, 332n9 “energy unconscious” 330 engineering 230, 231, 290 Enlightenment 29, 110, 190–191, 217 enslavement. See slavery environment 3 – as assemblage 279–280 – gender and 174 – race and 362–365 environmental aesthetics 3, 5, 8, 9, 10–11, 291, 421 – of extractivism 425–426 – territory and 218–219 – water and 428–435 environmental crisis 47 – capitalism and 381–382 – colonialism and 357 – as crisis of knowledge 36–37 – race and 357 environmental destruction, race and 356 environmental determinism 3 environmental disaster 281 environmental groups 174 environmental injustice 173, 174, 175, 176, 180, 364. See also environmental racism environmentalism 402–403 – Indigenous forms and 325 – popular forms and 325 – varieties of 159–162 – “varieties of environmentalism” 160 “environmentalism of the poor” 323, 364. See also “ecologism of the poor” environmental justice 14, 19, 381n1, 390, 400–403 – definition of 400–401 – environmental justice criticism 30 – environmental justice movements 401 environmental legislation 364. See also under specific countries – 2011 Law of Mother Nature, 358

470

Index

– water law reforms 426 environmental literature, rise of 363–364 environmental movements 174n2, 175. See also specific movements environmental panic 448 environmental pollution 184, 185 environmental protection 10–11 environmental racism 358, 364, 401–402, 407 environmental rights 403 epidemics 9, 123, 132, 200. See also specific diseases – biopolitics and 133–134 – coloniality and 123n1, 125 epidemiological narratives 132 epistême aisthetikê 5 epistemic extractivism 59–62 epistemic health, restoring 217–218 epistemic loss 222 epistemic violence 223, 224 epistemology 36–37, 100 – environmental epistemology 17 – “epistemology of the jungle” 100 – Indigenous 183 – onto-epistemologies 29, 36 equitable redistribution, need for 47 equivocal translation, perspectivism and 81–86 eradicationism 129–132, 137 Erickson, Bruce 337–338 Errázuriz, Paz 168 Esbell, Jaider 225, 267n9 Esch, Sophie 39 Escobar, Arturo 10, 33, 37, 40, 259, 352, 365 Escobar, Ticio 10, 415n6 esgrima de machete. See Colombian grima “español champurriado” 321 Esparza, Gilberto 239n9 Esposito, Roberto 37, 91–92n2, 95 Estado Novo 337 ethnic studies 85 “ethnographic present” 412–414, 417–418 ethnology 412–413 Etsa Natu/Cámara 279 eucalyptus plantations 313, 314, 317–319, 325–326 eugenics 362 the Eurocene 381n1 eurocentrism 115, 119, 355–356, 358, 363 Europe, mining in 51 Evans, Mei Mei 400 evolution, theory of 206 (see also coevolution) exchange 356

exile, trauma and 403–404 Expedição Rio Doce 426 exploitation 146–147, 174, 191, 197, 217, 247, 249, 253, 294, 313, 356, 364 – labor and 248–252 – land and 257 – oil industry and 331–332 “export reverie” 53–55 expropriation 14 extermination 131, 189n2 extinction 157–172, 205 – aesthetics of 448 – art and 448 – dictatorship and 168–169 – of dinosaurs 206n4, 207, 208 – as eruption or rupture 159 – human intervention and 160 – as hyperobject 157 – mass extinctions 157n1, 158, 162 – representativity and 160–161 – survival of other worlds and 166–169 – ways of imagining 162–166 extraction 229–230, 239–240, 248, 344, 383–384, 433–434. See also extractivism; mining; specific resources – capitalism and 356 – deterritorialization and 300–304 – value and 306 – vampiric 248 – violence and 306–307 – violent 248 extractivism 11, 16–17, 36, 39, 45–66, 99–100, 279, 349, 364, 383. See also extraction; mining – abstraction and 311 – advent of neoextractivism 56–59 – aftermath of 248 – Blackness and 261–262, 261n3 – bodies and 253, 257–270 – in Brazil 257–270 – capitalism and 60, 123, 137, 163–164, 253–255 – coal extraction 152 – colonialism and 17–18, 261–262, 261n3, 267–268, 285–286 – complicity with 293 – contagion and 130–131, 130–132 – “contamination of” 99 – critique of 48, 53–55 – deserts and 141, 142n2, 146–147, 151 – development of the concept 46–47

Index

– discourse of 280 – empire and 47, 50–52, 51n2, 60, 137 – enslavement and 261–262, 261n3 – environmental aesthetics of 425–426 – epistemic 59–61 – “export reverie” and 53–55 – extractive cycle 388–390 – “extractive view” 48 – extractive violence 247 – “extractive zone” 383, 388, 426 – feminism and 173, 175, 187, 252 – forests and 191–193, 200, 204 – geographies of 52–53 – human/nonhuman relationality and 257–270, 280 – imperialism and 280, 282, 304–307 – Indigenous knowledge and 294 – Indigenous peoples and 261–262, 261n3, 267–268 – labor and 50, 248, 253–255 – land and 257–270 – Latin America as laboratory for 382–383 – literary 59–61 – logic of 47–49 – modernity and 47, 48, 50, 60 – neoextractivism 11, 46–47n1, 56–59, 174, 247, 358, 364, 381 – origin of the term 46–47n1 – postextractivist aesthetics 61–62 – protectionism and 262–263 – racialization and 260, 261–262, 261n3, 267–268 – resistance to 176, 411n2 – settler colonialism and 262–263 – sexuality and 100 – territories and 253 – toxicity and 396 – violence and 53n3, 252–253 – writing and 18 factory farms 247 familial bonds, erosion of 176 Fanon, Frantz 372 the fantastic 177 farming. See also agribusiness – agribusiness 47 – factory farms 247 – genetically-modified agriculture 247 – monoculture and 47, 313–328 Farrier, David 5

471

Federici, Silvia 173, 252, 427 Felguérez, Manuel 180 Felski, Rita 291 female laborers 308, 310, 338–339 femicides 184, 249, 252 feminism(s) 3, 85, 129n14, 134, 134n24, 173–188, 247 – Central American 13–14 – contagion and 137 – “cuerpo-territorio” (body-territory), notion of 382 – decolonial 174 – ecofeminisms 174, 176, 252, 362–363, 427 – ecology and 174 – feminist activism 183 – feminist movements 173 – feminist organizations 174 – feminist politics 127 – feminist theory 252 – feminist voices 12, 13–14 – liberal 174 – popular 174 – science and technology studies (STS) and 135–136 Fêo, Flávio 220–221 Feral Atlas 161 Ferdinand, Malcom 11, 382, 387 Fernández Bravo, Álvaro 95 Fernández de Castro, Miguel, The Absolute Restoration of All Things 19, 45–47, 45, 47, 53, 62 Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo 190n3 Fernández Mouján, Alejandro 168 Ferreira Pará Yxapy, Patrícia 218–219, 218n8 fetishism 301–303, 308 Few, Marta 94 Fichte, Hubert 416 – Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit 409–410 “fiction of surplus” 54 finality, rejection of 398–399 finitude 6, 7 fire art 448 Fisher, Josh 398 Flanders 274 Flaubert, Gustave 236 Flemish painting 274 Flores Magón brothers 211–212 fluidity 421 Fonseca, Carlos 212

472

Index

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) 315 forest boom 318–319 forest capitalism 313–328 forest industry, free-market policies in 319 forest plantations 313, 314, 317–319, 325–326 forest(s) 189–202 – clear-cutting 320 – deforestation 320 – endangerment and extinction of 318–319 – in La vorágine 192–193 – monocultural 313–328 – native 315–316, 318–319 – reductions 320–325 – resistance(s) and 325–326 – Western understanding of 189–190 formal mutations 14–15 Fornoff, Carolyn 11, 19 Forns-Broggi, Roberto 17 “fossil capital” 330 “fossil economy” 330n4 fotogramas velados 337 Foucault, Michel 37, 91–92n2, 182n9, 236 fracking 248–252 France 207 Francica, Cynthia 14, 267n8 French 32 French, Jennifer 17, 68, 195–197, 200–201, 344 Fresnillo Group 46 Freud, Sigmund 100–101, 100n19 Freudian psychoanalysis 101, 101n20 Freyre, Gilberto 113 Friedrich, Caspar David, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer 288, 289 Fromm, Harold 29 frontier monocultures 317–319 Fuentes, Carlos 194 Fundação Renova (Renovation Foundation) 426 fungibiity 262–263, 267–268 Furtado, Celso 34 futurity 49, 444 futurology 444, 447 Gagliano, Monica 344 Gago, Verónica 174–175, 252, 255, 266 Gaia 1, 2, 4, 159 Galeano, Eduardo 231, 363 – Las venas abiertas de América Latina 355 Galindo, Regina José 428–429

– BE DAMMED 429 – Ríos de gente 429 Gallego, Rómulo 68, 195, 199 – Canaima 343, 348 Galvão, Patricia 332, 339 Gamboa, Pilar 253 Gan, Elaine 352 Ganz, Louise 280 García, Alan 288 García, Charly, “Los dinosaurios” 168–169 García Bernal, Gael 58 García Márquez, Gabriel 109, 330, 363, 442, 443 Garcilaso de la Vega 67 Garramuño, Florencia 5–6, 7 gauchos 360 the gaze 273, 274–275, 276, 278, 279–280 Gelay Ko 250–251 Gell, Alfred 291–292 gender 173–175, 176 – environment and 174 – labor and 247, 248–252, 253–255 – notion of 173–174 gender-based violence 128, 133, 182n9, 382 gendered bodies 173 gendered intimacies 133–137 gendering, of nonhuman life 19 genocide 182–183, 192–193, 261, 261n3, 262–263, 318, 376, 384, 441 the geo 441 geography 271 GeoHumanities 447 geological time, historical time and 382–383 geology 203–214 – geological catastrophism 205–209 – political catastrophes and 209–212 “geomemories” 11 geontology (geontopower) 151, 204, 288, 413n3, 444, 447 Gerber Bicecci, Verónica 14, 407 – Conjunto vacío 398, 403–405, 404, 406 – La compañía 180–181, 388–390, 392, 398, 404–405, 405, 406, 406 German immigrants, in Chile 318, 322–323 germs 129–132 germ theories of disease 129, 130–131, 132 Ghigliotto, Galo, El museo de la bruma 168, 384–388, 385, 389, 392 Ghosh, Amitav 4, 39, 239, 329–330, 383, 384, 443 “ghosts” 281

Index

the gigantesco 451 Gilbert, Scott 9 Giorgi, Gabriel 38, 95, 289, 441–452 Giorgio, Marosa di 95 Girón, Mónica, Guantes de la Patagonia 252–253 glaciation 205 Gladys, Maria 336–337 Glissant, Édourd 204 the global 2, 4, 7, 8, 276, 441, 447 global capitalism 1, 8 globalization 239, 294 Global North 57–58, 110, 132, 174, 236, 357 – Cuba 109 – environmental social justice movement in 174n2 – toxicity and 400–401, 402 Global South 39, 57–58, 109, 110, 123, 132, 174 – Great Acceleration and 329n3 – oil industry and 329n3, 330 – toxicity and 400–401, 402 global warming 132, 356–357 Glotfelty, Cheryl 29 Goeman, Mishuana R. 259, 259n1 Gomes, Rachel L. 399–400 Gómez, Fernando 34 Gomez, Laureano 112 Gómez-Barris, Macarena 48, 280, 344, 348, 358 González, Raquel 183 Gordillo, Gastón R. 142, 148–149, 148–149n17, 238, 240 governments 174, 236, 256. See also specific countries Graeter, Stephanie 238 Graham, Steve 232 Gran Canal de Desagüe 423 Gran Chaco, Paraguay 167 Great Acceleration 329n3, 332, 339, 357 Great American Interchange 442, 444 Great Britain 196 Greeks 189, 189n1, 190 “green deserts” 325 green neoliberalism 319 Green Revolution 315, 316 grief – arts of 449 – collectivization of 449 Gronemeyer, Jorge 168 Grosfoguel, Ramón 35, 60 Grosz, Elizabeth 94, 204, 448

473

Guajajara, Sônia 10 Guamán Poma de Ayala, Felipe, Plus ultra, el ynga 287–288, 287, 288 Guatemala, “drug war” violence and 53n3 Guattari, Félix 91–92n2, 204, 386–387n3 Gudynas, Eduardo 10, 33, 46n1, 60, 71, 349 Guerrero, Marciela 61 guerrilla warfare 263 Guha, Ramachandra 323 Guimarães Rosa, João 95, 102n23, 199, 289 Güiraldes, Ricardo 68, 195 Gustafson, Bret 56 Gutiérrez González, Gregorio 345 Guzmán, Patricio 168, 431 Guznik, Ariel 430 the Gynocene 4 habitus 85 Haeckel, Ernst 3 Haedes & Aegypta e a abordagem da Oxitec 136 Hakihiiwe, Sheroanawe 433 Hall, Matthew 349 handicrafts – arts and 224–225 – Indigeneity and 224–225 Harambour, Alberto 152 Haraway, Donna 4, 9, 91, 93, 117, 127n7, 134–135n26, 158n2, 162, 169, 223–224, 317, 359, 398–399 Harris, Wilson 55 Harrison, Robert 189, 189n1 Harvey, David 101, 313, 313n1 Harvey, Penny 237 Hatoum, Milton 295 headdresses 265 Heffes, Gisela 14, 30, 99, 344 Heidegger, Martin 70, 296, 306 Heise, Ursula 29, 39, 40, 157, 160–161, 162, 169n11 “hell” 190, 190n5 Heraclitus 285 Heredia, José María 67 Hervé, Francisco 160n6 Herzog Werner 190n5 heterogeneity, Andean landscape and 276–277 heteronormativity 337, 339 Hetherington, Kregg 142, 150, 237n6, 238 Hibbett, Alexandra 101n22 HidroAysén 237

474

Index

Hidroituangua plant 426n1 Hidrovía Amazónica 433–434 hierarchy, landscape and 276–277 Highway, Tomson 449–450 Hirszman, Leon, Ecologia 162–163 historical materialism 47, 197, 293–294, 309, 414 historical time, geological time and 382–383 historicity 381 history 291, 381–394 HIV/AIDS 127 Hobbes, Thomas 211n7 Hoëg, Elida 161 Hoeg, Jerry 17 Hoffmeyer, Jesper 70n4 Holanda, Antonio de, “Terra Brasilis,” from the Miller Atlas 257–259, 258, 260, 267–268 Holland 274 Holling, C. S. 369 the Holocene 158, 447 “Hombre Nuevo” (New Man”) 254 Homem, Lopo, “Terra Brasilis,” from the Miller Atlas 257–259, 258, 260, 267–268 homeostasis 369 homogenization 222 Hornborg, Alf 357 horticulture 422, 423 Hoyos, Héctor 18, 39, 197–198, 198n13, 200–201, 410 Huarochirí Manuscripts 97–98, 98n13, 102n24 Hudson, W. H. 343, 348 – “A Boy’s Animism” 343, 348 – Far Away and Long Ago 348–349 – Idle Days in Patagonia 350 Huenún, Jaime Luis 12, 14, 320–325, 372 – Fanon city meu 372 – La calle Mandelstam 372 – Puerto Trakl 372 – Reducciones (Reductions) 313–314, 319, 320–325, 370–371, 373–379 – writing in Spanish 372–373 Huidobro, Vicente 68 Huilliche culture 378–379 Huilliche people 314, 314n2, 320–325, 370–371, 372–379 Huirimilla, Juan Paulo 363 the human 47, 70–73 human agency 158–159, 280 human animality 100–101 human exceptionalism 70

humanism 67n1, 92–93, 94 the humanities 18, 295 – digital humanities 40 – energy humanities 40, 329 – environmental humanities 8, 9, 40, 47, 127, 293–294, 445 – hydrohumanities 421, 435 – materialism and 291–295 – medical humanities 40 – recharting 6 humanity, vs. nonhuman nature 4 human/nature divide 68–73, 86, 93–94, 102n23, 132, 141, 236, 305–306. See also nonhuman representation human/nature relationality 159–160, 176–177 human/nonhuman divide 236, 247–248, 261, 261n4 human/nonhuman relationality 132, 176–177, 197–199, 201, 253, 255, 280, 281, 293–294, 299, 343, 350, 383, 398 – Afro-descendant cosmologies and 362–363 – extractivism and 257–270 – Indigenous cosmologies and 362–363 – land and 257–270 – landscape and 277 human rights violations 182 human teleopoesis 93 human trafficking 446 Humboldt, Alexander von 111, 190, 190–191n6, 212, 274, 274–276, 288 – “Le Chimborazo vu depuis le Plateau de Tapia. Dessiné par Thibaut, d’après une esquisse de M.r de Humboldt. Gravé par Bouquet. De l’Imprimerie de Langlois” 275, 281–282 – View of the Cordilleras 275 humor, Indigeneity and 224–225 Husserl, Edmund 74–75 Hutton, James 206 hybridity 372 hybridization 198, 376 hydrocommons 427 “hydrocommunities” 15, 422 hydrocultural formations 421, 422–426 hydrosphere 421 hygienic discourses 128–129, 136 hyperobjects 157, 280 Ignez, Helena 336–337, 338, 338 Iheka, Cajetan 39 Illades, Carlos 211

Index

immigration 445 imperialism 130–131, 211, 238n7, 273, 316, 317, 364, 441 – “animal” and 92–93 – British 51 – as civilizing effort 356 – contagion and 129, 131 – cultivation and domestication by 356 – extractivism and 280, 282, 304–307, 396 – landscape and 273–278 – mining and 300 – monoculture and 317 – toxicity and 396 Inaudito Magdalena 434 Inca 277 Independence 191 “Indian,” invention of category 216 Indiana, Rita 14 Indianist Romanticism 223, 223n22 Indian Wars 142–143 Indigeneity 214–228, 443–444, 446, 451 – agrocide and 220–222 – before borders 218–219 – critiques of Indigeneity and 216–217 – defining dimension of 444 – handicrafts and 224–225 – humor and 224–225 – Indigenous arts as cosmopolitics 225–226 – migration and 446–447 – monoculture and 220–222 – nature and 290 – physical-material and ethical-aesthetic demarcation and 222–224 – refusing generic Indigeneity 215–216 – remapping of 13 – restoring epistemic health and 217–218 – territory and 218–219 – transformed into pure potentiality 261n3, 263, 267–268 – tropicality and 114–121 – visibilizing 223–224 indigenismo 39, 363 Indigenous activists 10, 49, 59, 265 Indigenous agrosociobiodiversity 222 Indigenous arts 225–226, 291–292. See also specific artists and works Indigenous communities 319. See also specific groups – monoculture and 313–328

475

– representation and 222–223 – resilience and 370–371 Indigenous cosmologies 198, 199, 200, 265, 277, 358, 362–363, 383, 413–414, 443 Indigenous epistemology 183 Indigenous forms, environmentalism and 325 Indigenous intellectuals 18 Indigenous land claims 446–447 Indigenous movements 15, 35n5, 247 Indigenous ontology 198, 199 Indigenous peoples 30, 167, 174, 321–325, 326, 360. See also specific groups – conflated with natural resources 259–263, 267–268 – cultivation and domestication by 159 – deaths due to Iberian colonization 357 – devaluation of 310 – dispossession of 261, 261n3 – enslavement of 273, 286, 355 – epidemics and 9 – erasure of 363 – extractivism and 261–262, 261n3, 267–268 – genocide of 192–193, 261, 261n3, 318 – as mediating agents 201 – mining and 362 – monoculture and 313–314 – racialization and 261–262, 261n3 – representation of 257–270 – worldviews of 356, 358, 363 (see also Indigenous cosmologies) the “Indigenous question” 261 Indigenous remapping 259, 259n1 Indigenous rights 216n2, 447 Indigenous Studies 262 indigenous territories, sex work and 249–251 Indigenous texts, denaturalization of concept of 194–195 Indigenous thought 35, 60, 183, 198, 199 Indigenous traditions 346, 383 Indigenous voices 12, 13, 59 Industrial Revolution 158n2, 330 industrial society, as one-dimensional 316–317 infrastructure(s) 229–244 – the Anthropocene and 236–241, 237n6, 238n7 – capitalism and 237–238, 238n7 – definition of 230–231, 236 – etymology of 230 – “infrastructural power” 231

476

Index

– “infrastructural turn” 236 – macroscale and 231 – “modern infrastructural ideal” 232 – of modernity 229–236 – modernization and 229–230, 236–237 – relationality and 237 – vs. superstructure 235–236 – wars and 230–231 – water infrastructure 422–424 – world-formation and 241 Instituto Di Tella 245 interculturality, decolonization and 37 interdisciplinarity 290–291, 295–296 Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 29 International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) 203, 356–357 interspecies aesthetic projects 448 interspecies experiments 448–449 interspecies migration 445 interspecies narrative 442–443 interspecies relationality 226, 277, 448–449 interspecies solidarity 100n18 intertextuality 292–293 intra-activity 86 Invisible Committee 235 in visu/in situ 273, 274, 281 Iovino, Serenella 399 Iquitos-Nauta highway 237 Ireranti 263–268, 264, 265 Iretynh 263–268, 264, 265 Irwin, Robert McKee 18 Isaacs, Jorge 67 Isla Dawson 384 Israel 332 Itaipu dam 424 Itro fill Mogen 350 Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes 208 Jamaica 274 James, William 72 Jameson, Fredric 330 Japan 301 John VI, Prince-Regent of Portugal 260 Jones, Oliver A. H. 399–400 the Jorullo 208 Joyce, Patrick 236 Juan, Andrea 280

the jungle 190, 191, 192–193, 195, 196, 197n12, 200–201 jungle, as cosmopoliteia 199–201 Jurassic Park 169 juruá kuery (white people) 219 Kac, Kduardo 280 Kahlo, Frida, Raíces 351 Kakjana 263–268, 264, 265 Kanhgág, Camila Kamé 225 Kant, Immanuel 3, 83, 288, 291 Karukinka 422 Kawésqar 168 Kayapó culture 265–266 Kayapó-Menkragnoti painters 12–13, 259 – Fome de Resistência – Fundamento Kayapó Menkragnoti (collective artwork) 263–268, 264, 265 Kayapó nation 263, 265n7 Keleman, Alder Saxena 161 Kenhíri, Tolamãn 416 Kerexu, Juliana 224–225 Kerridge, Richard 5 keywords 15–20 Khan, Firdos Alam 400 K’iche’ people 363 Kiersch, Fritz, Children of the Corn 221, 221n21 King, Tiffany Lethabo 262 Kipaé 221 Klubock, Thomas 317–318 Knox, Hannah 237 Kochi, Kerala, India 123 Koenju, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil 218n8 Kohan, Martín 95 Kohn, Eduardo 78–79, 81n16, 96, 198, 345, 347–348, 414, 414n4, 433 Kokowati 263–268, 264, 265 Kopenawa, Davi 12–14, 18, 80, 200, 216–217, 259, 410, 443 – The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman 59, 200, 201, 292–293, 415–420, 415n5 – A queda do céu 392 Koselleck, Reinhart 285, 386–387n3 Krenak, Ailton 11, 18, 217–218, 225, 265n7 Krenak Indigenous reserve 425 Krimer, María Inés, Noxa 178–180 Kuletz, Valerie 397 Kull, Kalevi 70n4 Kumu, Umúsin Panlôn 416

Index

labor 32, 152, 229–230, 245–256, 294 – absence of 148, 150, 150–151n21 – appropriation of 51 – capitalism and 330 – developmentalism and 245–247 – exploitation and 174, 248–252 – extractivism and 50, 51 – female laborers 308, 310, 338–339 – forced 260–261, 273–274 (see also slavery) – gender and 134, 248–252, 310–311 – Indigenous 257–259, 262–263, 277 – labor regimes 9, 142 – land and 262 – mining and 299, 308 – mita system of 51, 303, 305, 306 – neoliberalism and 246–247 – oil industry and 331–332 – racialization of 310–311, 317 – resistance(s) and 252 – sex work 248–252 – traditional male industrial 253 – unpaid 247–248 – violence and 299 La Condamine, Charles Marie de 190 Lafargue, Paul 255 Lake Rapel 184 lahuan 318 Lake Poopó 426 Lam, Wifredo 347 Lamarckian theories 362 Lamborghini, Osvaldo 95 land 32, 175, 257–270. See also territories – bodies and 257–270 – dispossession of 446 – exploitation and 257 – expropriation of 376 – extractivism and 257–270 – human/nonhuman relations and 257–270 – labor and 262 – in Mbyá-Guarani cosmology 219 – “nonsensuous similarity” in 81 – as nourishment 49 – as resource 49 land claims, Indigenous 446–447 land defenders 49, 59 landscape 142, 271–284 – avant-garde and 279 – conquest and 272

477

– cultural landscapes 271 – definitions of 281 – European notion of 272, 274–275, 277 – hegemonic 279–280 – hierarchy and 276–277 – historical notion of 272–273 – human/nonhuman relations and 277 – imperialism and 273–278 – instability of notion of 279 – as mediating nature/culture divide 272–273 – mimesis and 282 – modernism and 279 – modernity and 272–273, 282 – nature and 274–275, 279–280, 282 – notions of 277–278 – possession and 272 – resistances and the end of 276–282 – subjectivities and 272–273, 274–275 – as symbolic space 276 – two axes constituting idea of 273 – use of the term 271–272 landscaping practices 356 Langebaek, Carl 290 language 73–76. See also representation; specific languages – materiality and 75–76 – as matter 294 – of mining 308–311 Larkin, Brian 233 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 50, 54, 54n5, 92n3, 304, 305 Latimer, Joanna 134–135 Latin American critical theory 29, 31–33, 134–135n26 Latin American Cultural Studies 9–10 Latin American Ecocultural Reader 39 Latin American environmental writing 37 Latin Americanism 104, 105 Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program 355 Latin American philosophy 34 Latin American studies 104, 348 Latour, Bruno 69, 69n3, 70, 72–73, 73n6, 76, 81, 127n7, 158, 159 Lauriano, Jaime 267n9 law 93, 364, 426 Lecain, Tim 406 LeClerc, Georges-Louise 110–111

478

Index

Lee, Shimrit 386 Leff, Enrique 17, 33, 36–37, 71, 402 Lem, Stanislaw 254 LeMenager, Stephanie 330 León Llerena, Laura 97n11 Letelier, Michelle-Marie 280 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 293, 409 Lewis, Simon 9, 357 liberalism 236 – late 142, 143, 151 liberation theology 34, 35, 36 Libertad para el Agua 434 Liboiron, Max 259, 400n3 Librandi Rocha, Marília 18, 85, 216, 216n2, 289 Lienhard, Martin 10, 98 Lienlaf, Leonel 321, 363, 371, 372 life, art and 217 life forms, interrelationship of 448–449 life/non-life division 204 life/non-life relations 142 Lillo, Baldomero, Sub terra 53, 54–55, 62 Lima, Peru 132, 238 Lin, Maya 161 Linett, Cheril 183 – Memorial 184 – Procesión Melinka 183–184 Linnaeus, Carl 165, 212, 274 liquid ecologies 427 liquidity 421 Lispector, Clarice 95 literary criticism 18 literary extractivism 59–62 literary historiography 194 literary representation, Amerindian theory of 85–86 (see also multinaturalism; perspectivism) literary studies – ecocriticism and 37–38 – materialism and 291–295 – thick description in 289 literature – mimesis and 81–85 – as multinaturalist 84–85 – perspectivism and equivocal translation in 81–86 – world literature 39 lithium 56–57, 58 living/nonliving divide 14, 19 living wage 246 Llanos, García de 310

Loayza, Marcos, Planeta Bolivia 163 Loayza Grisi, Alejandro 166n10 Lobato, Monteiro 131, 132 logging 47 the logging camp 52 Loncón, Elisa 18 London, England 423 Lope de Vega 67 López, Magdalena 95 López-Labourdette, Adriana 95 Los Ingrávidos – Iguana 162 – Lagarto 162 loss, aesthetics of 449 Lost 334 Lotman, Yuri 81 Lovelace, Carl 130–131, 132 Lovelock, James 159 Löwy, Michel 131 Loya Valverde, Manuel 46 Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael 280 Luco, Antonio 160n6 Lúkacs, Georg 83 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio 331 lumber industry 315, 318, 364 Lunch, Pao – El pozo 251, 251 – Pornopetróleo 247, 249–251, 249–250 Lundblad, Michael 100, 100n19 Luxemburg, Rosa 109 Lyell, Charles 206, 206n4, 207, 207n5 Lynch, Benito 196 Mac-Clure, Rafael Elizalde 320 Machado Aráoz, Horacio 48 Machiguenga indigenous narratives 199 Macri, Mauricio 248, 255 Madeira-Mamoré Railway 130 madness 197n12 Madonado-Torres, Nelson 355–356 Magdalena River 232, 290 magical realism 330–331, 443 Magno, Marcela, Land II Litio 56–57, 57, 61 Maia, Ana Paula – Carvão animal 152–153, 153n24 – De gados e homens 164 Maia, Tulio 134n25 maize 343 malaria 123, 123n1, 123n2, 130–131, 133

Index

Malfatti, Anita 113 Malm, Andreas 330, 330n4, 357, 358–359 Malthus, Thomas 3 Mancuso, Stefano 166, 349 Mandelstam, Ossip 372 Manifesto Antropoceno en Chile 357 Mansilla, Sergio 321 Mapocho River 184 Mapuche culture 321, 350, 371–372, 379 Mapuche-Huilliche culture 372–378 Mapuche-Huilliche people 313–314, 318, 320–325, 376. See also Mapuche Nation Mapuche lands 248 Mapuche language and territory 184–187, 350–351 Mapuche Nation 184–185, 248, 252–253, 313–314, 363 Mapuche poetry 320–323, 325, 363, 370–379 Mapuche resistence 14 Mapuche territorial vindication 182 Mapudungun 324, 350–351 Marambio, Camila 434–435n4 Marcone, Jorge 17, 99, 99n15, 101, 101n21 marco temporal (temporal landmark) 216n2 Marcuse, Herbert 316–317, 399 Marder, Michael 166, 343, 352, 395 marginalized groups. See also specific groups – toxicity and 401 – violence against 182–183 Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil 425 Mariana disaster 429 Marín, Juan 52, 53 Marmolejo, María Evelia 428 Márquez, Francia 10, 290, 390n5, 391, 392 Martel, Julián 295 Martí, José 54n5, 361 – “Mi raza” 361 Martín Alcoff, Linda 34 Martínez, José Luis 180 Martínez Alier, Joan 160n4, 323, 364 Martínez Pinzón, Felipe 111, 112, 197n12 Marvin, Simon 232 Marx, Karl 9, 50, 93–94, 248, 305, 306, 313n1 Marxism 252, 301 masculinity 253, 254 Maslin, Mark 9, 357 Massey, Doreen 252 mass graves, illegal 182 mass migration, fears of 110 material dialectic 201

479

materialism 308–309 – historical 47, 197, 293–294, 309, 414 – humanities and 291–295 – literary studies and 291–295 – transcultural 293–294, 296 materialist turn 290–291, 295–297 materialities 32, 47, 290–291 – bodies and 253 – language and 75–76 Mato Grosso, Brazil 220–221, 220n19, 222 “matrix” 40 matter 285–298. See also materialities – (in)animate matters 285 – agency of 310 – alleged Amerindian harmony with 290 – labor/energy of 308 – materiality of 47 – subordination to form 308, 310 matter/life divide 287–288 Maximilian I 210 Maya 346 Mayer, Renata 97, 97n11 Mbembe, Achille 182n9, 261 Mbyá-Guarani culture 218–219 McBride, Justin 248, 251 McClintock, Anne 145n7 McHugh, Susan 104–105 Mckay, Adam 164 McLean, Benjamin 363 McNeill, J. R. 123n1, 128 meaning 74–76, 78–79. See also representation medical discourses 128–130 mejorar la raza 360 Melgoza Cortés, Ángel R. 46 Melinka torture center 183–184 Melville, Herman 254 Menchú, Rigoberta 292, 363 Mendes, Chico 59 Mendieta, Ana 253, 279, 351 – Siluetas 279 Mendieta, Eduardo 34 Mendoza, Natalia, The Absolute Restoration of All Things 19, 45–47, 45, 53, 62 Mendoza Collío, Jaime 377 Menneken community 384n2 Merchant, Carolyn 5 Meruane, Lina 14, 180n5 “meshwork” 40 Mesoamerica 277

480

Index

mestizaje 13, 361, 362 mestizo(s) 110, 361 metals, classification of 309–310 metamorphosis 159–162, 169, 198–199, 343, 345 metaphysical instrumentalism 306, 307, 309, 310 “metaphysics of mixture” 345, 350–352 Mexican-American War 142–143 Mexicas 290, 422–423 Mexico 58–59, 111, 142n2, 232 – activist deaths in 49 – catastrophes and 204–207, 208–211, 211n7 – catastrophism in 206–207, 208–209 – “drug war” violence and 53n3 – earthquakes in 209–210 – extractivism in 56, 58 – Independence of 208 – infrastructure(s) in 237 – invasions of 207, 210, 211 – monoculture in 315 – oil industry in 331 – U.S. interventions and 207, 210 – volcanism in 208, 209 Mexico City, Mexico 211n7, 232–233, 423, 430 microbiological revolution 129 Mignolo, Walter 290, 355–356, 359 migration 142n2, 444, 445, 446–447 – “developmental refugees” 424 – fears of 110 – forced 446 – Indigeneity and 446–447 – managerial response to 446 – trafficking and 446 Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn 51, 52 Miller, Theresa L. 349 Miller Atlas 257–259, 260, 266–267 Millones, Luis 97, 97n11 mimesis 18, 68n2, 74–75, 82n18, 83, 86, 273 – as invocation and activation of traces 86 – landscape and 282 – literature and 81–85 – modernity and 68 Minas Gerais, Brazil 259–260, 267–268, 425 “mineral virtue,” 307 Mininco 319 mining 47, 51, 240, 247–248, 286, 290, 294, 299–312, 355, 362, 364, 424, 432–433 – Afro-descendant communities and 362 – in Andes 299, 306 – in Bolivia 299, 303–304, 305

– capitalism and 299–302, 305, 306, 308 – in Chile 54–55 – colonialism and 299, 302–303, 308–311 – defetishization of 299–303, 309, 310–311 – deterritorialization and 311 – empire and 304–307 – imperialism and 300 – Indigenous peoples and 362 – as labor 308 – labor and 299, 308 – language of 308–311 – of lithium 56–57 – as money/capital 308 – racialization and 310 – as real abstraction 304–308 – as sensorial practice 308–311 – subaltern practices and 308–309 – value and 299, 301–304, 306, 307, 308–310, 311 – as world-making practice 300–304 mining disasters 429, 430. See also specific disasters Miranda Marrón, Manuel 204, 209–212 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 50, 277–278 miscegenation 361, 362 Misiones, Argentina 218n8 mita 51, 303, 305, 306 Mitchell, Timothy 330, 333 Mitchell, W. J. T. 272 Mixteco 446 MLA 30 mnemonic ecology 200 mobility 230, 232, 233–234, 445 Modatima Women (Movement for the Defense of Access to Water, Land and Environmental Protection) 183 modernism 4, 5–6, 113, 279, 442 modernista literature 54–55 modernity 5, 8, 30–31, 55, 92, 93, 167, 169, 261n4, 360, 382 – capitalism and 47, 48 – critiques of 35 – decolonial theory and 356 – destructive agricultural practices of 146, 148–149, 148n16 – extractivism and 47, 48, 50, 60 – infrastructure(s) of 229–236 – landscape and 272–273, 282 – mimesis and 68 – nature/culture divide and 272–273, 358

Index

– temporality and 383–384 – theories of 231 modernization 99, 101n22, 128, 132, 197n12, 320 – criticism of 162 – hydrocommunities and 422 – infrastructure(s) and 229–230, 236–237 – modernizing projects 38 Molina, Enrique 113 Molina, Nicolás 160n6 Molloy, Sylvia 195, 195n9, 196–197, 198, 200–201 Mombaça, Jota 13 monarch butterflies 445 monism, signification and 291–295 monoculture 47, 141–142, 177, 221–222, 247–248, 257, 313–328, 355 – agrocide and 220–222 – colonialism and 313–328 – colonial roots of 317 – definition of 314–315 – deforestation and 313 – frontier monocultures 317–319 – global 316–317 – imperialism and 317 – Indigenous communities and 313–328 – Indigenous peoples and 313–314 – monocultural systems 314–317 – “monoculture of the mind” 316–317 – neoliberalism and 316 – resistance to 325–326 Monsanto 316 Montero, Mayra 449 Moore, Jason 9, 51–52, 92, 158n2, 203, 237–238, 238n7, 246–247, 305–306, 318, 331–332, 331n8, 358–359, 381n1 Moquém_Surarî: arte indígena contemporânea exhibition, São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM) 225 Mora Curriao, Maribel 343, 350–351 Morales, Evo 56, 290 Moreno, Francisco Pascasio 151 more-than-human communities 38, 429, 433 more-than-human hydrocommons 427 more-than-human relations 129, 141 more-than-human water cycles 421 Moriceau, Jean-Marc 189n2 Mortimer-Sandilans, Catriona 337–338 Morton, Timothy 6, 157, 163, 280, 441

481

mosquitos 123–126, 129, 131, 132, 133–137, 134n25 motherhood 14 Mount Chimborazo 274–275 mourning, resistance and 378, 379 Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (River Doce Alliance and Movement for Dam Victims) 425 Muenala, Alberto, Killa 364–365 Muisca crop cultivation system 434–435n4, 434 “mulatos” 310 Mülchi, Hans 168 Müller, Claudia 280 multiculturalism 86, 358 – liberal 216 – market assimilation of 316 – multinaturalism as rejoinder to 288–289 – settler liberal multiculturalism 216 multinaturalism 10, 16, 18, 67–90, 288–289, 292 multinatural perspectivism 18. See also multinaturalism; perspectivism multiplicity 79 multiplicity of worlds 176 multispecies aesthetic 127 multispecies contagion 123, 128, 129 multispecies sociality 76–81, 86, 93, 104, 125, 127 Munduruku, Daniel 215–216, 216n1 Muñoz, Oscar, Re/trato 431 Museo de Arte Abstracto Manuel Felguérez, in Zacatecas 388 Museo de la bruma 385 museums 383–388 music, plant(s) and 448 Mutis, Álvaro 55, 295 mutual heteronymy 9–10 Myers, Natasha 352 Nading, Alex M. 134 Nancy, Jean-Luc 275 narration 448 narrative strata 381–394 narrative transculturation 200, 410 narrativity, crisis of 447 Nash, Linda 130 Nassau-Siegen, Johann Maurits van 274 nation-building 32 – biopolitics of 128–129 – debates on 360 – race and 359–362

482

Index

nation-state 93, 141, 231–232 Native Americans 110, 111. See also Indigenous peoples; specific groups native forests, endangerment and extinction of 318–319 Native idleness, myth of 257 native laurel (Laurelia sempervirens) 322 natural gas 56 naturalism 54–55 natural resources 58. See also extraction; nature; specific resources – bodies and 259–261 – theft of 252–253 natural science 356 natural selection 206 natural subordination, principle of 304, 305–307, 310, 311 nature 3, 70–73, 141, 217. See also human/nature divide – as ancestors 218, 226 – appropriation of 51 – bodies and 279 – capitalism and 203 – coloniality of 356 – commodification of 261, 276 – critique of 4 – culture and 290–291 – desubjectification of 286 – domination of 306 – the global and 276 – Indigeneity and 290, 363 – Indigenous and Afro-Latin views on 363 – instability of notion of 359–360 – landscape and 274–275, 279–280, 282 – pre-Columbian conceptions of 343 – race and 359–362 – relations with 176 (see also human/nature relationality; interspecies relationality) – representation and 67–68, 279 (see also nonhuman representation) – women and 247, 252 nature/culture divide 4, 70–73, 76–77, 82–83, 92–93, 99, 100–101, 277, 358, 363. See also human/nature divide – landscape and 272–273 – modernity and 272–273, 358 – teleology and 356 nature-first criterion 363 “nature writing” 85

Navarro Trujillo, Mina Lorena 33, 37 Nazca desert 422 the “Necrocene” 248 necropolitics 38, 39, 182–183, 182n9 Negreinome 263–268, 264, 265 Negrín, Edith 331 neocolonialism 196, 199, 201 neoextractivism 11, 46–47n1, 56–59, 174, 247, 358, 364, 381 neo-imperialism 364 neo-indigenismo 363 neoliberal globalization 236 neoliberalism 182, 304, 317, 364 – in Chile 313, 325–326 – collapse of first-wave, financialized 247 – critiques of 30 – destruction of formal industrial labor and 247 – green 319 – labor and 246–247 – monoculture and 315, 316 – resilience and 370, 371 Neruda, Pablo 320, 331, 363, 371, 375 networks, sociality and 78–79 Neuquinx people 249–251 new critical vocabularies 15–20 Newell, Stephanie 39 New Jersey, shorebirds in 445 new materialism 127, 127n7, 134n24, 197, 308–309 New World, discourses on 110–111 New World baroque 345, 346 New World degeneracy, theory of 110–111 Ngreiboi 263–268, 264, 265 Ngreidje 263–268, 264, 265 Ngreiê 263–268, 264, 265 Ngreipangri 263–268, 264, 265 Ngreita 263–268, 264, 265 nguillatun 323 Nhako 263–268, 264, 265 Nicaragua 134 Niebisch, Arndt 400n4 Niemeyer Cesarino, Pedro de 419 Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 219n12 Nixon, Rob 61, 95, 99, 127, 290, 364, 444–445 non-animate forces 448–449 non-binary waters, as territory 181–187 the nonhuman 47, 176 – nonhuman life 19, 447 (see also nonhuman nature)

Index

– nonhuman nature 4, 48 nonhuman representation 67–90 non-indigenous peasant organizations 174 nostalgia 52, 169 Nouzeilles, Gabriela 356 the novel 384. See also realism; regionalism – modern 383 – novela de la selva 348 – novela de la tierra 363, 383–384 Oaxaco, Mexico 58–59 objectivization 279–280 oil 329–342 – the Anthropocene and 329, 329n3 – queerness of 333, 338 – uncanniness of 333, 335–336 oil embargo of 1973, 332–333 oil industry 248–251, 364 – capitalism and 331–332 – culture industry and 331, 331n6, 339 – exploitation and 331–332 – labor and 331–332 – oil drilling 47, 247, 248–251 Oiticica, Hélio, Tropicália 279–280 Okoth, Christine 50 “old materialism” 309 onto-epistemologies 29, 36 ontological fictions 304–307 ontology – Andean 364 – “dualist ontology” 352 – Indigenous 198, 199 – onto-epistemologies 29, 36 – ontological fictions 304–307 – “the ontology of the fictional” 18 – perspectival 76–81 “the ontology of the fictional” 18 ore extraction 299, 308 Orellana, Francisco de 190n3 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries 332–333 Orinoco River 232, 433 Ortega, Julio 99 Ortiz, Fernando 293–294, 345, 410 Ortíz, María Mercedes 196n11 Osnovikoff, Iván, Surire 166–167, 239–241 Osorno, Chile 321, 371, 372 “other knowledges” (otros saberes) 30

483

“otherness” 218 “outbreak narratives” 132 Oviedo, José Miguel 194 “ovine sovereignty” 152 Oxitec Brazil 133, 135–136, 136, 137 Pachacuti Yamqui, Juan de Santa Cruz. 277 – Drawing of the Corichancha temple 278 Pachamama (Mother earth) 10, 286, 297 “Pacificación de la Araucanía” 318 Page, Joanna 280 Pakistan 445 palafitos 422 Palestine 332 Paley, Dawn 53n3 Pampas 142n2, 147n12, 360 Panama 193, 231 – isthmus of 442 – watersheds in 238 Panama Canal 231, 238 Pape, Lygia 338 Papoi 263–268, 264, 265 Paraguay 142, 142n2, 149–150, 149n18, 232, 238, 424, 424 Paraná-Paraguay 232 Paraná River 232, 424, 424 “parasite paradigm” 131 parasites 131, 132 parasitism, capitalism and 255 Paredes, Jorge 363 Paredes, Laura 253 Parikka, Jussi 126n5, 204 Paris, France 232 Parque Nacional Conguillío 318 particularism, of realism 443 Partido Liberal Mexicano 211–212 pastoralism 67 Patagonia 52, 151–152, 168, 248, 255, 319, 321, 384 Pataxó, Arissana 217 patriarchy 173, 175–176, 182n9, 246–247, 308, 316 Pau-brasil 257 “paysage dépayse” 275 Paz, Octavio 363 Pedregal de San Angel, Mexico City, Mexico 208 Penmont Mining 45–46, 47, 62 people of color 203 perception 448 Pereira Dos Santos, Nelson, Vidas secas 148

484

Index

Pérez, Oscar 18 Pérez, Óscar 61–62 Pérez Rosales, Vicente 320 Pérez Trujillo Diniz, Axel 141 performance theory 3 peripheries 2 – vs. centers 52 – urban 446 Perlongher, Néstor 113 perspectival ontologies 76–81 perspective(s) 280–281 – network of 281 – problematization of 280 perspectivism 32, 81–86, 96, 277, 378 Peru 111, 192–193, 237, 238, 424, 426, 433–434 Perut, Bettina Surire 166–167, 239–241 pesticides 177 Petorca,Chile 183 Petorca river 184 Petras, James 396 Petro, Gustavo 290, 390n5 “petrocultures” 330 “petrofictions” 330, 333 petro-imagination 332–333 Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) 58, 59 “petro-magic-realism” 330–331 “petrotopias” 330, 339 Pflugheber, Jill 38 phenomenology of perception 74–75 Philippines 7, 123, 125 philosophy of liberation 34–35, 36 physical sciences, social sciences and 70–71 phytomorphism 198 Piel de Lava collective, Petróleo 247, 253–256 Pierce, Charles 74, 74n8, 81, 81n16 Piglia, Ricardo 449 Pinacoteca de São Paulo 224–225 Pineda Camacho, Roberto 192–193 pine plantations 313, 314, 317–319, 325–326 Piñera, Sebastián 182n7 Piñera, Virgilio, La isla en peso 109, 114–121 Pinochet, Augusto 168, 181, 182, 318–319, 384, 431 Pires da Silva Pontes, Antonio 259–260, 267–268 Pizarro, Ana 190n5 place 445 planetarity 8, 117n3, 281, 441–452 the planetary 2, 3–4, 7, 8, 117, 117n3, 118, 441 planetary crisis 280 planetary imaginaries 381

planetary mines 300, 307 planetary turn, aesthetics and 3–4 plant animism 347–349 plant anthropomorphism 347–349 the plantation 9, 52 plantation economy 257 the Plantationocene 4, 9, 158n2, 317, 359, 381n1 plantation romance 344 plantations 274, 344, 355 – depletion of land capacity due to 148 plantation system 344, 382 “plant horror” 344 the “Planthroposcene” 352 plant imaginaries 343, 344–345, 351 plant(s) 343–354. See also specific plants – as “metaphysics of mixture” 350–352 – migration of 445 – music and 448 – in post-Conquest Latin American society 344 “plant-thinking’ 343, 347–348, 352 Plato 75, 75n10 Platonism 295, 304 Plaza de Mayo 246 Plumwood, Val 252, 339, 339n18 pluralism 358 the pluriverse 10, 29, 32, 39, 72, 201, 352 political ecologies 40, 397 political science 290 political systems 142 Pollan, Michael 198n13 pollution 184, 185, 398–400. See also toxicity Ponte, Antonio José 294 Popocatépetl Volcano 208 Popol Vuh 97, 363 popular forms, environmentalism and 325 the Porfiriato 423 Portinari, Cândido, “Retirantes” 148 Porto-Gonçalves, Carlos 411, 411n2, 444 Porto Velho, Brazil 130 Portugal 260 Portuguese Crown 32 positivism 291 possession 272 the post 441, 447 Post, Frans 274 post-anthropomorphism 94–95n8 “postcolonial” approaches 30 postcolonialism 116, 313, 445 post/colonial nations 182n9

Index

postextractivist aesthetics 46, 47, 61–62 postextractivist language 18, 61 postextractivist thought 18, 59 posthumanism 38, 40, 94–95n8, 101n21, 281, 348, 350 posthuman knowledge 94–95n8 posthuman thinking 4 post-Independence period 141 post-millennial moment 444 the “postmodern,” Latin America and 8 postmodernism 8 postmodernity 8 postnature 159–162 poststructuralism 3 Potosí, Bolivia 286, 287 – female mining workers in 308 – mining in 51, 299, 303–304, 305 Povinelli, Elizabeth 11, 142, 143, 151, 204, 216, 288, 382, 388, 413, 413n3, 444 power – coloniality of 17, 31, 31–32n2, 39, 355 – resilience and 369–370 power/knowledge, discourses of 220 “practices of world-making” 12 Pratt, Mary Louise 2, 8, 16, 111, 117n3, 190–191, 190–191n6, 257, 288, 381, 441–452 – Planetary Longings 441, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 450 precarity 246, 419 precarization 246, 247, 248 Prebisch, Raúl 34 Price, Rachel 331, 331n6 prime matter, subordination to form 304, 305–307, 311 primitivism 358 Private Snafu 123 privatization 236, 252, 424 production 177–181, 246, 247–248, 252, 253, 254 – regimes of 2 – reproduction and 253–255 productivity, masculinity and 254 progress 331, 360, 361, 413. See also teleology – symbols of 233 – visions of 230 protectionism, extractivism and 262–263 provincialization 273 public health 130, 132, 133, 134 Puchuncaví, Chile 183–184

Puerto Montt 318 Puerto Rico 279 Puig, Manuel 95 Pulido, Laura 358 pulp industry 315, 318 Punjab, India 316 Punta Arenas, Chile 384 Putumayo region 192 Pykwyiky 263–268, 264, 265 Quechua 97 Quechua culture 277 Quechua language 310 Quechua peoples 286 Quechua traditions 91, 96, 288, 290 queer activisms 173 queer/cuir movements 173, 173n1, 187 queerness – anti-extractivist potency of 255 – of oil 333, 338 Queiroz, Rachel de, O quinze 148 Quijano, Alberto 355–356, 359 Quijano, Aníbal 31–32n2 Quilacahuín 322, 376 quinine extraction 344 Quintana, Jorge 15 Quiroga, Horacio 100n18, 191, 196, 449 Rabasa, José 257 race 131–132, 176, 355–368, 396 – in Brazil 361 – capitalism and 356 – casta system and 310 – climate and 360 – coloniality of power and 355 – colonization and 355 – Conquest and 359 – contagion and 128 – developmentalism and 360 – environmental crisis and 356, 357 – environmental injustice and 364 – environment and 362–365 – in Iberia before Columbus 359 – instability of notion of 359–360 – nation-building debates and 359–362 – during nation-building era 359–360 – nature and 359–362 – Quijano on 355–356, 359

485

486

Index

– in republican period 359–360 – theoretical approaches 355–359 racial capitalism 40, 401–402 Racial Capitalocene 359 racialization 99, 132, 261–262, 261n3, 355 – colonialism and 259 – environmental racism 401–402 – eurocentrism and 355–356 – extractivism and 260, 261–262, 261n3, 267–268 – human/nonhuman divide and 261 – inside the body 132 – of labor 317 – mining and 310 – of nonhuman life 19 – settler colonialism and 261n3, 267–268 – violence and 356 racial jurisprudence, in Iberia 359–360 racial thinking 355, 360 racial violence 246–247 racism – biological 3 – colonization and 355–356 – environmental 358, 364, 401–402, 407 – scientific 361, 362 radical singularity 441 railroad 229, 230, 232, 233 Rama, Ángel 10, 191, 194, 200, 410, 412, 416 Ramírez, Enrique 431 Ramirez, Victoria, Teoría del polen 165–166 Ramos, Graciliano 442 – Vidas secas (Barren Lives) 148 Ramos, Nuno 95 Rangel, Alberto 191 “rasura” (defacement) 220, 220n14 Rauff, Walter 384 “reading for the planet” 441 real abstraction 304–307 realism 4, 5, 239 – “agential realism” 73–74 – empiricist 69 – particularism of 443 – social realism 39 “reality effect” 236 recurrence 398, 403 reductions 303, 318, 320–325, 376 Regeneración 211–212 regionalism 68, 191, 194, 200, 363 “regionalists” 191 Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo 198

Reinel, Jorge, Miller Atlas 257–259, 260, 267–268 Reinel, Pedro, Miller Atlas 257–259, 260, 267–268 Reis-Castro, Luísa 136 relationality 32, 74–76, 81, 226, 237 relativism 72, 86 remapping 259, 259n1, 267–268 representation 18 – bodies and 279 – human/nature divide in 70–73 – Indigenous communities and 222–223 – nature and 279 – nonhuman 67–90 – rethinking through material semiotics 73–76 – sociality and 76 reproduction 14, 129, 129n14, 134, 134n24, 135–137, 173, 176, 177–181, 246, 247–248, 252, 253, 254 – production and 253–255 Repsol 253 republican period, race in 359–360 Reserva Thomas Van der Hammen, Susa, Bogotá, Colombia 434 resilience 369–380 – concept of 369 – Indigenous communities and 370–371 – neoliberal discourse and 370, 371 – power and 369–370 – resistance(s) and 369–370 – violence and 369–370 resistance 38, 280, 402, 411n2. See also activism – Amerindian cosmologies and 383 – end of landscape and 276–282 – environmental resistance 402 – to extractivism 176 – forest and 325–326 – to gaze 276 – Indigenous 263–268 – Indigenous cosmologies and 383 – labor and 252 – to monoculture 325–326 – mourning and 378, 379 – resilience and 369–370 “resource logics” 59–60 resource nationalism 58 resources, theft of 252–253 response extraction 102n23 Resumen, Plantar pobreza. El negocio forestal en Chile (Planting Poverty. The Forest Business in Chile) 313 Reverón, Armando, Paisaje blanco 279

Index

“revolutions,” geological 205, 206, 207 Revueltas, José 296 “r-existência” 36, 39, 411n2, 444 Reyes Novaes, André 257 Rhea 221 the rhizome 402 Riddle, Amy 333 Rika 263–268, 264, 265 Rio de La Plata system 232 Rio Doce 260 Riofrancos, Thea 58 Rio Negro 220 Ríos to Rivers 426n2 Ríos Vivos 429 Rivera, Diego 430 Rivera, José Eustasio 191, 362 – La vorágine 53, 55, 68, 144–145, 191–192, 192–199, 195n9, 196n11, 197n12, 200–201, 295, 343–344, 348, 384, 411–412 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia 10, 35, 60, 406 Rivera Garza, Cristina 296, 392–393, 405 road movies 239n8 roadways 232, 235 Robbins, Nicholas A. 307 Rocha, Glauber 410–411 Rodelas, Bahia, Brazil 223n23 Rodrigues, Guará 336, 337–338, 339 Rodríguez, Abel 433–434, 433n3 Rodríguez, Fermín 95 Rodríguez, Luis Ricardo 245–246 Rodríguez Gallo, Loreno 434–435n4 Rodríguez Sousa, Antonio 158 Rogers, Charlotte 55, 130, 197n12, 294–295 Román Medina, Giselle 113 Romans 189, 189n1 Romanticism 191, 363 rootedness 445 Roraima, Brazil 224n26 Rosell, Daniela 294 Rossi, Anacristina 363 rubber boom 192–193, 199, 262, 344 rubber extraction 192–193, 194, 196, 197n12, 198, 199, 344 Rudwick, Martin 205 ruins 147n12, 148–149, 148–149n17, 151, 229–230, 324 Rulfo, Juan 442–443 Rupailaf, Roxana Miranda 321 – Shumpall 187

487

rural dwellers, organizations of 34 Ryan, John C. 344 Sá, Lúcia 199, 220n14 Sabana de Bogotá 422, 434–435n4 “sacrifice zones” 174, 184, 185, 401 “Salario Básico Universal” 256 Salazar, Ángela 432 Salazar Velez, Adriana 392 salt extraction 229–230 Samarco Mineração S.A. (Vale and BHP Billiton joint venture) 425, 426, 430 Sánchez, Mideas 49, 59, 62 Sánchez de Lozada, Gonzalo “Goni” 290 Sanjinés, Jorge, Lloksy Kaymata/¡Fuera de aquí! (Out of Here! 1977), 364, 365 San Jorge River 290 Sanson, Nicolas 219 Santa Cruz, Victoria 13 Santa Fe, Argentina 229–230 Santiago, Chile 165, 182n7, 184 Santiago, Silviano 10 Santillán, Oscar 432–433 Santoro, Daniel 245 Santos, Kleber 336, 338 São Paulo, Brazil 424 São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) 215 Saramago, Victoria 15, 38, 102n23, 194n8, 320 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 96, 141, 143–144, 150, 158, 158n3, 232, 233, 362 – Conflictos y armonías de las razas en América 360–361 – Facundo 144, 147n12, 152–153, 345, 360 SARS 127 satellite 280 Sauer, Carl 271 Schiebinger, Londa 356 scholasticism 285–286 School of Salamanca 285–286 Schwartz, Stuart B. 260n2 Schweblin, Samantha 14, 239n9 – Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream) 177–178, 179, 344 science and technology studies (STS) 40, 127, 301, 304 – feminism and 135–136 science fiction 447 scientific discourse, human exceptionalism and 70

488

Index

scientific empiricism, abstract art and 68–69, 69n3 scientificism 291 scientific racism 361, 362 Second Mexican Empire 210 self-reflexivity 7 Selgas, Gianfranco 38 Selk’nam people 168, 384n2, 434–435n4 – genocide of 152 – narrative traditions 384–385 semiosis 73, 75, 76, 79, 80–81, 84, 85, 86. See also meaning “semiospheres” 81 semiotics 73–76 sensorium 4, 383 Sepkoski, David 206–207 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de 304, 305 Sepúlveda, Luis 363 Serres, Michel 248 sertanejos 361 sertão dwellkers 132 Servitje, Lorenzo 127 Sessa Aldo 351 settler colonialism 17, 40, 257, 259–262, 263, 265 – cartography and 259–260 – extractivism and 262–263 – racialization and 261n3, 267–268 – self-actualization and 262 – settler liberal multiculturalism 216 Seurat, Clémence 161 seven generations paradigm 444 sexual dissidence 247 sexuality 100–101, 173–175, 182n9 sexualization 99–100, 173 sex work 248–251 Sganzerla, Rogério 336, 338 shamanism 77, 98n14, 219–220, 292, 293, 410–411, 414–420 Shimose, Pedro 194 Shiva, Vandana 314, 315, 316 Shuar ethnic group 279 Siberia 445 signification, monism and 291–295 signified 285 signifier 285 Silva, José Asunción 53 Simard, Suzanne 345, 349 Simón, Pedro 190n5 Simonin, Louis 51, 52 Singer, Peter 94

singularity 86, 441–442, 443 Skattebo, Steven 363 slave plantations 274. See also plantations slavery 50, 260–261, 273–274, 286, 355 – abolition of 360 – in Brazil 360 – energy and 332n9 – extractivism and 261–262 slave trade 382 slow violence 17, 95, 99, 290, 364 Smith, Amanda 18, 38, 53n4, 60–61 Social Darwinism 99–101, 100n19, 207, 361 social hieroglyphic 50 socialism 364 sociality – multispecies sociality 80–81 – networks and 78–79 – representation and 76 social justice 402–403, 407 social justice movements 401–402 social movements 35n5 social realism 39 social sciences, physical sciences and 70–71 Sociedad Mexicana de Estadística y Geografía 209 society/nature duality 349. See also nature/culture divide sociology 10, 291 socio-territorial movements 174 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred 305, 306 Solanas, Fernando 62 Soldevilla, Dolores 331n6 Solórzano Pereira, Juan de 305, 306 Sommer, Doris 449 Sontag, Susan 127, 291 soul, concept of 80 Southern Cone 177 South Korea 301 soy production 148, 149, 150, 150–151n21, 177, 238, 315 space 273, 281, 282. See also land; landscape; territories – abstracting 274 – converted into landscape through gaze 273 – framing of 274 – heterogeneity of visions of 277 – as network of perspectives 281 – ordering of 273 – representation of 276–277 – spatial imagination 147n13

Index

Spanish Crown 32, 274, 286, 396 Spanish Empire 287, 303, 304 Spanish explorers 190. See also conquistadors speciesism 92, 92n4, 94, 226 “species loss” 157. See also biodiversity speculative fiction 447 Spencer, Herbert 3, 207 Spinoza, Baruch 255, 285 Spivak, Gayatri 117n3 Stam, Robert 336 Standard Oil Co. 331 ‘state of nature’ 356 state oil companies 253 Stec, Anna 399 Stein, Rachel 400 Steiner, Juliana 434–435n4 Stengers, Isabelle 1–2, 4, 86, 109 Stevenson, Robert Louis 52 Stockholm Resilience Center 369n1 Stoermer, Eugene F. 356 Storefront for Art and Architecture 45–46 strata 381–394 – concept of 386–387n3 – narrative strata 383–388 Strathern, Marilyn 76, 134–135n26 subaltern activisms 10 subaltern cosmovisions 14 subaltern cultures 383 subaltern knowledge 308, 309–310 subaltern practices 308–309 subaltern studies 85 subjectivities 187, 277 – gaze and 278 – Indigenous conceptualization of 80–81 – landscape and 272–275 – marginal 176 subject/object dualism 163 subjugation 356 the sublime 3, 288 subsumption 93–94 suction 248, 249–251, 252, 253–254 sugar industry 274, 293–294, 431 sumak kawsay 290, 358 suma qamaña 290 the supernatural 391, 391n6 superstructure, vs. infrastructure(s) 235–236 Supervía 237 Surire Salt Flats 239–241 survivance 444

489

– aesthetics of 414–420 sustainable development 307 Svampa, Maristella 10, 33, 56, 71, 174n2, 176, 247–248 Swan, Claudia 356 Sweden 445, 447 “sylvophobia” 320 symbiosis 86 “sympoiesis” 4 Sze, Julie 401 Szeman, Imre 54, 60, 329n1, 330 Szurmuk, Mónica 18 tailings dam collapse 425 Taíno culture 114–115 Taussig, Michael 262 Tavares, Paulo 33, 62 technologies 2, 10, 169, 204, 236, 364 – agriculture and 247 – as alienating 101n22 – contagion and 125 – as contaminant 101n22 – idealization of 173 – ideology of 280 Tehuantepec, Mexico 58–59 Teixeira, Pedro 219–220 telegraphs 233 teleology 29, 231, 356, 413 Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán, Oaxaca, Mexico 346 temporality 281, 381–394, 441–442 – collective narratives and 392 – human 390–392 – laboratories of 392–393 – modernity and 383–384 Tenochtitlán, Mexico 233, 290, 422, 423 – map of 423 Terena, Naine 220–221, 224–225 territorial conflict 174 territorial movements 175 territories 49, 93, 174–175, 246, 280. See also land; landscape – bodies and 252, 253 (see also “cuerpo-territorio” (body-territory), notion of) – control of 278–279 – destruction of territorial communities 382 – dispossession of 278–279 – environmental aesthetics and 218–219 – extractivism and 247, 253 – indigeneity and 218–219

490

Index

– non-binary waters as 181–187 – reclaiming of 218 – representation of 273 – territorial devastation 11 – transformation of 273–274 – understandings of 32 testimonio 292 Texas 442, 446 theology 290 theory, production of 10 thick description 289 thinking like a planet 441 Third Cinema 161–162 Thomism 285–286, 304, 305 Tierra del Fuego 152, 168, 384, 384n2, 422, 434–435n4 tierras calientes 144–145n6 tierras frías 144–145n6 “tirakuna” 96 tobacco 293–294 Todd, Zoe 358 Toledo, Francisco de 51, 303, 304–305 Toltén River 318 Tolvanera 46 Tonacci, Andrea 168 Toribio Medina, José 190n3 Tortorici, Zeb 92, 94 torture centers 183–184 totality, rejection of 398–399 toxicity 175, 177–181, 222, 395–408 – definition of 399–400 – dispossession and 403–405 – politics behind 400–401 – vs. pollution 398–400 – as recurrence 403–406 – toxic body-territory 177–181 – toxic narratives 397 – trauma and 403–405 – violence and 401–402 traces 74–75, 86, 387 Trakl, Georg 372 trance 409–420 trance-culturation 410–414, 413n3, 416, 418–420 trans-corporeality 397 transcultural materialism 294, 296 transculturation 200, 201, 293–294, 410 transdisciplinary work 38. See also interdisciplinarity

transfemicide 184 transformation 413–414, 416 translation, equivocal 81–86 transspecies assemblages 95, 104 transspecies history, poetics of 94 transspecies literary agency 96–105 trapiches 308 trauma 183, 369, 370, 403–405 travel – desert and 144–145, 146n9 – trance-culturation and 411–414 travel literature 198 Trias, Fernanda, Mugre rosa 164 Tropicália 114 tropicality 359 – colonialism and 130–131 – contagion and 125 – dissident 114–121 – travel literature and 198 tropical medicine 128, 133 tropics, construction of 110–114 “troubled ecologies” 247 Tsing, Anna 91, 161, 317, 335, 345, 350, 359, 419, 444, 449 Tuan, Yi-Fu 144, 144n4 Tuana, Nancy 398 Tuck, Eve 264n6 Tuíre 265n7 Tukano, Daira 216 Tupinambá, Glicéria 218 Tupinambá Indians 48–49, 59 Tupinambá Olinda 217 TurbaTol 434, 434–435n4 Tuxá, Yacunã 12, 223, 223n23 – Não somos Iracema 224 Tylor, Edward Burnett 290 Tynan, Aidan 147, 147n12 Uhiri 199–201 uncanniness 333, 335–336, 451 uncertainty 246 “the uncommons” 6 unemployment 246 uneven development theory 8, 47 uniformitarianism 206, 206n4, 207 United Nations 46–47n1, 426, 446 – United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the “Earth Summit,” held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 34

Index

United States 207. See also specific locations – environmental justice in 401 – Mexico and 142n2, 207, 210 University of California – Davis’s Life Sciences Innovation Center laboratory in Santiago 165 University of Manchester’s Cultures of Anti-Racism in Latin America project 217 unpredictability 445 “unspecificity” 5–6, 14 Urano, Pedro 257 Ureta, Sebatián 231 Uriarte, Javier 15, 16 Uribe Peidrahita, César 52–53 urihi a 217 Ursúa, Pedro de 190n5 US Army 123 Uslar Pietri, Arturo 330–331, 331n5 US-Mexico border 142n2 utilitarianism, critiques of 216–217 Vaca Muerta, Neuquén, Argentina 248, 249, 251, 253 Valdivia, Chile 314n2, 318, 322, 371 Valdivian temperate rainforests 314 Valdivia River basin 318 Valentín, Marco Antonio 391n6 Valle de Xico Community Museum 431 Vallejo, César 279, 449 – El tungsteno 364, 365 Vallejo, Fernando 294 Valley of Mexico 208, 290, 422–424 Valparaíso, Chile 183–184 value – extraction and 306 – fetishism and 308 – mining and 301–304, 306, 307, 308–310, 311 – value creation 299 Van der Straet, Jan 257 Vargas, Getúlio 337 Vargas Llosa, Mario 55, 60, 61, 199, 295, 363 Varillas, Davani 162 Vasconcelos, José 361–362 – Cosmic Race 362 – Indología 362 Vásquez, Leonel, Río de la Verdad 432, 432 vastness 143n3 Vaz, Ana 161–162 – Apiyemikyekî 168 – A Film, Reclaimed 161–162

491

– Pseudosphynx 161 Vecchio, Diego, La extinción de las especies 164 vector control, biotechnologies of 135–136 “vegetal baroque” 343, 345–347 vegetal sentience 345 Velasco, José María 208, 213 Velho, Raquel 231 Veltmeyer, Henry 396 Venezuela 111, 229–230, 232, 239–240, 424 – oil industry in 330–331 – pearl fisheries in 50 Vergès, Françoise 359 Vespucci, Amerigo 257 Véxoa 225 Viana, Gê 267n9 Vicuña, Cecilia 428 Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín 320 Vidal, Lux 265–266 Vieira, Patrícia 344 Vieques, Puerto Rico, Navy Bombing Range in 279 Vilaça, Aparecida 76 Villagra, Luis Rojas 150 Viola, Alessandra 349 violence 203, 247, 249, 253–254, 382, 396 – abstraction and 299 – animals’ experience of 105 – against the collective body 174–175 – colonial 182–183, 246–247, 261, 384 – epistemic 223, 224 – extractivism and 53n3, 247, 252–253, 306–307 – gender-based 173, 182n9, 183, 184, 382 – labor and 299 – against marginalized groups 182–183 – patriarchal 246–247, 252 – political 431–432 – racial 246–247, 252, 356, 357 – resilience and 369–370 – slow 95, 99, 290, 364 – symbolic 356 – toxicity and 401–402 – water and 431–432 – against women 173, 182–183, 182n9, 183, 184, 252, 382 Virgil 67 Virgin Mary 286, 286, 293 Virgin of Zapopan 445 vitalism 290 Vitoria, Francisco de 285–286, 304, 305

492

Index

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 2–4, 32, 146, 166, 198, 200, 281, 295, 358, 391n6, 412–419 – on invention of “Indian” category 216 – on multinaturalism 10, 16, 18, 67–90, 288–289, 292 – on perpectivism 32, 81–86, 96, 277, 378 Vizenor, Gerald 444 volcanism 208, 209, 213 volcanos 274–275 Von Trier, Lars 164 Von Uexküll, Johann Jakob 3, 77, 417 Waimiri-Atroari 168 Wald, Priscilla 132 Walsh, Catherine 37 Wapichana, Lucilene 224–225 Warner Bros. 123, 136 – It’s Murder She Says 123, 125 War of the Triple Alliance 149 wars 142n2. See also specific conflicts – infrastructure(s) and 230–231 – wars of conquest 9 Warsh, Molly 50 the Wasteocene 2, 381n1 water 175, 326, 421–439 – aesthetic currents 427–433 – bodies and 427 – environmental aesthetics and 428–432, 433–435 – “future histories of” 426 – hydrocultural formations 422–426 – as a live, shifting, non-binary space 183 – non-binary waters as territory 181–187 – personhood and 432–433 – political violence and 431–432 – privatization of 181–182 – violence and 431–432 – water infrastructure 232–233 water law reforms 426 water rights, privatization of 424 way-finding 36–37 ways of being 32, 292 ways of doing 32 ways of knowing 32 ways of seeing 273–274, 282 Weisman, Alan 167 welfare state 253 – narratives of 246 Wenzel, Jennifer 5, 59–60, 330–331, 441

Werá, Ricardo 224–225 Whewell, William 206 White, Hayden 291 White, Steven F. 38 whitening 360 “white settler colonial studies” 262 “White Supremacy Scene” 50 Wiethüchter López, Bianca 294 “wilderness,” notion of 143, 143n3, 363 Williams, Eduardo, El auge de lo humano 1–2, 3, 4, 7 Williams, Rosalind 230n1 Wilson, Mike, Leñador 164 Winter, Juan Duchesne 347 Wintersteen, Kristin 98 Wohlleben, Peter 315 Wolfe, Cary 92n4 Wolfe, Patrick 261 wolves, extermination of 189n2 women 133, 134, 308. See also female laborers; femicides – mining 308 – nature and 247, 252 – politics of disease control and 128 – public health and 134 – violence against 182–183, 182n9 Woodroffe, Joseph 262, 263 workers’ rights 150 World Bank 46–47n1 world-formation, infrastructure(s) and 241 world-imaginings 5, 7 world literature, ecocriticism and 39–40 “world of worlds” 32 World War II 123 Wright, Willie Jamaal 401–402 writing, extractivism and 18 Wuhan, China 132 Wylie, Lesley 38, 198, 199, 200–201 Wynter, Sylvia 261n4 xawara 417, 418 Xetá, Dival 225 Xinca peoples 252 Xochimilco 422, 423 Y2J 447 Yaeger, Patricia 330 Yaganes 168

Index

yage 198, 199 Yahuarcani, Rember 433 Yamana community 384n2 Yang, K. Wayne 264n6 Yanomami cosmology 293 Yanomami knowledge 292–293 Yanomami lands 59 Yanomami people 168, 200, 216, 410, 415–420, 433 yellow fever 133 Yeni y Nan 15 – Integraciones en el agua 427, 428 yerba production 150 Yom Kippur War 332 York, Alissa 449 Yoruba 291 YPF 253

493

Yusoff, Kathryn 13, 203, 204, 231n2, 238n7, 332, 332n9, 358 Yvy Rupá 218–219 Zalasiewicz, Jan 6 Zambra, Alejandro 294 Zanotti, Laura 265 Zapatista movement 32 Zenú people 290 Zhou, Feifei 161 Zika 123n1, 127, 129, 133, 134, 134n24, 137 ZODEVITE 49 Zola, Émile 54 Zoque 49