Author: Lesley Wylie
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 082298766X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature examines the defining role of plants in cultural expression across Latin America, particularly in literature. From the colonial georgic to Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, Lesley Wylie’s close study of botanical imagery demonstrates the fundamental role of the natural world and the relationship between people and plants in the region. Plants are also central to literary forms originating in the Americas, such as the New World Baroque, described by Alejo Carpentier as “nacido de árboles.” The book establishes how vegetal imaginaries are key to Spanish American attempts to renovate European forms and traditions as well as to the reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Such a reconfiguration, which persistently draws on indigenous animist ontologies to blur the boundaries between people and plants, anticipates much contemporary ecological thinking about our responsibility towards nonhuman nature and shows how environmental thinking by way of plants has a long history in Latin American literature.
Author: Lesley Wylie
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1835535224
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.
Author: Sara Castro-Klaren
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 111969261X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 772
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Book Description
Cutting-edge and insightful discussions of Latin American literature and culture In the newly revised second edition of A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture, Sara Castro-Klaren delivers an eclectic and revealing set of discussions on Latin American culture and literature by scholars at the cutting edge of their respective fields. The included essays—whether they're written from the perspective of historiography, affect theory, decolonial approaches, or human rights—introduce readers to topics like gaucho literature, postcolonial writing in the Andes, and baroque art while pointing to future work on the issues raised. This work engages with anthropology, history, individual memory, testimonio, and environmental studies. It also explores: A thorough introduction to topics of coloniality, including the mapping of the pre-Columbian Americas and colonial religiosity Comprehensive explorations of the emergence of national communities in New Imperial coordinates, including discussions of the Muisca and Mayan cultures Practical discussions of global and local perspectives in Latin American literature, including explorations of Latin American photography and cultural modalities and cross-cultural connections In-depth examinations of uncharted topics in Latin American literature and culture, including discussions of femicide and feminist performances and eco-perspectives Perfect for students in undergraduate and graduate courses tackling Latin American literature and culture topics, A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture, Second Edition will also earn a place in the libraries of members of the general public and PhD students interested in Latin American literature and culture.
Author: Mark Anderson
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826506798
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 528
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Book Description
The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things begins by analyzing the ethical debates and political contexts relating to Latin American “rights of nature” legislation and the political ontology of nonhuman speech within a framework of intercultural and multispecies diplomacy. Author Mark Anderson shows how Latin American authors and thinkers complicate traditional humanistic perspectives on nature, the social, and politics, exploring how animals, plants, and environments as a whole might be said to engage in social relations and political speech or self-representation. Drawing Native Amazonian thought into productive tension with a variety of posthumanist theoretical frameworks—ranging from Derrida’s conceptualization of passive decision and hospitality to biosemiotics, Karen Barad’s theorization of intra-activity, and Isabelle Stengers’ proposal for cosmopolitical diplomacy—Anderson analyzes literary works by Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector, José Eustasio Rivera, and Davi Kopenawa that reframe environmental ethics in terms of collective, multispecies work and reciprocal care and politics as a cosmopolitics of friendship rooted in diplomacy across difference. Finally, Anderson examines the points of connection and divergences between Latin American relational ontologies and Euro American posthumanist theories within Indigenous Latin American remodernization projects that reappropriate and repurpose ancestral practices as well as develop new technologies with the goal of forging alternative modernities compatible with a livable future for all species.
Author: Jens Andermann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110775905
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 506
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Book Description
The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics offers a comprehensive overview of Latin American aesthetic and conceptual production addressing the more-than-human environment at the intersection between art, activism, and critique. Fields include literature, performance, film, and other audiovisual media as well as their interactions with community activisms. Scholars who have helped establish environmental approaches in the field as well as emergent critical voices revisit key concepts such as ecocriticism, (post-)extractivism, and multinaturalism, while opening new avenues of dialogue with areas including critical race theory and ethnicity, energy humanities, queer-*trans studies, and infrastructure studies, among others. This volume both traces these genealogies and maps out key positions in this increasingly central field of Latin Americanism, at the same time as they relate it to the environmental humanities at large. By showing how artistic and literary productions illuminate critical zones of environmental thought, articulating urgent social and material issues with cultural archives, historical approaches and conceptual interventions, this volume offers cutting-edge critical tools for approaching literature and the arts from new angles that call into question the nature/culture boundary.
Author: Gisela Heffes
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031288319
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Visualizing Loss in Latin America engages with a varied corpus of textual, visual, and cultural material with specific intersections with the natural world, arguing that Latin American literary and cultural production goes beyond ecocriticism as a theoretical framework of analysis. Gisela Heffes poses the following crucial question: How do we construct a conceptual theoretical apparatus to address issues of value, meaning, tradition, perspective, and language, that contributes substantially to environmental thinking, and that is part and parcel of Latin America? The book draws attention to ecological inequality and establishes a biopolitical, ethics-based reading of Latin American art, film, and literature that operates at the intersection of the built environment and urban settings. Heffes suggests that the aesthetic praxis that emerges in/from Latin America is permeated with a rhetoric of waste—a significant trait that overwhelmingly defines it.
Author: Nicolás Campisi
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822991640
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
In The Return of the Contemporary, Nicolás Campisi combines the fields of post-dictatorship studies and environmental humanities to analyze Latin American cultural production in the neoliberal age. Each chapter pairs two authors from different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean who create a common vocabulary in which to frame the various crises of the region’s present and recent past, such as climate change, forced migration, the collapse of state institutions, and the afterlives of slavery. By situating his argument at the intersection of ecocritical and environmental humanities, affect studies, and the politics of memory and postmemory, Campisi presents new comparative methods to show how Latin America's neoliberal crisis prompted significant changes in how the novel as a form imagines a different future.
Author: Brian T. Chandler
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684485215
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
Science Fusion draws on new materialist theory to analyze the relationship between science and literature in contemporary works of fiction, poetry, and theater from Mexico. In this deft new study, Brian Chandler examines how a range of contemporary Mexican writers “fuse” science and literature in their work to rethink what it means to be human in an age of climate change, mass extinctions, interpersonal violence, femicide, and social injustice. The authors under consideration here—including Alberto Blanco, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Sabina Berman, Maricela Guerrero, and Elisa Díaz Castelo—challenge traditional divisions that separate human from nonhuman, subject from object, culture from nature. Using science and literature to engage topics in biopolitics, historiography, metaphysics, ethics, and ecological crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, works of science fusion offer fresh perspectives to address present-day sociocultural and environmental issues.
Author: Scott M. DeVries
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611485169
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
A History of Ecology and Environmentalism in Spanish American Literature undertakes a comprehensive ecocritical examination of the region’s literature from the foundational texts of the nineteenth century to the most recent fiction. The book begins with a consideration of the way in which Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s views of nature through the lens of the categories of “civilization” and “barbarity” from Facundo (1845) are systematically challenged and revised in the rest of the century. Subsequently, this book develops the argument that a vital part of the cultural critique and aesthetic innovations of Spanish American modernismo involve an ecological challenge to deepening discourses of untamed development from Europe and the United States. In other chapters, many of the well-established titles of regional and indigenista literature are contrasted to counter-traditions within those genres that express aspects of environmental justice, “deep ecology,” the relational role of emotion in nature protectionism and conservationism, even the rights of non-human nature. Finally, the concluding chapters find that the articulation of ecological advocacy in recent fiction is both more explicit than what came before but also impacts the formal elements of literature in unique ways. Textual conventions such as language, imagery, focalization, narrative sequence, metafiction, satire, and parody represent innovations of form that proceed directly from the ethical advocacy of environmentalism. The book concludes with comments about what must follow as a result of the analysis including the revision of canon, the development of literary criticism from novel approaches such as critical animal studies, and the advent of a critical dialogue within the bounds of Spanish American environmentalist literature. A History of Ecology and Environmentalism in Spanish American Literature attempts to develop a sense of the way in which ecological ideas have developed over time in the literature, particularly the way in which many Spanish American texts anticipate several of the ecological discourses that have recently become so central to global culture, current environmentalist thought, and the future of humankind.
Author: Oscar A. Pérez
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000533328
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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Book Description
This book offers a substantial examination of how contemporary authors deal with the complex legacies of authoritarian regimes in various Spanish-speaking countries. It does so by focusing on works that explore an under-studied aspect: the reliance of authoritarian power on medical notions for political purposes. From the Porfirian regime in Mexico to Castro’s Cuba, this book describes how such regimes have sought to seize medical knowledge to support propagandistic ideas and marginalize their opponents in ways that transcend specific pathologies, political ideologies, and geographical and temporal boundaries. Medicine, Power, and the Authoritarian Regime in Hispanic Literature brings together the work of literary scholars, cultural critics, and historians of medicine, arguing that contemporary authors have actively challenged authoritarian narratives of medicine and disease. In doing so, they continue to re-examine the place of these regimes in the collective memory of Latin America and Spain.
