Plant Theory In Amazonian Literature

This book discusses new developments of plant studies and plant theory in the humanities and compares them to the exceptionally robust knowledge about plant life in indigenous traditions practiced to this day in the Amazonian region. Amazonian thinking, in dialogue with the thought of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Emanuele Coccia and others, can serve to bring plant theory in the humanities beyond its current focus on how the organic existence of plants is projected into culture. Contemporary Amazonian indigenous literature takes us beyond conventional theory and into the unsuspected reaches of vegetal networks. It shows that what matters about plants are not just their strictly biological and ecological projections, but the manner in which they interact with multiple species and cultural actors in continuously shifting bodies and points of view, by becoming-other, and fashioning a natural and social diplomacy in which humans participate along with non-humans.

This book discusses new developments of plant studies and plant theory in the humanities and compares them to the exceptionally robust knowledge about plant life in indigenous traditions practiced to this day in the Amazonian region. Amazonian thinking, in dialogue with the thought of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Emanuele Coccia and others, can serve to bring plant theory in the humanities beyond its current focus on how the organic existence of plants is projected into culture. Contemporary Amazonian indigenous literature takes us beyond conventional theory and into the unsuspected reaches of vegetal networks. It shows that what matters about plants are not just their strictly biological and ecological projections, but the manner in which they interact with multiple species and cultural actors in continuously shifting bodies and points of view, by becoming-other, and fashioning a natural and social diplomacy in which humans participate along with non-humans.

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.

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.

What are the main contributions of Hispanic cultural products and practices today? This book is a collection of essays on new critical trends in Hispanic Caribbean thinking. It offers an update on the state of Hispanic Caribbean studies through the discussion of diverse theoretical perspectives around notions of affect, archipelagic thinking, deterritoriality, and queer experiences and subjectivities. These eccentric Caribbean and aquatic imaginaries move beyond those that are circumscribed by identity, nation, insularity, and the colonial epistemologies derived from these conceptions. Due to its cultural and historical specificities, the Hispanic Caribbean constitutes a focus of study crucial to re-thinking global dynamics today.

An analysis of the political and ecological consequences of charting the Amazon River basin in narrative fiction, Mapping the Amazon examines how widely read novels from twentieth-century South America attempted to map the region for readers. Authors such as Jos� Eustasio Rivera, R�mulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, C�sar Calvo, M�rcio Souza, and M�rio de Andrade traveled to the Amazonian regions of their respective countries and encountered firsthand a forest divided and despoiled by the spatial logic of extractivism. Writing against that logic, they fill their novels with geographic, human, and ecological realities omitted from official accounts of the region. Though the plots unfold after the height of the Amazonian rubber boom (1850-1920), the authors construct landscapes marked by that first large-scale exploitation of Amazonian biodiversity. The material practices of rubber extraction repeat in the stories told about the removal of other plants, seeds, and mineral from the forest as well as its conversion into farmland. The counter-discursive impulse of each novel comes into dialogue with various modernizing projects that carve Amazonia into cultural and economic spaces: border commissions, extractive infrastructure, school geography manuals, Indigenous education programs, and touristic propaganda. Even the novel maps studied have blind spots, though, and Mapping the Amazon considers the legacy of such unintentional omissions today.

Extending law beyond the human, the book probes the conceptual openings, methodological challenges and ethical conundrums of law in a time of deep socio-ecological disturbances and transitions. How do we learn and practice law across epistemic and ontological difference? What sort of methodologies do we need? In what sense does conjuring other-than-human beings as sentient, cognitive and social agents— rather than mere recipients of state-sanctioned rights—transform what we mean by “law” and “rights of nature”? Legal institutions exclusively focused on human perspectives seem insufficiently capable of addressing current socio-ecological challenges in Latin America and beyond. In response, this book strives to integrate other-than-human beings within legal thinking and decision-making protocols. Weaving together various fields of knowledge and world-making practices that include—but are not limited to—Indigenous legal traditions, Earth Law and multispecies ethnography, Law, Humans and Plants focuses on the entanglement of law, ecology and Indigenous cosmologies in Southern Colombia. In so doing, it articulates a general postanthropocentric legal theory which is proposed, a tool to address socioecological challenges such as climate change and bio-cultural loss. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the disciplines of environmental law, Earth Law and ecological law, legal theory and critical legal studies as well as others working in the in the fields of Indigenous studies, environmental humanities, legal anthropology and sustainability and climate change justice.

The Amazon extends across nine countries, encompasses forty percent of South America, and hosts four European languages and more than three hundred Indigenous languages and cultures. Eyes on Amazonia is a fascinating exploration of how Latin American, European, and US intellectuals imagined and represented the Amazon region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This multifaceted study, which draws on a range of literary and nonliterary texts and visual sources, examines the complex ways that race, gender, mobility, empire, modernity, and personal identity have indelibly shaped how the region was and is seen. In doing so, the book argues that representations of the Amazon as a region in need of the civilizing influence of colonialism and modernization served to legitimize and justify imperial control. Eyes on Amazonia operates in cultural geography, ecocriticism, and visual cultural analysis. The diverse and intriguing documents and images examined in this book capture the modernizing project of this region at a crucial juncture in its long history: the early twentieth-century rubber boom.