Changes in the Landscape Humans and Nature in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

About this book

Changes in the Landscape is a collection of timely essays that bring the methodologies and commitments of ecocriticism to bear on the study of Latin American literature and cultural production. The book's eleven chapters, written by some of the leading voices in the field, invite readers to consider how the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature was fundamentally transformed during a period when new modes of capitalist production were emerging in the region and around the world. Jennifer L. French's introductory essay provides a historical and theoretical framework for the collection.

Ranging from the immediate aftermath of the Spanish-American Wars of Independence (1810-1826) to the early twentieth century (1925), the volume's essays cover a wide variety of genres and forms of cultural production, from José Hernández's epic poem Martín Fierro to prose fiction, painting and photography, and the personal albums compiled by Spanish-American women. Individually and collectively, the essays engage with scientific writing as both a discourse of power and a source of potentially significant, even revelatory information about human and nonhuman nature. Changes in the Landscape enables readers to more fully understand the transition from colonial regimes to the ecocidal extractivism of the export boom (1870-1930) by drawing out and analyzing some of the cognitive resources and rhetorical strategies that were available to imagine, protest, or enact new norms and expectations regarding the relations between human and nonhuman life, be it the life of wildflowers, waterfalls, or Cuba's Ciénaga de Zapata.

Contents

Introduction: A Rapidly Changing Landscape: Ecocriticism as an Approach to the Cultural Production of Nineteenth-Century Latin America / Jennifer L. French

1. Canals, Dams, and Colonized Landscapes: Simón Rodríguez vs. the Vincocaya Project (Arequipa, 1830) / Ronald Briggs
2. Forests of Sound: Listening, Affect, and Matter in Humboldt and Hudson / Jens Andermann
3. Archives of Extinction: Unproductive Bodies in the Rapidly Changing Landscape of Nineteenth-Century Argentina / Gisela Heffes
4. Cuba's Ciénaga de Zapata: Despoiled Landscapes and Biodiversity Conservation in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries / Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
5. Botanical Beings: On Women, Flowers, and Plants in Nineteenth-Century Latin America / Vanesa Miseres
6. Hydraulic Energy, Nature, and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Mexico / Jorge Quintana Navarrete
7. That Mysterious Something: Nature, Mystery, and Animism in W. H. Hudson's Early Writings / Lesley Wylie
8. Estanislao Severos Zeballos, or Nineteenth-Century Argentina's Environmental Unconscious / Aarti S. Madan
9. La Revista Hispano-Americana (1895-1896): Laura Méndez's Extractive Pedagogy / Catalina Rodríguez
10. Memories of a Darwinian: Anarchism and Animality in the Literary Crónicas of Rafael Barrett / Jennifer L. French
11. Graffiti as Earthly Inscriptions: Human Acts and Geological Forces in Euclides da Cunha's Os sertóes (1902) / Emmanuel Velayos

Notes on Contributors
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Biography

Jennifer L. French is the Rosenburg Professor of Environmental Studies and Spanish at Williams College.