ABSTRACT
Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World brings together critical studies of Latin American and Latinx writing, film, visual, and performing arts to offer new perspectives on ecological violence. Building on Rob Nixon’s concept of "slow violence," the contributions to the volume explore processes of environmental destruction that are not immediately visible yet expand in time and space and transcend the limits of our experience. Authors consider these forms of destruction in relation to new material contexts of artistic creation, practices of activism, and cultural production in Latin American and Latinx worlds. Their critical contributions investigate how writers, cultural activists, filmmakers, and visual and performance artists across the region conceptualize, visualize, and document this invisible but far-reaching realm of violence that so tenaciously resists representation.
The volume highlights the dense web of material relations in which all is enmeshed, and calls attention to a notion of agency that transcends the anthropocentric, engaging a cognition envisioned as embodied, collective, and relational. Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence measures the breadth of creative imaginings and critical strategies from Latin America and Latinx contexts to enrich contemporary ecocritical studies in an era of heightened environmental vulnerability.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|55 pages
Bad Living
chapter 1|16 pages
Monsters and Agritoxins
chapter 2|19 pages
Toxic Nature in Contemporary Argentine Narratives
part II|51 pages
Econarratives and Ecopoetics of Slow Violence
chapter 5|14 pages
The Voice of Water
chapter 6|16 pages
From Polluted Swan Song to Happy Armadillos
part III|52 pages
Protracted Degradation and the Slow Violence of Toxicity
chapter 7|15 pages
Collateral Damage
chapter 8|18 pages
Violence, Slow and Explosive
part IV|80 pages
Materialities, Performances, and Ecologies of Praxis