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.

part I|55 pages

Bad Living

chapter 1|16 pages

Monsters and Agritoxins

The Environmental Gothic in Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de Rescate 1

chapter 2|19 pages

Toxic Nature in Contemporary Argentine Narratives

Contaminated Bodies and Ecomutations 1

chapter 3|18 pages

The Ruins of Modernity 1

Synecdoche of Neoliberal Mexico in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

part II|51 pages

Econarratives and Ecopoetics of Slow Violence

chapter 5|14 pages

The Voice of Water

Spiritual Ecology, Memory, and Violence in Daughter of the Lake and The Pearl Button

chapter 6|16 pages

From Polluted Swan Song to Happy Armadillos

The Cold War’s Slow Violence in Nicaragua

part III|52 pages

Protracted Degradation and the Slow Violence of Toxicity

chapter 7|15 pages

Collateral Damage

Nature and the Accumulation of Capital in Héctor Aguilar Camín’s El resplandor de la madera and Jennifer Clement’s Prayers for the Stolen

chapter 8|18 pages

Violence, Slow and Explosive

Spectrality, Landscape, and Trauma in Evelio Rosero’s Los ejércitos

part IV|80 pages

Materialities, Performances, and Ecologies of Praxis

chapter 10|19 pages

Slow Violence in a Digital World

Tarahumara Apocalypse and Endogenous Meaning in Mulaka

chapter 11|18 pages

Slow Violence in the Scientific Ecosystem

Decolonial Ecocriticism on Science in the Global South

chapter 12|21 pages

Bodies, Transparent Matter, and Immateriality

Compagnie Käfig’s Ecodance Performances

chapter 13|20 pages

Llubia Negra

Fetishism of Form, Temporalities of Waste, and Slow Violence in Cartonera Publishing of the Triple Frontier (Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina)