ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter summarises the volume’s contribution to a “liquid turn” in ecocritical analyses of the arts in Latin America and the Caribbean. It contextualises the book amid the rise of the “blue humanities,” the “environmental humanities” and the “oceanic turn” which have turned scholarly attention to human engagements with liquid environments across a range of disciplines, periods and artefacts. The introduction addresses this transdisciplinary shift to present the book’s aims and scope in advancing a paradigm that probes the relational web of liquidity in its historical, political, environmental, social, epistemological and aesthetic dimensions. The volume’s focus on cultural production is clarified through the contention that visual and literary works are especially generative media to work through the variable intensities, viscosities and porosities of liquid ecologies. This contention is set against the backdrop of concerns that inform it, including a discussion of contemporary transformations of liquid environments through climate-related phenomena and infrastructural projects and failures; the longstanding role flows and fluids as aesthetic and epistemic figures; and recent curatorial practices that discuss, use and expand on liquidity and liquids, particularly water, as material signifiers, metaphors and/or aesthetic theories. Ultimately, the introduction presents liquid ecologies as a new critical, theoretical and analytical framework for cultural production.
