ABSTRACT
This essay engages the critical apparatus of ecocriticism to examine how Brazilian writers and artists are reflecting upon the theme of environmental crisis. The first part of the essay provides an abridged overview of the field of Cultural Studies in Brazil and reflects on the insertion of this critical approach into the field of ecocriticism. Given the critical potential of Cultural Studies, its politically disruptive impetus and its capacity to question and disturb hegemonic systems of knowledge, the essay shows how ecocriticism in Brazil is necessarily tied to a Cultural Studies methodology that questions configurations not only of political and economic power, but also dominant symbolic constructions of the environment and of the relation between human and non-human actors. In the second part of the essay, I explore how Brazilian writers such as Maria José Silveira and Eliane Brum deploy the tropes of crisis, disaster and dislocation to create an ecological imaginary that reflects, critiques and expands on the environmental issues that affect present-day Brazil. Specifically, the article focuses on how Silveira and Brum engage Belo Monte as a trope of environmental disaster and human catastrophe. The attention to tropes of disruption echoes the –potentially– subversive impulse that underlies Cultural Studies as a discipline and a methodology.
