From Crime Scene to Anthropocene in 2010S Argentinian Narrative

This chapter examines three ecological crime narratives by contemporary Argentine writers: Ricardo Piglia’s El camino de Ida (2013), Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (2014), and Mariana Enríquez’s “Bajo el agua negra” (2016). In different ways, each of these texts subverts the conventions of the genre with the objective of addressing the temporal, causal, and epistemological problems posed by attempts to codify ecocide as crime. As the chapter shows, the urgent need to reconfigure existing paradigms is the common thread that runs throughout the three texts, not only in terms of how they address ecological crime but also in terms of their approach to writing crime fiction.