ABSTRACT
This chapter posits that there is an existential link between the peoples of the world and nature. Land and its tenure have determined the histories, politics, and cultures of peoples in the Americas in diverse and conflictive ways. From autochthonous empires, European colonization, independence, and nation building to our digital times, the American continent has been characterized by diverse practices of (non-)human rights violations that have resulted in dislocation and a desire to transform its “savage” wilderness into “cultivated” gardens too often resulting in landscapes and seascapes imbued with violated bodies, minds, and places. Anthropomorphic and racist ideas continue to justify processes of neocolonialism, invasion, and/or domination/marginalization. In this sense, dislocation in the Americas is deeply rooted in the brutalization of space, human beings, and the entire biota. The objective of this essay is to examine how writers in the Western hemisphere translate this brutalization: how they express a continuous process of neocolonial violence mapped on the minds and bodies of their characters in search of home across a continent characterized by what Édouard Glissant has memorably termed “tortured time” and “transferred space.”
