Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the last few decades as the full scope of anthropogenic climate change manifests itself and large-scale natural resource extraction has expanded into formerly remote areas that seemed beyond the reach of industrialization. Scientists and popular culture alike have turned to the term "Anthropocene" to capture the global scale of environmental and even geological transformations that humans have carried out over the last two centuries. The chapters in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America examine the dynamics and interplay between local cultures and the expansion of global capitalism in Latin America, emphasizing the role of art in bearing witness to and generating awareness of environmental and social crises, but also its possibilities for formulating solutions. They take particular care to draw out the ways in which local environmental crises in Latin American nations are witnessed and imagined as part of a global system, focusing on the problems of time, scale, and complexity as key terms in conceiving the dimensions of crisis. At the same time, they question the notion of the Anthropocene as a species-wide "human" historical project, making visible the coloniality of natural resource extraction in Latin America and its dire effects for local people, cultures, and environments. Taking an ecocritical approach to Latin American cultural production including literature, film, performance, and digital artwork, the chapters in this volume develop a notion of ecological crisis that captures not only its documentary sense in the representation of environmental destruction (the degradation of the oikos), but also the crisis in the modern worldview (logos) that the acknowledgment of crisis provokes. In this sense, crisis is also the promise of a turning point, of the possibilities for change. Latin American representations of ecological crisis thus create the conditions for projects that decolonize environments, developing new, sustainable ways of conceiving of and relating to our world or returning to old ones.
Introduction: The Dimensions of Crisis - Mark Anderson Section I: Declarations of Crisis 1. Latin America in the World-Ecology: Origins and Crisis - Sharae Deckard 2. Mythologies of Gold in Choco - Juanita C. Aristizabal 3. Anthropomorphism and Arboricide: The Life and Death of Trees in the American Tropics - Lesley Wylie 4. The Brevity of the Planet: Environmental Loss in Recent Poetry by Contemporary Amazonian Writers - Jeremy Larochelle Section II: Representational Crises 5. "The Monstrous Head" and "The Mouth of Hell": The Gothic Ecologies of the Mexican Miracle - Kerstin Oloff 6. The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth: Mexico City in the Anthropocene - Mark Anderson 7. A Crisis in Environmental Representation: In-Depth Reporting in a Brazilian Magazine - Simao Farias Almeida 8. The Languages of Ecological Crisis in Brazilian Documentary and Fiction - Zelia M. Bora 9. Ecozones of the North and the South: Models of Development, Extractive Practices, and Tensions in Freedom and eRRor, un Juego con Tra(d)icion - Mirian Carballo Section III: Decolonial Ecologies 10. Mining and Indigenous Cosmopolitics: The Wirikuta Case - Abigail Perez Aguilera 11. Ecological Crisis and the Re-enchantment of Nature in Jaime Huenun's Reducciones - Ida Day 12. Animales de Alquiler: Challenging the Architectures of Domination - Ana Avalos and Maria Victoria Sanchez 13. Hippopotami, Humans, and Habitat: Ecological Crisis and Posthuman Subjectivities in Mempo Giardinelli's Imposible equilibrio - Diana Dodson Lee Section IV: Ongoing Crises 14. Amazonia: Looking for the Earthly Eden and Finding the Planet's Next Landfill - Diego Mejia Prado, Juan Carlos Galeano, and Herman Ruiz Abercasis 15. The Nicaragua Canal and the Shifting Currents of Sandinista Environmental Policy - Adrian Kane 16. Tourism, Ecology, and Changing US-Cuban Relations - Marcela Reales Afterword: The Self as Nonhuman Other - Zelia M. Bora
