Ecocriticism in Brazil: The wastelands of Ana Paula Maia’s fictions

Abstract

In their introduction to the volume on ecological crisis in Latin American culture, Mark Anderson states that contemporary representations of the environment in Latin American culture activate the trope of crisis and depletion. The fictions of Brazilian author Ana Paula Maia take up the theme of ecological crisis via the representation of wastelands inhabited by subjects who are reduced to their bare lives. Maia’s novels not only suggest a rethinking of the environmental imaginary in Brazilian fiction that runs counter to the idealized vision of nature present in much of Brazil’s literary tradition, but also delineate a reexamination of the relationship between human, and their lived landscapes, as well as between human and non-human beings. Maia’s fictional texts employ the imaginary of environmental crisis to probe into the role that late capitalism plays in the construction of the human/ecosphere/non-human interface. Her novels suggest both an exploitative relation and, at the same time, destabilize the binary between the human and the non-human that justifies this exploitation. This paper examines how Ana Paula Maia’s two novels, De gados e homens (2014) and Enterre seus mortos (2018), employ the trope of ecological exigency to broach the slow violence implied in extractive capitalism and its effects on land, humans and non-human animals. Both novels bring to the fore the imbrication of economic exploitation of both human and non-humans and environmental crisis.