Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature ed. by Mark Anderson, and M. Bora Zélia

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature ed. by Mark Anderson, and M. Bora Zélia Carolyn Fornoff Anderson, Mark, and Zélia M. Bora, eds. Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. 329 pp. We are in the midst of an unprecedented environmental catastrophe—a disaster that is of our own making. This era has been alternatively invoked as the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, and even the Obscene. Terminology aside, the main takeaway is that humans have become geological actors. Human history is no longer separate from, or acted out alongside, the unchanging backdrop of ahistorical "nature." Rather, human and nonhuman are inextricably imbricated, and human practices have fundamentally altered the trajectory of the planet. In spite of mounting evidence that we have entered a new climatic regime, the response to the crisis at hand has been remarkably slow. Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argue in The Ends of the World that perhaps this is because we imagine that disaster entails a single cataclysmic event, rather than a slow and surprisingly variable process. In academia, scholarship has increasingly taken up the task of sifting through how we got here. The nascent field of the environmental humanities brings together scholars across disciplines around the common question of "nature." The wide-ranging reach of ecological crisis seems to demand new forms of scholarship, or at the very least, interdisciplinary networks to grapple with its causes and consequences. Yet within the US academy, work in the environmental humanities has remained largely Anglocentric. This is particularly troubling because the Global South bears much of the brunt of climate change. Even though Latin American countries are only responsible for about nine percent of global emissions, they are disproportionately vulnerable to its impacts. Indigenous environmental defenders are at the forefront of many of these battles; the brutal slaying of Honduran Lenca leader Berta Cáceres was but one of approximately 200 environmental-related killings worldwide in 2016 (with Brazil being the deadliest). Mark Anderson and Zélia M. Bora's edited volume, Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America, argues that attending to Latin American texts and contexts allows us to better understand the geopolitical, racial, and gendered implications of climate change. This volume is a welcome addition to the field of ecocriticism that will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, regardless of their primary region of study. Anderson and Bora's collection builds on the trailblazing work in Latin American literary ecocriticism by Marisol de la Cadena, Scott Devries, Jennifer French, Gisela Heffes, and Jorge Marcone. Anderson's introduction provides an excellent overview of Latin American thinkers that have theorized ecological crisis, most notably the Mexican environmental philosopher Enrique Leff and the aforementioned Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Anderson explains that before the twenty-first century, in spite of the centrality of land within Latin [End Page 691] American sociopolitical discourse, "Latin American intellectuals only very exceptionally represented environmental crisis as ecological crisis" instead articulating it as a question of "uneven development" that would be resolved as soon as Latin America became fully "modern" (xii). In spite of this, the collected essays bring together a wealth of literary and cultural texts that have contended with environmental destruction throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. When curating a volume as wide-ranging as this one, representation can be challenging. Anderson and Bora's book performs strongly on this count: it includes scholars located in the United States, Europe, and in Latin America. The studied texts are representative of a range of countries throughout Latin America, including often-overlooked regions like Brazil and Central America. For example, Ana Avalos and María Victoria Sánchez's chapter on the short Costa Rican film Animales de alquiler effectively marries animal studies with biopolitics (and compelled this reader to hop onto YouTube to watch the film in question). The volume also includes numerous pieces that robustly center on Amerindian or indigenous texts and voices. A standout in this arena is Abigail Pérez Aguilera's "Mining and...