Hereafter: Off the Grid

Abstract

Lines of Geography concludes that Western notions of “development” have thrived on a geographically enabled extractivism that has reached its limits in this new era of the Anthropocene. To examine these contemporary issues in more depth, the final chapter turns to Amerindian animistic thought as a potential exit strategy for the multiple crises spawned by global capitalism. It anchors on Argentine director Andres Di Tella’s documentary El pais del diablo (2007), which complicates Zeballos’s participation in the Conquista del Desierto and illustrates the sustained impulse across time and space to use geography and language to discipline the Latin American nation, be it punitively, didactically, or institutionally. The chapter leaves readers with post-Eurocentric paradigms as a path to a hereafter that is compatible with modern capitalist civilization.