Reading Extractivism

Abstract

Reading Extractivism Jens Andermann Extractivism, World Literature, Jungle Novel, El Dorado, Ecocriticism, Transculturation, New Materialism HÉCTOR HOYOS. Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America. Columbia UP, 2019. 302 pp. CHARLOTTE ROGERS. Mourning El Dorado: Literature and Extractivism in the Contemporary American Tropics. U of Virginia P, 2019. 340 pp. "Literature" (in the singular or plural), "contemporary," and "extractivism" are the buzzwords looming large in the titles of two recent book-length studies by Héctor Hoyos and Charlotte Rogers. The key addition to the triad is, obviously, the last of those three, "extractivism": it is the one that shakes up relations between literature and contemporariness we had taken for granted and, thus, also makes us look at these in a new light. What is "contemporary" when the timescales are counted not in generations or schools but rather in climate regimes and geological eras, or in the lapse of things and objects into (planned) obsolescence? And what happens to our received notions of literature once we interrogate it from the vantage point of its ability to accommodate living to verbal matter or to expose and subvert extractivism's objectification of the nonhuman? But literature—as both books wager, albeit from very different angles as we shall see—also has something to give back to post-extractivist critique and practice: "recent Latin American fiction," in Hoyos's words, "puts forward a negative political ecology which not only thinks together environmental and social issues but also investigates in language their blind spots, lacks, and omissions" (87). Books do not have arms, Hoyos concedes, but—as Rogers would no doubt agree—they do things nonetheless, and not just with words: "readers are their arms" and therefore interpretation, as performed by any reader but, in a more focused and thus also public and political fashion, by the critic, "extends the eventfulness of literature" (101). Both works, then, make the case for literature and aesthetics to matter when it comes to critiquing the extractivist matrix that has underwritten Latin America's inscription into the world-ecology of colonial and neocolonial capitalism, to borrow ecological [End Page 95] historian Jason W. Moore's term for the "bundling" of "capital, power and nature" in the colonial-modern "web of life" (45). Indeed, despite a more recent flurry of article-length studies asking about the historical and formal interfaces between aesthetics and resource-extractive economics in the region, more comprehensive contributions in the field of Latin American studies to the debates unleashed by Indigenous and environmental activism and the legal-political struggles for the "Rights of Nature" have been in short supply, even though José Miguel Wisnik's recent book-length inquiry into the importance of mining in Carlos Drummond de Andrade's poetry (Maquinação do mundo: Drummond e a mineração) has certainly broken new ground—no pun intended. With few exceptions—the pioneering work of Jorge Marcone, Gisela Heffes and Patrícia Vieira deserves special mention—Latin Americanism has been a latecomer to ecocriticism, in part because of a well-justified suspicion towards the latter's frequently race-and class-blind wilderness ethos as prevalent in its U.S. iteration. Critiques of extractivism, on the other hand, have largely remained impervious to aesthetic considerations, at least in their more macro-sociological incarnations as exemplified by the work of Eduardo Gudynas or Alberto Acosta. "Post-extractivism," as a critical discourse and as activist practice, split off from resource-nationalist neo-developmentalism during the 2000s, in a critical rereading of the dependency theories that continue to underwrite the former. Instead of maximizing revenue in order to create conditions for the leap into industrial modernity, post-extractivism aims at a societal transformation, fostering "a life that puts the self-sufficiency and self-management of human beings who live in communities at the core of its existence" (Acosta 99). Yet even though such a collective change of attitude would by necessity also require a cultural shift of sorts, debates on the cultural dimensions of extractivism and the possibility of its superseding have, thus far, remained restricted almost entirely to Indigenous cosmologies and to the role of science and technology as "epistemic...