The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art

Abstract

Malcolm K. McNee's The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art presents a sophisticated and nuanced inquiry into the representational strategies engaged by contemporary Brazilian artists and poets to promote dialogue about the relations between people and environments at various scales. The introduction and first chapter draw Brazilian artists' and intellectuals' ecological aesthetics into tension with recent trends in North American ecocriticism, particularly as they relate to and problematize the nationalistic “paradise motif” critiqued by Brazilian historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. In this way, McNee generates a productive dialogue between Brazilian thought on the lived experience of local and regional environments and the social/symbolic construction of nature and recent North American proposals about environmental representation, such as Amanda Boetzkes's reappraisal of earth art, James Engelhardt's ecopoetics, and Timothy Morton's “ambient poetics.” McNee argues for an expanded definition of environmental activism, which he relates not only to the political struggle for environmental justice, but also to the search for subjectivities that deconstruct the foundational modern human/nature binary.