Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment)

Description

Visualizing Loss in Latin America engages with a varied corpus of textual, visual, and cultural material with specific intersections with the natural world, arguing that Latin American literary and cultural production goes beyond ecocriticism as a theoretical framework of analysis. Gisela Heffes poses the following crucial question: How do we construct a conceptual theoretical apparatus to address issues of value, meaning, tradition, perspective, and language, that contributes substantially to environmental thinking, and that is part and parcel of Latin America? The book draws attention to ecological inequality and establishes a biopolitical, ethics-based reading of Latin American art, film, and literature that operates at the intersection of the built environment and urban settings. Heffes suggests that the aesthetic praxis that emerges in/from Latin America is permeated with a rhetoric of waste―a significant trait that overwhelmingly defines it. Preface References Acknowledgments Contents About the Author List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction 1 The Environment in (Eco)Critical Perspective 2 Ecocriticism: Then and Now 3 Ecocriticism and Latin America 4 Visualizing Loss in Latin America References Chapter 2: Destruction: The Garbage Dump as a Global Biocritical Trope 1 Unfathomable Fluidity: Toward a Condition of “Exception” 2 Collateral Residues of Modernity’s Production, Consumption, and Disposal 3 Residual Humans (or Human Ruins) 4 Visual Tales of Indistinctness 5 Intermission: Verbitsky 6 Narratives of Bioenvironmental Destruction 7 Contemporary Slums as a Reconfiguration of the Dump (Other, New Conditions of “Exception”) 8 Out of Sight, Out of Mind References Chapter 3: Sustainability: Waste and Its Social, Cultural, and Aesthetic Re-significations 1 From Destruction to Environmental Conservation: The Enacted Object of Waste 2 The “Subversive” Condition of Waste? 3 Waste from the Global City 4 Cartoneros 5 Pepenadores 6 Catadores 7 Diving in Havana: Dream or Nightmare? 8 Intermission II: Berni 9 From the Street to the (Art) Workshop and Back Again 10 By Way of Conclusion: A Bio/Ecocritical Reading References Chapter 4: Preservation: Nature and Urbanism from Utopia to Dystopia 1 Utopian Imaginaries and Urban Territories 2 Green Utopias, Ecological Utopias 3 Green Utopias in Urban Venues 4 Science and Nature in Cities 5 Nature (Re)Appropriated: A Utopian Effort for Private Societies in the Twenty-First Century 6 Dystopia for all and Futurist Ecocide in the Latin American City of the Twenty-First Century 7 Coda References Chapter 5: Bioecocriticism: A New Critical Episteme References Index