Emily Baker (UCL): Possible Worlds: Contemporary Latin American Ecological Fiction

Talk delivered on 1 February 2024 as part of the University of Manchester’s Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series.

Emily Baker is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies at University College London.

Abstract: One of the key questions at the heart of ecological fiction is: what is the relationship between language/culture and ‘the real’. The anthropologist Anna Tsing argues that: ‘To appreciate the patchy unpredictability associated with our current condition, we need to reopen our imaginations’. For Eduardo Kohn in his seminal work How Forests Think, ‘language is nested within broader forms of representation that have their own distinctive properties … open to the emerging worlds around us’. This presentation examines work that engages with the question of the interface between representation and ‘the real’ explicitly and self-reflexively. Drawing upon case studies from contemporary Latin American ecofiction, this presentation will primarily focus upon two very different novels as a function of the ‘possible’ or ’emerging’ worlds that they stage. The first is El camino de Ida/The Way Out (2013) the last novel written before his death by the canonical Argentine author Ricardo Piglia; a realist campus novel set in a fictionalised version of Princeton where the author worked, which tells the story of the U.S. domestic terrorist the Unabomber, with an ecological slant. The second is La mucama de Omicunlé/Tentacle (2015) by queer Dominican author Rita Indiana. This speculative fiction sets out a near possible future of ecological disaster with the opportunity for a character to travel back in time and prevent that future from playing out. Despite pertaining to different literary genres, I argue that both demonstrate that culture is the privileged terrain upon which ecological crisis is negotiated.

Paul Merchant (Bristol): ‘An Archipelagic Nation? Ecology and Identity on Chile’s Pacific Coast’

Talk given on 27 October 2021 as part of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series 2020/21.

Paul Merchant is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol.

Abstract: Discussions of identity, coloniality and ecology in the Pacific world have rarely considered that ocean’s eastern edge. Yet Chile’s complex relations with the cultures of its southern archipelago and its remote island territory of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) make it unquestionably a Pacific nation. Drawing on research carried out during my current AHRC Fellowship, this paper argues that when considering the intersection of environmental and social challenges in contemporary Chile, there is much to be gained by adopting an approach grounded in ‘archipelagic thinking’ (Martínez-San Miguel and Stephens 2020), which has to date been more familiar in Caribbean and Oceanic contexts. Through an analysis of recent documentary and essay films, as well as sound and installation art, I suggest that the project of decolonising our approach to the environmental humanities in Latin America is best served by an openness to multiple and incommensurable ‘ecological epistemes’ (Escobar 2020).