Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultural Production, livre ebook

Challenging anthropocentric perspectives by highlighting cultural representations of plants and animals across Latin American history

The first book to integrate both critical plant studies and critical animal studies within the context of Latin American culture, this collection explores the relationships between plants, animals, and humans across various countries and historical periods and through various kinds of media. Acknowledging nonhuman species as coproducers of culture, this volume offers a deeper understanding of the region’s natural environment and humanity’s place in it.

Contributors analyze a wide range of cultural production, including recent science films on monarch butterfly migration, nineteenth-century photographs of Panama, the eighteenth-century diary of a nun in New Granada, 1920s Brazilian landscape paintings, contemporary Zapotec poetry, and twentieth-century vegetarian cookbooks from Uruguay and Mexico. By focusing on plants and animals, these essays uncover the entanglements of nonhuman lives with issues such as race, gender, labor, and coloniality, while highlighting other-than-human ways of living, knowing, and communicating.

Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultural Production promotes a deeper understanding of cultural forms in Latin America and breaks down disciplinary divides—both between critical animal studies and critical plant studies and among fields such as literary studies, film studies, and art history. Ultimately, this collection challenges anthropocentric perspectives as it offers new pathways to think about and with plants and animals.

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Plants, Animals, and Cultural Criticism from Latin America

Cristina E. Pardo Porto and Oscar A. Pérez

Part I. Beyond Anthropocentrism

1. Anthropomorphism and Vegetal Life in Sara Gallardo’s “Un césped”
Micah McKay

2. “They Have Wrapped the Fibers of My Plants around Their Naked Feet”: Plants and Animals of the US-Mexico Borderscape
Kate Ostrom

3. Tropical Scenery: Plant and Animal Resistance in Early Photographs of Panama’s Rainforest
Cristina E. Pardo Porto

4. Brazil, the Country of Palm Trees: A Study of the Arecaceae in the Work of Tarsila do Amaral
Ana Carolina Carmona-Ribeiro

Part II. Language and Knowledge

5. Cattle Intimacies: Animal Voice and Literary Speech in João Guimarães
Rosa and Marília Floôr Kosby Thomaz Amancio

6. Languages of Life: Biosemiotics and Living Systems of Plants and Animals in Contemporary Mexican Poetry
Brian T. Chandler

7. Bugs, Plants, and Laboratories: A Grammar for/of More-Than-Human Entanglements in Alexis Gambis’s Science New Wave Films
Oscar A. Pérez

8. In the Beginning Was the Fable! Textually Transmitted Beasts and Commodities in Amores Perros and Calila e Dimna

Beatriz Rivera-Barnes

Part III. Coloniality and Multispecies Resistance

9. “He wanted me to be his little dog”: Imagery of Nature, Gender, and Colonial Powers in Jerónima Nava y Saavedra’s Spiritual Autobiography
Pilar Espitia

10. Guamán Poma’s Ecocentric Ethos in Primer Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno

Víctor Sierra Matute

11. Migration and Stasis in Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ /La nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los ríos by Irma Pineda
Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez

12. El árbol del chicle: Plant Life and Racialization in Luis Rosado Vega’s Poema de la selva trágica (1938) and Yulene Olaizola’s Selva trágica (2021)

Jorge Quintana Navarrete

Part IV. The Politics of Plant and Animal Life

13. Of Paddocks, Plants, and Cattle: Security and Burden in the Caribbean Age of Sugar

Niall A. Peach

14. “There’s Nothing Better than Giving Life”: Freeing the “Plant” from the “Plantation” in Recent Latin American Narratives about Coffee

Mauricio Espinoza

15. Captivity and Pride in the Yerba Mate World: A Bond for Survival under Persistent Coloniality

Jonathan Mulki

16. Return to Nature: The Politics of Animals and Plants in Two Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Latin American Vegetarian Cookbooks

Vanesa Miseres

Afterword: A Latin American Mélange of Existence

Patrícia Vieira

List of Contributors

Index