“Amazonian Ecopoetics: Paes Loureiro’s Shamanic Zoophytography.” Ed. Brigida Pastor and Lloyd Davies. Romance Studies 41.1 (forthcoming in 2023).

In this article I discuss the notion of Amazonian ecopoetry. Given that poetry from the Amazon expresses Amazonian culture and that culture from the region is marked by an indistinction between nature and culture, between human and non-human cultures and societies, I argue that Amazonian poetry is necessarily an ecopoetry. I subsequently reflect upon the concept of Amazonian perspectivism, developed, among others, by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, as an entry-point into the interpretation of the multiple metamorphoses that characterize Amazonian literature, broadly understood to include folktales, legends, and so on. I draw a comparison between the Indigenous, shamanic goal of translating between non-human and human perspectives, and Amazonian ecopoetics that allows plants and animals to articulation themselves within human literature. In the final section of the essay, I analyze the writings of Amazonian-born poet João de Jesus Paes Loureiro as an example of Amazonian shamanic ecopoetry. In his texts, legendary and actual Amazonian entities speak in the first person to express the convergences as well as the equivocations that punctuate the myriad interaction between human and non-human beings. 

"Indigenous Apocalypses: The Anthropocene Seen from the Amazon." The Anthropocene as a Multiple Crisis: Perspectives from Latin America. Edited by Elissa Rashkin. Jalisco: CALAS. (forthcoming)

(with Emanuele Fabiano)

In this article, we take Brazilian Amazonian artist Denilson Baniwa's "Oh, I see, real civilized," a re-work of a Mad Max film still, as a point of departure to discuss different understandings of the end of the world and of the Anthropocene. We argue for a re-evaluation of the notion of the Anthropocene seen from an Amazonian perspective, through the lens of peoples for whom the end of the world has already happened multiple times during the process of colonization. 

“An Anarchist Rainforest: Cooperation in Ferreira de Castro’s The Jungle.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. forthcoming in 2023.

This text discusses Ferreira de Castro's novel The Jungle taking the author's anarchist leanings into account. I argue that the transformation of the main character throughout the text from an elitist to an egalitarian is due to his observation of examples of cooperation in the rainforest. I discuss the thought of Russian anarchist Petr Kropotkin as a key inspiration for the representation of an anarchist Amazonia in Castro's text.