Contemporary Brazilian Indigenous Thought and Ecology

(with Karen Shiratori and Malcolm McNee)

This co-edited book offers a panorama of contemporary Brazilian thought and its relation to ecology. Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies consider that there is a continuity between different forms of existence and see the encounter between beings as connections to be negotiated in an incessant cosmopolitics. This interdependence between humans and non-humans has decisive consequences for human politics, insofar as, for Indigenous peoples, the link to their ancestral home is key to their lives. Indigenous ecological thought can therefore not be separated from the struggle for the demarcation and protection of Indigenous lands faced with the expansion of the extractivist frontier.

The Environment in Brazilian Culture: Literature, Cinema and the Arts

This edited book project aims to explore the centrality of the environment in shaping Brazilian culture. How have different Brazilian cultural productions depicted nature? In which ways has the environment determined Brazilian literature, cinema, and the arts? How have disparate geographical regions—the Amazon, the Northeast, etc.—been portrayed in Brazilian texts, films and other artworks? What are the Brazilian contributions to current debates on critical plant and animal studies, post-humanism and, more broadly, the environmental humanities? The project brings together a collection of essays that seek to answer some of these questions and to assess the centrality of the environment in shaping Brazilian literature, cinema and the arts.

The Amazon River Basin in Contemporary Latin American Culture

A special issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

This special issue explores the representation of the Amazon River Basin in Latin American culture, including literature, cinema and the arts. Spanning nine countries, Amazonia is a key element of the South American natural environment, whose influence can be felt throughout the continent and even in other areas of the globe. Its size, diverse flora and fauna, and relevance in terms of the earth’s biosphere have turned it into an emblem of the natural world. In recent years, the destruction of the rainforest by forest fires, logging, mining, agrobusiness and other extractivist industries has attracted widespread condemnation both within Latin America and abroad. This special issue aims to analyze cultural representations of Amazonia, paying particular attention to evolving depictions of the natural environmental and their impact on our views of the region. Going beyond existing scholarship, potential contributors draw on insights from ecocriticism and, more broadly, from the environmental humanities, to discuss the ways in which portrayals of the Amazon reveal underlying views on nature and, in turn, impact human behavior towards the natural world.