Abstract
Drawing upon my recently completed study, The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2023), my paper explores the metaphors of chile eating to distinguish Naturalist or Western settler aesthesis from the Native relational ontologies that refuse to disappear. Today those Native refusals preserve the possibilities of what their cosmologies could teach about how a late capitalist society may evolve truly indigenized ecologically situated knowledges. My genealogy of metaphors relies on the cronicas of conquest, Mesoamerican cosmology and poetry, as well as the ethnographies of Native culinary, medical, and farming practices to show how the Spanish elaborated the discourse of la comida de indios y la comida de cristianos to reinforce a racial classificatory system that represented the Native as a savage idolater, a cannibal, a sexual predator, an indolent peasant, a parsimonious saint resigned to hunger, and chiles as commodities symbolized both savage idolatry and the Western Hemisphere’s fabulously exploitable natural bounty. The colonial impositions of Naturalist religion and science throughout the hemisphere more than paved the way for European and U.S. industrial capitalism; they have delayed the ability of borderland settler societies to understand how Native relational eco-aesthetics of chile could enable their descendants and Native peoples to become indigenized to the Western hemisphere, a process 21st-century scientists, scholars, and climate activists now acknowledge as essential to effectively adapting to catastrophic climate change.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
DECOLONIAL, AESTHESIS, ECO-AESTHETICS, INDIGENIZED, NATURALIST ONTOLOGY, NATIVE RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY
