Abstract
Since the turn of the millennia, there has been a robust number of publications by Latin American women writers engaged with environmental injustices in their region. However, most of the scholarly publications on Latin American Ecocriticism focus on the canonical work of male writers (French, 2005; Rivera-Barnes and Hoeg, 2009; Taylor Kane, 2010; Anderson and Bora, 2016). In this paper, I outline a panorama of the literary production of contemporary Latin American women novelists that advocate for environmental justice by tracing the main themes and common genres among them. Then I offer an in-depth analysis of one of these novels. One of the main thematic areas is the representation of bad-development (Dumond and Mottin, 1981; Satrustegui, 2009; Svampa and Viale, 2014) and of alternative socio-environmental structures. I analyze the Ecuadorian novel Poso Wells (2007) by Gabriela Alemán in relation to multinational corporations and local governments that infringe indigenous nations´ ways of living with extractive practices. Building on the notion of unsustainable agriculture, I study how Argentinian Samantha Schweblin reimagines the monstrous consequences of agrotoxins on children while at the same time I reflect about motherhood in this context. I study how Dominican Rita Indiana denounces the consequences of eco-tourism in La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacles] (2015) through the representation of African-Antillean sea deities. Finally, I offer an in-depth analysis of how Uruguayan Fernanda Trías preannounces a plague which causes food scarcity, as she ponders the female role of caretakers in Mugre rosa [Pink Slime] (2020).
Presenters
Victoria JaraStudent, PhD. Comparative Literature, University of Western Ontario, Ontario, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Economic, Social, and Cultural Context
KEYWORDS
Environmental Humanities, Latin American Literature, Gender Studies, Indigenous Studies
