Voices in the Wilderness: Environment, Colonialism, and Coloniality in Latin American Literature

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Notes

¹Having been a marginal movement within Latin American literary studies for more than a decade, ecocriticism was recently featured in an MLA panel and a number of book-length studies, including: Ecocríticas: Literatura y medio ambiente, ed. Carmen Flys Junquera, José Manuel Marrero Henríquez, and Julia Barella Vigal (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2010); Adrian Kane, ed., The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth-Century Writings (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2010).

²On the “Arcadian” tradition, see Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 3–25. On “wilderness,” see William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 69–90.

³On the so-called “greening” of postcolonial studies, see Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, eds., Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

⁴Translations are the author's unless otherwise noted.

⁵Horacio Quiroga, Cuentos, ed. Leonor Fleming (Barcelona: Cátedra, 1995), especially “El desierto” (223–241), “A la deriva” (130–134), and “Una bofetada” (173–182).

⁶Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural Anthropology 25:2, 334–370; Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou 5 (June 1971), 95–102. See Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “‘He of the Trees’: Nature, Environment, and Creole Religiosities in Caribbean Literature,” Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005).

⁷See, for example, Felipe Martínez's research on environmental determinism and elite attitudes toward Colombia's lowland tropics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “Tránsitos por el río Magdalena: el boga, el blanco y las contradicciones del liberalismo colombiano en el medio siglo XIX,” Estudios de Literatura Colombiana 29 (July–December 2011) (Medellín: Universidad de Antioquia), 17–41.

⁸José Martí, “En comercio, proteger es destruir,” La América, New York, August 1883 (1975: IX, 382–383). Quoted in Castro Herrera, Los trabajos de ajuste y combate: Naturaleza y sociedad en la historia de América Latina (Bogotá: Casa de las Américas/Colcultura, 1994), 213 note 22.

⁹Ismael P. Márquez, La retórica de la violencia en tres novelas peruanas (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 51. Enrique Leff, “El desvanecimiento del sujeto y la reinvención de las identidades colectivas en la era de la complejidad ambiental,” Polis, Revista de la Universidad Bolivariana 9: 27 (2010), 191.

¹⁰See the Proposal of Bolivia to Rio + 20 World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, December 19, 2011. http://pwcc.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/proposal-of-bolivia-to-rio20 (accessed 3/26/2012).

¹¹Wendell E. Berry, “It All Turns on Affection,” 2012 Jefferson Lecture. http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture (accessed 5/16/2012).

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Notes on contributors

Jennifer L. French

Jennifer L. French is Associate Professor of Spanish at Williams College and currently serves as Director of the Center for Environmental Studies. She is the author of Nature, Neocolonialism and the Spanish American Regional Writers (2007)