The extractive colonial enterprise that took root in the sixteenth century gave rise to legal structures, knowledge regimes, financial instruments, uneven globalization, and importantly, the relentless pursuit of accumulation that has produced the anthropogenic ecological crisis humanity faces today. This panel interrogates the representation of extractivism in literary texts by contemporary authors from diverse areas in the Americas. These papers participate in the ongoing, robust conversation in the environmental humanities about the operations and histories of extractivist logics and the co-emergence of the colonial/modern extractivist system, as most recently highlighted by Macarena Gómez-Barris's The Extractive Zone. The panelists offer insights from Latin American imaginaries of time and place, histories and possible futures, and in so doing, underscore the centrality of extractivism as a theoretical lens that foregrounds perspectives emergent from and attentive to the Global South.
[Short description of presentations]
Our panelists think with cultural texts that consider diverse cultures and ecosystems, from the tropical forests and sprawling metropolises to deserts and floodplains. In her presentation “Uncanny Extractivism in El diablo de las provincias by Juan Cárdenas,” Catalina Arango Correa considers extractivism and its implications for ecological political imagination. In her reading of Juan Cárdenas' novel about sugarcane monoculture in Colombia’s Cauca region, Arango Correa argues that Cardenas makes extractivism legible as a phenomenon that creates an "uncanny" weave of life, where extractivism’s violent and toxic consequences for human and non-human relationships are revealed. She nonetheless points out how the uncanny is often interpreted through an undisputed heteropatriarchal and colonial worldview.
Laura Barbas Rhoden, in “Extractivism and Central American Imaginaries of Relationality,” analyzes the representation of the entanglements of relationality with extractivism in 21st century Central American texts. Her talk centers on the work of Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa, particularly El país de Toó (2019), La cola del dragon (2014), and “El tesoro de la Sierra” (2004), and his representation of the enmeshment of peoples, territories, memories, and futures in extractive zones. She argues that representations of relationality in Central American cultural texts signal the ways in which the operations of extractivism are entangled with sociocultural relationships and territory in multiethnic states and global networks.
Regina Pieck then takes us to the U.S. American and Mexican forests with her presentation “Extractivism and the Texture of Language in Forests Across the U.S.-Mexico Border.” This presentation shows the interactions between the human and the nonhuman, as well as the co-existence of “slow violence” and “gore violence” in the ecosystem of the forest. Pieck analyzes this through the poetry collections of the U.S. Chicana poet María Meléndez, How Long She’ll Last in This World (2006), and the Mexican poet Maricela Guerrero, El sueño de toda célula (2018). Her presentation considers how marginalized communities on both sides of the border are impacted disproportionately by ecological harm, while simultaneously haunted by the equally urgent and pressing dangers of human violence.
Finally, the talk by Sebastián Figueroa, “Extracting Neoliberalism in the Atacama Desert,” considers the intersection between extractivism and neoliberalism in the Atacama Desert, the setting for a growing number of novels that deal with the histories of political, social, and environmental violence in Chile. Figueroa focuses on Patricio Jara’s novel Geología de un planeta desierto (2013), which explores the violent transition to neoliberalism in Chile. Focusing on the tensions between realism and the gothic, Figueroa asserts that Jara’s novel reveals the intimate connection between expulsion and extraction in the production of material life in neoliberalism.
[How session will function within allotted time]
The panel will be moderated by Carolyn Fornoff, who will make sure that each presenter speaks for no longer than 15 mins, to allow for up to thirty minutes of Q&A with conference attendees. In advance of the conference, the panelists will be reminded that their talks should be no longer than 7-8 pages, to ensure for equitable time distribution.