Fostering a comparative approach, this session explores narratives of extractivism in the long nineteenth century in Chile, Colombia, and Italy. Most of the critical scholarship on extractivism focuses on the neoliberal era. However, the "extractive view," the colonial gaze that imagines territories as a collection of potential commodities (Barris-Gómez), has a longer history. Despite foundational works like Mary Pratt's Imperial Eyes, nineteenth-century narratives of extractivism remain relatively unexplored. While there is a well-established tradition on literature's role in nation-building (Sommer, Ramos), Latin American foundational economic imaginaries have only recently begun to be explored (Beckman). Similar neglect can be found in Italian studies. Many monographs examine the role of fiction in creating imagined communities during the Unification process (Caudet, Re, Banti), but Italian economic fictions have largely been ignored. Recent ecocritical studies have mainly focused on post-WWII Italy's landscape (Seger, Iovino), overlooking nineteenth-century novels that explored how human and nonhuman agents altered the natural environment since the Unification. This session fills this gap by investigating extractivism in the long nineteenth century in a dialogue with two sets of scholarship with which it is rarely paired: critical finance studies and nation-building studies.

To promote discussion, the session is limited to three 15-minute papers focusing on Italian and Latin American literature and culture. It will be chaired by Pedro García Caro, who specializes in the comparative study of socio-political conceptualizations of nation and nature across the Americas. García Caro will introduce the panelists and moderate the discussion between presenters and the public.

In the first paper, Nicolás Sánchez-Rodríguez studies the sovereign bonds of Colombia issued in 1822 by Francisco Antonio Zea, Simón Bolívar's envoy in London. Looking at their relation to Colombia. Being a Geographical Account of that Country (1822), he argues that Colombia was invented as a space of extractivism at the intersection of debt signs and the writings that sought to substantiate the promises embodied by these signs. For him, this intertextuality worked as a matrix of "discursive-financial" convertibility that translated the territory and populations of the nation-state into paper for their administration. Sánchez-Rodríguez thus suggests that extractivist narratives of the 1820s can be approached as a form of symbolic "usury" to account for their neocolonial nature.

The second speaker, Rafael Núñez Rodríguez, plays with the shared etymological origins of economics and ecology in the Greek word oikos to analyze representations of mining at the turn of the twentieth century in Chile. Baldomero Lillo's "Los Inválidos," from the classic collection of stories Sub Terra (1904), serves as the starting point for Núñez's analysis of how extractivism places the economy at odds with ecology in a reciprocal process of degradation: humans consume nature and the ecosystem in turn consumes them. Núñez provides a biocentric reading of Lillo's story that underlines the corporeal alliance between workers and the mine against capitalist exploiters. He thus vindicates "Los inválidos" as an anti-extractivist narrative that places life at the center, countering hegemonic discourses that celebrate Chile as a mining nation.

Finally, Cristina Carnemolla analyzes another metaphor of the "mine" in Giovanni Verga's short story Rosso Malpelo (1878). Her study uses the precarity of Sicilian sand mining as a metaphor for the instabilities of the young Italian nation. The main character, a child exploited in the mines because villagers view him as an embodiment of the devil, is criminalized for his physical appearance. She concludes by highlighting how the mine may serve as a metaphor for a semi-colonial market system imposed on the South by the central government.