Within Hispanophone discourse, shaped by Continental Spain’s urban centers, Othered territories fall into the side of Nature in the Nature/Culture divide. Be it the landscapes of the Andes or the atavistic “España Profunda,” their inhabitants are linked to wilderness and “primitive” forms of thought. It is necessary to revisit and rethink these discursive linkages, by analyzing how texts from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries represent ritualistic practices that celebrate the union between human and non-human and lay bare the artificiality of these categories.

The consolidation of Object Oriented Ontologies, Animal Studies and Ecocriticism within Hispanic studies points towards the urgency with which criticism needs to transcend an anthropocentric discourse. This is the subject of William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” and Lawrence Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism. Even more radical approaches to these issues can be found in Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, Latour’s Politics of Nature, and Rossi Braidotti’s The Posthuman.

Mariangela Ugarelli opens up this discussion by revisiting the oldest text in the panel, Ventura García Calderón’s La Venganza del Cóndor (1924). Ugarelli’s approach to the panel’s topic will hinge on the postcolonial usage of the Great Divide for the purposes of Imperial Gothic, following Patrick Bratlinger. García Calderón paints a picture in which the indigenous man, animals, nature and disease have celebrated a “dark pact” to take revenge on the descendants of the Conquistadors. Notwithstanding, by choosing the non-mimetic as a way of giving shape to white creoles’ fears, García Calderón shows his hand and, unintentionally, demonstrates that the Nature/Culture divide is as artificial as the Gothic machinery he uses to portray it.

Carmen Araujo concentrates on the resolution of the conflict between a multicultural community and its history through a ritual encounter with natural forces in Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s La isla de los jacintos cortados (1980). The action takes place in an isolated city, eroded by political turmoil. The non-mimetic climax, the advent of Greek gods, marks a pause in social division and a disruptive exchange with nature. The hegemonic discourses inherited from humanism and modernity are questioned by means of phenomenology and semiotics. The omnipotent and destabilizing presence and action of non-human bodies renew the links between societies, their environment, and therefore their narratives.

In turn, Arturo Ruiz-Mautino addresses questions of form, ecological crisis, and postcolonial asymmetries in “Taxonomies of the End: Genealogy and Extinction in Mayra Montero’s Tú, la oscuridad (1995).” Ruiz-Mautino interprets the Cuban novel focusing on the intertwinement of human and non-human taxonomies, which paves the way for a timely understanding of the place of the novel form amid the rise of environmental concerns in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. This intervention questions the referential role that ecological anxieties have assumed in the genealogy of ecologically-oriented novelistic production in Cuba. It turns to Montero’s exercise in taxonomic rendering as a means to overcome the idea that novels have a hard time making legible the decelerating aspects of the age of species-related paranoia.

Finally, Alvaro Jasaui-Chero closes off the panel by exploring how Pola Oloixarac’s Las constelaciones oscuras (2015) proposes a fictional rewriting of the colonial encounter, reimagined as an injection of radical alterity into the heart of modernity. The colonial subject is represented as in liaison with botanical and entomological agencies, and thus, as capable of initiating the colonizer figure into a kinship with the non-human. Through what masquerades as a celebratory mating ritual, the botanist Niklas Brumm is “infected”, forcing his approach and goals to diverge from the ethos of nineteenth century scientific discourse.

Each panelist will speak for fifteen minutes, leaving fifteen additional minutes for questions and discussion. In closing, the panel offers a multifaceted, interdisciplinary approach to questions of the literary, cultural and environmental present of both the Americas and Spain by isolating a distinctive mode of analysis, namely, an inquiry into the reasons for celebrating the collapse of the Great Divide.