This session traces early ecological and environmental thought in avant-garde and modernist movements, examining how artists and writers across different time periods used experimental forms to challenge the legacies of colonialism, environmental imperialism, and capitalist exploitation. The session will be organized chronologically, covering a range of historical and global contexts, from early 20th-century Brazilian avant-garde movements to the Mexican Renaissance, 1930s American Modernism, and mid-20th-century Moroccan poetics.

This panel participates in an interdisciplinary conversation about how the humanities can harness the potential of experimental artwork and literary praxis as interventions in ongoing ecological conflicts. The study of the avant-garde is central to 20th-century humanistic thought, with literary modernisms emerging from these movements. Remapping the avant-garde, this panel redefines modern literary practices and addresses a significant gap in scholarship regarding the ecological imaginaries of these artists.

Contemporary scholars explore how avant-garde movements transcended European influences to address global environmental and colonial issues: Flores’s Mexico's Revolutionary Avant-Gardes shows how avant-garde movements emerged in response to Mexico’s modernization post-revolution, while Infante’s A Planetary Avant-Garde examines the transnational scope of experimental poetics in the context of Iberian colonialism. Engaging with Elizabeth Black’s The Nature of Modernism and Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett’s Affective Materialities, the panel extends their ideas by examining environmental concerns within global modernisms. Together, the panelists reframe the avant-garde not only in artistic terms but also in relation to ecological and colonial concerns, expanding the discussion further to Morocco, Brazil, and beyond.

Victoria Saramago begins the session by exploring Brazil in the 1920s and the avant-garde movement’s engagement with energy and ecological systems in “Anthropophagocene: Energy and the Anthropocenic Imagination of Brazil’s Cannibalist Avant-Gardes.” Saramago situates Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagy as a cultural and intellectual response to imperialism, demonstrating how energy, specifically electrical energy, becomes a critical infrastructural element in Andrade’s poetic and political thought. Saramago argues that the concept of anthropophagy—the consumption of foreign cultural elements—evolves into the consumption of the planet’s natural resources, marking the transition to what Saramago calls the Anthropophagocene.

Sarah María Medina Pérez then brings the focus to the Mexican avant-garde in the mid-20th century, in “Ecopoetics and the Transnational Avant-Garde: Modernist Experimentation and Ecological Imaginaries in Mexico City,” examining the works of Nahui Olin and Alice Paalen Rahon. Medina highlights how their experimental poetics engage with ecological imaginaries, critiquing environmental imperialism and colonialism through representations of the body and landscape. Considering the Iztaccíhuatl volcano, Medina demonstrates how these avant-garde artists anticipated contemporary ecological thought, using their art to interrogate the intersection of the body and nature.

Kayla Lutes in “The Whole Valley is Witness: Environmental Advocacy in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead” considers environmental advocacy in 1930s America through Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead. Lutes shows how Rukeyser’s documentary-style poetry captures the effects of the Hawk’s Nest disaster, using modernist experimentation to make the connections between environmental destruction and capitalist exploitation. Rukeyser’s feminist resistance becomes a call to action, turning the disaster into a symbol of ecological and social justice.

Lastly, Sara Ansaloni shifts to the 1960s–1970s in Morocco, with “From Earth to Memory: The Ecopoetic Aesthetics of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine” focusing on the avant-garde journal Souffles-Anfas and the poetics of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. Through is work, Khaïr-Eddine excavates Morocco’s past from the maternal earth, forging a modern national identity that resists colonial narratives and rigid religious dogmas. Ansaloni argues that Khaïr-Eddine reimagines the connection to the land by crafting a mystical, feminine, and utopian vision of the South, ultimately constructing an ecological and modern Moroccan identity, contributing to broader debates on ecopoetics, surrealist aesthetics, and postcolonial resistance.

The session will conclude with a broader reflection on the role of avant-garde and modernist poetics in responding to environmental crises. Analyzing these works through an ecocritical lens, the session will offer new perspectives on how experimental forms can engage with pressing contemporary ecological concerns.