Nature Fantasies

Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America

Gabriel Horowitz (Ed.)

2023
176 pages
$37.95
ISBN 9781684484997
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

In this original study, Gabriel Horowitz examines the work of select nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American writers through the lens of contemporary theoretical debates about nature, postcoloniality, and national identity. In the work of José Martí, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Jorge Luis Borges, Augusto Roa Bastos, Cesar Aira, and others, he traces historical constructions of nature in regional intellectual traditions and texts as they inform political culture on the broader global stage. By investigating national literary discourses from Cuba, Argentina, and Paraguay, he identifies a common narrative thread that imagines the utopian wilderness of the New World as a symbolic site of independence from Spain. In these texts, Horowitz argues, an expressed desire to return to the nation's foundational nature contributed to a movement away from political and social engagement and toward a "biopolitical state," in which nature, traditionally seen as pre-political, conversely becomes its center.

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Reviews
" . . . very sharp, provocative and sophisticated [approach] to nature and literature that open[s] the way to future ecocritical and environmental humanities studies . . . " - Ímpetu, June 2024

"Horowitz challenges conventional approaches, particularly in recent environmental criticism, that see a return to nature as an emancipatory act (from the colonial period to today), when quite to the contrary, it might be a reifying act that further leads to a biopolitical state. Those committed to a rigorous Latin American ecocriticism will need and want to engage with this cross examination." ~Christopher Travis, author of Resisting Alienation: The Literary Work of Enrique Lihn

"A study on the discursive history of nature in Latin America, Nature Fantasies is a far-reaching and well-documented intervention that offers fresh new readings of such classics as Gómez de Avellaneda, Martí, and Heredia. The author argues for the nineteenth-century signifier 'nature' in Spanish America as one housing criollo fantasies that aimed at superseding and erasing both indigenous histories of the region and the continent's own non-human history. A readable theoretical intervention on our own historical uses of the word-concept 'nature,' this book is also a study that challenges, in productive ways, the very tenets of ecocriticism and what we do as ecocritics." ~Felipe Martínez Pinzón, coeditor of Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon

"In its candid engagement with the modern Latin American literary canon, Nature Fantasies: Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America provides a succinctly written assessment of some of the limitations inherent to current paradigms of thought such as decolonial thinking and the environmental humanities. It makes a valuable contribution to contemporary debates on Latin America's past and present." ~Gareth Williams, author of Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State

"A formidable and provocative examination of the role of nature thinking (and nature writing) in the historical transition from cultural decolonization to the modern biopolitical state in Latin America. A must-read for anyone interested in the ways nature and politics intersect." ~Alejandro Quin, coeditor of Authoritarianism, Cultural History, and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing Paraguay

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Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150.00, 9781684485000; EPUB: $37.95, 9781684485017