Decolonial Topophilia

Nature, Place, and History in Puerto Rican Poetry

Víctor Figueroa

2026
262 pages
$48.95
ISBN 9781684486083
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Decolonial Topophilia: Nature, Place, and History in Puerto Rican Poetry examines how four major poets - Luis Lloréns Torres, Luis Palés Matos, Juan Antonio Corretjer, and Julia de Burgos - address the ecological and human consequences of colonial domination in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Their poetry raises questions about the capitalist transformation of land through monocultures like sugarcane, the reduction of nature to exploitable resources, and the ties between attachment to place and nationalism. In tracing these connections, this pathbreaking book reveals how poetic visions of place can challenge colonial histories and imagine more reciprocal ways of inhabiting the world.

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About the author:

VÍCTOR FIGUEROA is a professor of Spanish at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. His publications include Not at Home in One's Home: Caribbean Self-Fashioning in the Poetry of Luis Palés Matos, Aimé Césaire, and Derek Walcott and Prophetic Visions of the Past: Pan-Caribbean Representations of the Haitian Revolution, as well as three poetry collections and articles in scholarly journals.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150, 9781684486090; Ebook: $48.95, 9781684486106