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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Reviews
"In this consistently insightful, well-researched, and well-written study of four major Puerto Rican poets of the early twentieth century, Víctor Figueroa convincingly demonstrates in his words, 'how a single island's history and ultimate destiny is inextricably entangled with global histories and planetary hopes for liberation - a liberation that must . . . [include] the well-being of both human beings and their other-than-human places and companions.' Such a study of Puerto Rico is long overdue for the insights the island's literature can offer to the environmental humanities. Decolonial Topophilia is smart, clear, and important scholarship that advances our understanding of the complexities and risks of what it means to love a place even as it rightly insists on its indispensability for the future." - George B. Handley, coeditor of Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment

"Decolonial Topophilia is a rich and timely intervention into the overlapping fields of Caribbean literary studies, environmental humanities, and decolonial thought. Víctor Figueroa offers a compelling account of how such Puerto Rican poets as Lloréns, De Burgos, Palés Matos, and Corretjer register - and contest - the transformation of land, labor, and life under colonial modernity. What emerges is a nuanced reading of nature not as scenery, but as a site where the violences of empire, the logics of capital, and the affective attachments to place converge. By placing these poets in dialogue with broader ecological and theoretical debates, Figueroa repositions Puerto Rican literature within urgent conversations about environmental crisis, colonialism, and the cultural meanings of place. This is a critical intervention that will resonate across disciplines." - Jason Cortés, author of Macho Ethics: Masculinity and Self-Representation in Latino-Caribbean Narrative (Bucknell University Press)

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