Future Environments of 21st Century Latin American Fiction

Abstract

The nature of the relationship between humanity and the natural environment has historically been one of division. The binaries of human/nature and culture/nature have influenced Western thought in the creation of strict physical and ideological distinctions between humanity and nature. In the chapters that comprise this dissertation, I analyze twenty-first century works of science and dystopic fiction from Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil. Through an ecocritical perspective, I analyze these transnational texts, paying special attention to issues of technology and spatiality that appear throughout the narratives. In the first chapter, comprised of Pola Oloixarac’s Las constelaciones oscuras, I examine the novel through the lens of an Indigenous cosmology briefly mentioned in the text in order to analyze the manifestations of technology and the natural world, specifically in relation to the masked dangers humanity’s weaponization of technology can pose. Conversely, the second chapter focuses on short stories from Diez planetas by Yuri Herrera and El matrimonio de los peces rojos by Guadalupe Nettel as vehicles for confronting the Western understanding of space and spatial relationships by utilizing unlikely landscapes such as organs, body parts, and homes to complicate the borders between “human” and “natural” environments. The final chapter moves outside and explores the landscape of the city to foreground how Marcia Tiburi’s Sob os pés, meu corpo inteiro depicts Nature’s revenge on humans and their built environments. This project examines the textual manifestations of the natural world to emphasize the role of anthropocentric ideologies in cultural products. I underscore how not only environmental degradation is seeping into literary productions, but how these works are being used as a form of resistance.