BOOK MANUSCRIPT
NECROTERRITORIES. SLAUGHTERHOUSES AND THE
POLITICS OF DEATH
In preparation
Necroterritoriestheorizes slaughtering sites as dynamic biopolitical territories that explicitly regulate animal death, and implicitly regulate both human and animal life. I take my cue from Achilles Mbembe’s definition of necropower as “the power that proceeds by a sort of inversion between life and death, as if life was merely death’s medium” (Necropolitics, 38) to examine how the concepts of “animality” and “animalization” have played an explicit role in the distribution of death and life in the River Plate basin, tracing these concepts in 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century literary and visual materials from Argentina, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil. Two interdisciplinary research initiatives have been key for writing my book: my LASA award-winning film, El caso de la carneand the online exhibition Matadero Modelo.
NECROTERRITORIES. SLAUGHTERHOUSES AND THE
POLITICS OF DEATH
In preparation
Necroterritoriestheorizes slaughtering sites as dynamic biopolitical territories that explicitly regulate animal death, and implicitly regulate both human and animal life. I take my cue from Achilles Mbembe’s definition of necropower as “the power that proceeds by a sort of inversion between life and death, as if life was merely death’s medium” (Necropolitics, 38) to examine how the concepts of “animality” and “animalization” have played an explicit role in the distribution of death and life in the River Plate basin, tracing these concepts in 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century literary and visual materials from Argentina, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil. Two interdisciplinary research initiatives have been key for writing my book: my LASA award-winning film, El caso de la carneand the online exhibition Matadero Modelo.
BOOK MANUSCRIPT
(IN)DEFENSE OF THE
LAND: BIODIVERSITY AND LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY IN 21ST-CENTURY POETRY FROM
ABIAYALA
In preparation
(In)Defense of the Land analyzes the relationship between biodiversity and linguistic diversity as two interrelated phenomena resulting from extractivism. Taking as a premise that the displacement of Indigenous, Afrodiasporic, and rural populations by the advancement of the extractive frontier has resulted in the loss of ancestral ecological knowledge conveyed in those communities’ languages, I show how contemporary poets writing in Guna, Garifuna, Guaraní, Maya K’iche’, Náhuatl, Ngäbe and Maya Yucateco advocate for the preservation of the biodiversity of Abiayala.
EDITED VOLUME
RUGE EL BOSQUE: ECOPOESÍA DE LA AMAZONÍA
Volumen III - In preparation
Co-edited with Javiera Perez Salerno and Whitney DeVos
This volume is organized around the ecosystem of the Amazon, the South American tropical forest that spans the nation-states of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela, as well as the French overseas department of French Guiana. Currently in preparation, this multilingual environment poetry book addresses the Amazon rainforest from a transactional perspective, with an emphasis on the territorial existence of indigenous nations whose cultures and languages are situated within the Amazon basin.
RUGE EL BOSQUE: ECOPOESÍA DE LA AMAZONÍA
Volumen III - In preparation
Co-edited with Javiera Perez Salerno and Whitney DeVos
This volume is organized around the ecosystem of the Amazon, the South American tropical forest that spans the nation-states of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela, as well as the French overseas department of French Guiana. Currently in preparation, this multilingual environment poetry book addresses the Amazon rainforest from a transactional perspective, with an emphasis on the territorial existence of indigenous nations whose cultures and languages are situated within the Amazon basin.
EDITED VOLUME
RUGE EL BOSQUE: ECOPOESÍA DE MESOAMÉRICA
Volume II – Caleta Olivia, 2024. Co-edited with Javiera Perez Salerno and Whitney DeVos
This plurilingual anthology gathers environmental poetic expressions written in Guna, Maya K’iche, Nahuatl, Belizean Creole, Garifuna, Yucatec Maya, Spanish and English. The volume indexes the cosmological and linguistic plurality of the Mesoamerican region composed of the current nation-states of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and parts of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Honduras. The included poetics demonstrate the importance of considering natural biodiversity and linguistic diversity as concomitant phenomena, and to reflect about the risk posed by colonial and capitalist extractivist models to the existence of Abiayala’s territories.
RUGE EL BOSQUE: ECOPOESÍA DE MESOAMÉRICA
Volume II – Caleta Olivia, 2024. Co-edited with Javiera Perez Salerno and Whitney DeVos
This plurilingual anthology gathers environmental poetic expressions written in Guna, Maya K’iche, Nahuatl, Belizean Creole, Garifuna, Yucatec Maya, Spanish and English. The volume indexes the cosmological and linguistic plurality of the Mesoamerican region composed of the current nation-states of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and parts of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Honduras. The included poetics demonstrate the importance of considering natural biodiversity and linguistic diversity as concomitant phenomena, and to reflect about the risk posed by colonial and capitalist extractivist models to the existence of Abiayala’s territories.
EDITED VOLUME
RUGE EL BOSQUE: ECOPOESÍA DEL CONO SUR
Volume I – Caleta Olivia, 2023. Co-edited with Javiera Perez Salerno and Whitney DeVos
Ruge el bosque. Volumen 1: ecopoesía del Cono Sur reúne poesía medioambiental escrita desde los territorios conocidos como Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay y sus zonas fronterizas. Las poéticas de este volumen señalan la convivencia de lenguas originarias, híbridas y coloniales del Cono Sur para pensar en la crisis climática planetaria desde perspectivas ecológicas, culturales y lingüísticas plurales. Para más consideraciones sobre este volumen, ver: “Wetland Poetics: Regional Situadness as Planetary Practice,” escrito por Valeria Meiller y Whitney DeVos.
RUGE EL BOSQUE: ECOPOESÍA DEL CONO SUR
Volume I – Caleta Olivia, 2023. Co-edited with Javiera Perez Salerno and Whitney DeVos
Ruge el bosque. Volumen 1: ecopoesía del Cono Sur reúne poesía medioambiental escrita desde los territorios conocidos como Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay y sus zonas fronterizas. Las poéticas de este volumen señalan la convivencia de lenguas originarias, híbridas y coloniales del Cono Sur para pensar en la crisis climática planetaria desde perspectivas ecológicas, culturales y lingüísticas plurales. Para más consideraciones sobre este volumen, ver: “Wetland Poetics: Regional Situadness as Planetary Practice,” escrito por Valeria Meiller y Whitney DeVos.
EDITED VOLUME
UNPREDICTABLE
ARCHITECTURES: THE POLITICS OF GARDENING IN LATIN AMERICAN CULTURE
Brill – Under Review
Co-edited with Lucas Mertehikian
Considered either as material landscape or symbols, gardens are usually thought of as spaces where nature appears to be enclosed and controlled. But as professional and amateur horticulturists know too well, gardens are, above all, unpredictable: too much or too little rain will “spoil” them; transplants might grow differently in new, unknown geographies; and prelapsarian Western ideals (including early modern notions of the ‘New World’ and current representations of the Amazon as untouched) conceal forms of racialized violence that remain to be uncovered. In a time of rapid degradation of fundamental green spaces and the advancement of climate change, Unpredictable Architectures reflects on the cultural and environmental relevance of the vegetal world through spatial practices and land uses from the arrival of European white settlers to the present. This volume is divided into three parts, each one focusing on different aspects of the Latin American garden: “Part I: Gardens as Archives,” “Part II: Gardens as Discourse,” and “Part III: Gardens as Critique.” The contributors of this volume work across fields such as plant studies, landscape history, urban studies, literary, and cultural studies. Their articles think creatively about modes of human-vegetal cohabitation within the social, political, racial, and territorial coordinates of Latin America.
UNPREDICTABLE
ARCHITECTURES: THE POLITICS OF GARDENING IN LATIN AMERICAN CULTURE
Brill – Under Review
Co-edited with Lucas Mertehikian
Considered either as material landscape or symbols, gardens are usually thought of as spaces where nature appears to be enclosed and controlled. But as professional and amateur horticulturists know too well, gardens are, above all, unpredictable: too much or too little rain will “spoil” them; transplants might grow differently in new, unknown geographies; and prelapsarian Western ideals (including early modern notions of the ‘New World’ and current representations of the Amazon as untouched) conceal forms of racialized violence that remain to be uncovered. In a time of rapid degradation of fundamental green spaces and the advancement of climate change, Unpredictable Architectures reflects on the cultural and environmental relevance of the vegetal world through spatial practices and land uses from the arrival of European white settlers to the present. This volume is divided into three parts, each one focusing on different aspects of the Latin American garden: “Part I: Gardens as Archives,” “Part II: Gardens as Discourse,” and “Part III: Gardens as Critique.” The contributors of this volume work across fields such as plant studies, landscape history, urban studies, literary, and cultural studies. Their articles think creatively about modes of human-vegetal cohabitation within the social, political, racial, and territorial coordinates of Latin America.
EDITED VOLUME
STILL
LIVES. THE INHUMAN IN LATIN AMERICAN CULTURE
Journal of Latin American Studies
Co-edited with Nicolás Campisi - Under Review
Why do plants, rocks, fungi, meat, and microbes feature so prominently in contemporary Latin American cultural production? Has the human receded to the background due to the onset of climate change and the sixth extinction? This edited issue studies the notion of the inhuman in contemporary Latin American culture to interrogate how the temporality of the Anthropocene has blurred the boundaries between the human and the geological, between inert and vital matter. Building on important theorizations of the division between the human and nonhuman in Latin American culture (see Heffes and Fornoff; Andermann; Giorgi; Hoyos; Vieira), this edited issue takes up the question of the inhuman to foreground how cultural producers engage with the deep temporality of minerals, the language of plants, or the cultural politics of meat.
Building on important theorizations of the division between the human and nonhuman in Latin American culture (see Heffes and Fornoff; Andermann; Giorgi; Hoyos; Vieira), this edited issue takes up the question of the inhuman to foreground how cultural producers engage with the deep temporality of minerals, the language of plants, or the cultural politics of meat. We want to explore how Latin American culture offers “a glimpse of the inhuman, and/or of an unclean non-world,” which Jean-François Lyotard theorized in his landmark The Inhuman: Reflections on Time.
STILL
LIVES. THE INHUMAN IN LATIN AMERICAN CULTURE
Journal of Latin American Studies
Co-edited with Nicolás Campisi - Under Review
Why do plants, rocks, fungi, meat, and microbes feature so prominently in contemporary Latin American cultural production? Has the human receded to the background due to the onset of climate change and the sixth extinction? This edited issue studies the notion of the inhuman in contemporary Latin American culture to interrogate how the temporality of the Anthropocene has blurred the boundaries between the human and the geological, between inert and vital matter. Building on important theorizations of the division between the human and nonhuman in Latin American culture (see Heffes and Fornoff; Andermann; Giorgi; Hoyos; Vieira), this edited issue takes up the question of the inhuman to foreground how cultural producers engage with the deep temporality of minerals, the language of plants, or the cultural politics of meat.
Building on important theorizations of the division between the human and nonhuman in Latin American culture (see Heffes and Fornoff; Andermann; Giorgi; Hoyos; Vieira), this edited issue takes up the question of the inhuman to foreground how cultural producers engage with the deep temporality of minerals, the language of plants, or the cultural politics of meat. We want to explore how Latin American culture offers “a glimpse of the inhuman, and/or of an unclean non-world,” which Jean-François Lyotard theorized in his landmark The Inhuman: Reflections on Time.