STILL LIVES. THE INHUMAN IN LATIN AMERICAN CULTURE





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.

© 2024 Valeria Meiller