Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction by Laura Barbas-Rhoden (review)

In 2005, critic Rob Nixon asked whether postcolonialism and environmentalism could be brought into dialogue—a question undoubtedly born of the rigorous debate among postcolonialists and ecocritics.³ The former is resolutely opposed to what Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as a problematic mode of species-level thinking, and one emboldened by recent interest in an “Anthropocene.”⁴ Ecocritics, on the other hand, fault postcolonialists for replacing the “land question” with more abstract concerns—primarily the preoccupation with nationalism, and later cosmopolitanism, that have marked postcolonial studies since the 1980s. But despite an often-contentious debate, postcolonial ecocritics like Laura Barbas-Rhoden have fostered a critical practice that attends to the ecological legacy of colonialism without eschewing consideration for persons dwelling in the postcolonial environment. Charting an “ecological imagination” across three regions and over a dozen novels, Barbas-Rhoden’s Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction lays bare the complicated relationship between postcolonialism and environmentalism without sacrificing fidelity to either.

Focusing on literary critiques of late capitalism, the author argues that “in the late twentieth century, a growing number of Latin American authors produced texts preoccupied with natural spaces, and that they did so as part of a broader critique of economic systems of subjugation” (p. 7). A “rhetoric of nature,” she contends, was a common trope marshaled by postboom authors to address the enclosure and privatization of formerly indigenous lands from Mexico to the southernmost reaches of Argentina (p. 2). While “writers of the Boom and magical realism emphasized the representation of Latin American space as both exotic and fertile,” writers like Argentine novelist Eduardo Sguiglia conjure a very different sense of place, replacing Gabriel García Márquez’s erstwhile “Macondo” with the ruined landscape of “Fordlandia” (p. 168). Indeed, according to Barbas-Rhoden, “the mobilization of a discourse of nature” served to “indict the neoliberal order of late-twentieth century Latin America”; although, as in the case of Sguiglia’s Fordlandia (1997), we are confronted with what the author calls the “prehistory of neoliberalism”—here Ford’s rubber plantation a harbinger of the era of NAFTA (p. 2).

Arguing that an “ecocritical approach to Latin America … must take into consideration the way literature registers both the intimate knowledge of place and global forces of change,” Ecological Imaginations is aligned with postcolonial ecocritics who challenge conventional approaches to landscape or “nature writing” by foregrounding the legacy of empire (p. 2). In fact, Barbas-Rhoden’s book directly takes up what Ramachandra Guha has called an “environmentalism of the poor”—a mode of environmentalism at odds with the more conventional wilderness ethos, which has historically ignored indigenous communities. Notably, Guha’s work highlights the shared pedigree of Latin American and South Asian environmentalism; his formulation of an “environmentalism of the poor” also directly influenced Nixon’s recent work on “slow violence.”⁵

Joining Guha and Nixon, Ecological Imaginations “brushes against” a conventional discourse of “nature” by centralizing what Barbas-Rhoden calls “cultures of habitat” (p. 5). Accordingly, the most salient moments of the book are to be found in Barbas-Rhoden’s skilled readings of the novels themselves—all thoughtfully contextualized and eminently readable. Central to each reading is an emphasis on the interdependence of human and nonhuman interlocutors. Pointing out the “facile Cartesian binaries” undergirding Western landscape aesthetics, Barbas-Rhoden is interested in persons who dwell within the “more than human” world—their local knowledge contesting the imperial gaze of Darwin or Ford. Indeed, while also focusing on the imbrications of extractivism and state-building, she attends to the epistemological violence of naturalist and capitalist alike, beginning in the Southern Cone. The first of four chapters, “Alterity, Empire, and Nation Tierra del Fuego,” is a study of three novels set in Tierra del Fuego: Sylvia Iparraguirre’s Tierra del Fuego (1998), Libertad Demitrópous’s Un piano en Bahía Desolación (1994), and Eduardo Belgrado Rawson’s Fuegia (1991).

Citing Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s classic Facundo, o Civilización y...