Down Under: New World Literatures and Ecocriticism

African, Asian, and European diasporas and more recent regional migrations between and among Latin American and Caribbean nations and the United States have challenged the very utility of literary regionalisms which have enjoyed long and fruitful histories in the U. S. South and in Latin America. It is by now well known that regionalism failed in its national aims, but perhaps a new form of regionalism may still prove useful in a more advanced globalized age. "Going south" has come to signify what it means to search for diasporic community; it is to imagine transgressively across what Cristina Garcia describes in Dreaming in Cuban as a geography carved up by political and economic interests. There is little guarantee, however, that such newly imagined communities are sufficient responses to the threat that a global migratory age poses to the environment. Pablo Neruda's poetry provides a model of how going south can also mean going down under to bioregional spaces affected by history's violence. His praise of the earth articulates, and recovers from, the experience of strange displacement in the New World and demonstrates that human and natural histories need not remain mutually exclusive.