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  • Latin American Literature at the Rise of Environmentalism:Urban Ecological Thinking in José María Arguedas's The Foxes
  • Jorge Marcone (bio)

—¿Quién carajo mete en un molde a una lloqlla? ¿Usted sabe lo que es una lloqlla?

—La avalancha de agua de agua, de tierra, raíces de árboles, perros muertos, de piedras que bajan bataneando debajo de la corriente cuando los ríos se cargan con las primeras lluvias en estas bestias montañas . . .

—Así es ahora Chimbote, oiga usted; y nadies nos conocemos.

(Los zorros, 87, ellipses in original)

("Who in hell can put a lloqlla into a mold? Do you know what a lloqlla is?

"It's an avalanche of water, earth, tree roots, dead dogs, and stones that comes rumbling down on the bottom of the current when the rivers are loaded with the first rains in these beastly Andean foothills . . ."

"That's how Chimbote is now, you hear? And none of us know each other."

[The Foxes, 91, ellipses in original])

Ecocritical approaches in Latin Americanist literary and cultural studies (carried out in Latin America, the United States, or Europe) owe considerably to the dissemination of environmental literatures in English and to the ecocritical approaches developed in academia for studying these [End Page 64] literatures. The drift of ecocritical approaches from English departments to foreign literature and comparative literature departments is driven by the relevance of environmental concerns, the will to address them across the curriculum, and the fact that comparison helps us recognize differences and commonalities. This development in academia parallels the dissemination of environmental discourses across borders occurring in the environmental movements themselves. Let's take, for instance, a discourse that has been evolving in Latin America since the early 2000s and has been actively used by social movements: buen vivir.1 "Buen vivir" or "vivir bien," is a Spanish phrase that refers to indigenous-based alternatives to the negative impacts of economic development. The discourses of buen vivir focus on the good life in a broad sense, that is to say, the classical ideas of quality of life, but with the specific idea that well-being is only possible within a community. In most approaches, the concept of "community" is understood in an expanded sense that includes nature. Buen vivir, therefore, embraces the broad notion of well-being and cohabitation with others and nature. Buen vivir relies on values associated with indigenous traditions, and in this sense the concept explores possibilities beyond the modern Eurocentric tradition. On the other hand, it includes critical reactions to classical Western development theory that echo certain indigenous perspectives, for instance, radical environmental postures, particularly deep ecology and other biocentric approaches that reject the anthropocentric perspective of modernity and recognize intrinsic values in the environment. Another example would be the coincidence with feminist perspectives that link gender roles with societal hierarchies and the domination over nature. In spite of its historical emphasis on the local, environmentalism is a transnational phenomenon, politically and culturally, following and responding to processes of globalization and increasingly focusing on planetary issues.2

Today, in the global North, ecocriticism is demanding from its practitioners an understanding of developments beyond their borders, as well as a cross-cultural sensitivity, ethics, and politics. In the global South, and certainly in Latin America, I argue, it is precisely the responsibility of literary and cultural studies to be at the frontline of this kind of research. Among the pending tasks in Hispanic studies are the study of canonical authors and texts from ecological perspectives and the expansion of that canon. On the other hand, environmental or ecological readings of Latin American literatures and cultures will benefit from a comparison with other literatures from the global South, and vice versa, since they have similar environmental problems, struggles, and histories. The current pattern in Hispanic studies of not engaging enough with the reflection on the relationship between society and [End Page 65] nature and the human and the nonhuman in the history of Latin American literature and the arts projects the false image to our students, South and North, that these topics have been totally secondary in this tradition and that literature and the arts have nothing...

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