Políticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación: Apuntes para una lectura (eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América Latina by Gisela Heffes (review)

Gisela Heffes’s study Políticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación is a welcome addition to discussions of environment and literature. It is organized around three central concepts: destruction, sustainability, and preservation, each of which provides the focal point of the book’s main chapters. The thoroughly researched introduction provides summaries of the emergence of ecocriticism in the tradition of Anglophone literary studies as well as the more recent development of a corpus of ecocritical analyses in Latin American studies, but goes on to posit that Latin American cultural production exceeds the present limits of ecocriticism as a theoretical apparatus. The book’s central argument, therefore, is for the necessity of creating an alternative critical episteme.

Chapter two, “Destrucción: El vertedero de basura como tropo de una biopolítica global,” analyzes the imagery of trash dumps in Latin American literature and film as well as the people who sustain their existence by literally and metaphorically feeding off of others’ waste. Using Argentinean, Brazilian, and Mexican films such as Sobras (2008), Cinco vezes favela (1962), and Los pepenadores de acá (1982) and fiction including Única mirando al mar (1994) by Costa Rican Fernando Contreras Castro and Waslala (1996) by Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli as examples, Heffes compellingly argues that in Latin American cultures of consumerism, the poorest subjects are often stripped of their humanity and degraded to yet another form of rubbish, no less disposable and invisible to the politically and economically powerful than the garbage that these marginalized citizens live among and, in some cases, depend upon for survival.

The following chapter, “Sostenibilidad: Los desechos y sus resignificaciones sociales, culturales y estéticas,” analyzes several narrative and visual representations related to the collection, recycling, and reuse of garbage as a transformative practice that disrupts the consumerist cycle of production-consumption-disposal. For Heffes, works such as the novel Mis amigos los pepenadores (1958) by Mexican José Luis Parra, the short story “Greenpeace” (2000) by Cuban Eduardo del Llano, the drama Homens de papel (1978) by Brazilian Plínio Marcos, and the documentary Cartoneros (2006) by Ernesto Livón-Grosman not only make the problem of waste visible and capture the ways in which the practice of trash collection is embedded into a wider social framework, they also identify garbage as an emblematic element of globalization and transnational capitalism. In these works, urban landscapes are transformed into spaces of daily displacement of impoverished citizens, who are perpetually on the move in search of forms of surviving off of discarded items. This chapter also includes analysis of fascinating works of visual art, most of which are composed of repurposed materials, including paintings by Argentinean artist Antonio Berni, the “Projecto Reciclar-T3” by Brazilian eco-designer Águida Zanol, and the collective art project Residual which took place in Mexico City in 2010. All of these projects share a common interest in generating a greater awareness of the civic responsibility of diligently managing waste.

The fourth chapter, “Preservación: Naturaleza y urbanismo: de las utopias sociales del siglo XX a las sociedades utópicas/distópicas del siglo XXI,” posits that an eco-reading of Latin American utopian narratives affords a more profound understanding of this centuries-old subgenre and that such readings should not be limited to “ecotopias.” The narratives chosen for analysis privilege the representation of urban spaces, yet all of them propose some form of green, inhabitable spaces within city limits. Heffes juxtaposes utopian narratives from the early twentieth century—La ciudad anarquista americana by Pierre Quiroule and A través del porvenir by Enrique Vera y González—with several more recent works: Mundo privado: Historias de vida en countries, barrios y ciudades cerrradas by Argentinean Patricia Rojas (2007), La...