Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film and Literature ed. by Mark Anderson and Zélia M. Bora (review)

Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America is a scholarly collection of sixteen insightful essays that converge on the unifying themes of environmental consciousness and the use of biotechnologies. Its nineteen contributors are Mark Anderson, Juanita C. Aristizábal, Ana Avalos, Zélia M. Bora, Mirian Carballo, Ida Day, Sharae Deckard, Diana Dodson Lee, Simão Farias Almeida, Juan Carlos Galeano, Jeremy Larochelle, Diego Mejía Prado, Marcela Reales Visbal, Hermán Ruiz Abecasis, Adrian Taylor Kane, Kerstin Oloff, Abigail Pérez Aguilera, María Victoria Sánchez, and Lesley Wylie. The collection is organized effectively into four sections and is tailored for the general public with a few exceptions indicated below.

Whereas the introduction provides a survey of the development and magnitude of the Latin American ecological dilemma, in the first section, those interested in recent ecocritical theory will find a useful comparison of the Capitalocene and Anthropocene concepts in order to identify the rise of Capitalism as a central cause for the current environmental crisis. Also included is a wealth of reference information for different instances of neoliberal appropriation of natural spaces. For those teaching contemporary Colombian literature and film, the first section identifies the biocentric content of Colombian narratives Andágueda (1946), La selva y la lluvia (1958), and Chocó: Magia y leyenda (1991), the journalistic volume El oro y la sangre (1994), and the film Chocó (2012). The section also examines Cuentos amazónicos (2007) and Amazonia (2012) by Juan Carlos Galeano, the poem "Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida" (1826) by Andrés Bello, and La vorágine (1924) by José Eustasio Rivera delving into the literary representations of deforestation in Latin America. The section culminates with a study on indigenous environmentally oriented poetry from the Peruvian Amazon presenting literary tendencies consistent with the Luddite tradition and biocentric perspectives.

The second section begins with an innovative rereading of Pedro Páramo (1955) by Juan Rulfo and Aura (1962) by Carlos Fuentes that conceptualizes those works as narrative archives of the processes that characterize increased commoditization and exhaustion of lands and communities. The section then follows with an examination of possibilities and limitations of ecocritical notions such as environmental apocalypse and urban ecology through analyses of artistic and filmic representations of the ecological crisis in Mexico City. The section also offers an examination of anthropocentric and ecocentric perspectives in modern Brazilian literature and film in order to explore the limits between Brazilian environmental activism and original nihilistic apocalyptic imaginations as regional responses to the environmental crisis. The second section finishes with an analysis of two distinct discursive approaches to the multiple problems of extractivism as portrayed in the play eRRor, un juego con tra(d)ición (2011) by the team BiNeural-Monokultur and the novel Freedom (2010) by Jonathan Franzen. The analysis successfully sustains that Freedom contributes a minor critique of coal mining extractivism but excuses environmental damage when it is done for the sake of improved economic gain. Conversely, eRRor exposes genetically modified soy production as a renewed attempt to colonize countries with weaker economies.

A theoretical discursive analysis, the third section will prove profitable for academics interested in socioenvironmental conflicts in Latin America. The section begins by exploring diverse representational strategies used to prevent a series of mining projects from taking place on lands considered sacred by the Huichol Indians in Mexico. The section then delves into environmental rhetoric managing concepts such as pluriverses, material feminism, new materialism, and indigenous cosmopolitics when used as decolonial theoretical tools. The section also provides a decolonial ecocritical reading of Jaime Huenún's poetry Reducciones (2013), examining literary representations of the ecological consciousness evident in the Mapuche-Huilliche communities in Chile. The second part of the section is a reading of Pablo Ortega's mockumentary film Zootizens...