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Coda New novels of ecological imagination have appeared in a moment of rapidly accelerating globalization in Latin America. During this period, legacies of neocolonialism, corruption, and authoritarianism still confronted Latin American peoples, even as they struggled to come to terms with new economic realities. Democracies took root, but at the same time, globalization weakened and challenged the prerogatives and responsiblities of the nationstate . The novels we have explored here spring from a context of growing unease and disillusionment about the imbrication of Latin America in the world economy. The novels are important expressions of a dynamic ecological imagination alive in Latin American literature since its earliest days. Often in its literary history, authors have portrayed the natural world of Latin America as exuberant and inexhaustible. Writers of the Boom and magical realism emphasized the representation of Latin American space as both exotic and fertile. But in the last decades of the twentieth century, as cities boomed and forests fell, some authors shifted discursive preferences and adopted a more skeptical, confrontational, or elegaic tone. New Latin American ecological imaginations instill in the minds of readers a world with real limits. They emphasize the boundaries imposed by the nonhuman world on human societies. They draw attention to both environmental degradation and unresolved social issues: land claims, indigenous rights, classism, sexism, and ethnic exclusion. And ultimately, I would argue, 168 • Coda authors of ecological imagination from Latin America wield the discourse of nature as a literary weapon against the homogenizing agenda of neocolonial and neoliberal enterprises. They craft this discourse of nature in their fictions as an intervention for democracy, for local knowledge, for human rights and environmental justice. Theirs is an ecological imagination imbued with social justice, and their new story of Latin America represents a real engagement with an imperiled world. ...

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