Latin American & Caribbean Studies
Literary Studies

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Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human

Name: Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human
Author: Lucy Bollington
ISBN: 9781683401490

Edited by Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant

Published by: University of Florida Press

This volume explores works from Latin American literary and visual culture that question what it means to be human and how the nonhuman world helps define personhood. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on how the region challenges and adds to global conversations about humanism and the posthuman.

324 Pages6.00 × 9.0015 b/w illus., notes, bibliography, index

Hardcover
9781683401490
Published: April 21, 2020

$85.00

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9781683401773
Published: March 18, 2020

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Description
Authors
Praise
Table of Contents

This volume explores works from Latin American literary and visual culture that question what it means to be human and examine the ways humans and nonhumans shape one another. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on how the region challenges and adds to global conversations about humanism and the posthuman.

Contributors identify posthumanist themes across a range of different materials, including an anecdote about a plague of rabbits in Historia de las Indias by Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas, photography depicting desert landscapes at the site of Brazil’s War of Canudos, and digital and installation art portraying victims of state-sponsored and drug violence in Colombia and Mexico. The essays illuminate how these cultural texts broach the limits between life and death, human and animal, technology and the body, and people and the environment. They also show that these works use the category of the human to address issues related to race, gender, inequality, necropolitics, human rights, and the role of the environment.

Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human demonstrates that by focusing on the boundary between the human and nonhuman, writers, artists, and scholars can open up new dimensions to debates about identity and difference, the local and the global, and colonialism and power.

Lucy Bollington is lecturer in comparative literature, film, and cultural studies at University College London. Paul Merchant is lecturer in Latin American film and visual culture at the University of Bristol.

“Interrogates the generative space for thought and creation ‘at the limits of the human’ in Latin America. Grounded in theory and inclusive of studies of a variety of texts, including installations and performance arts, film, and literature, this volume makes a welcome contribution to work in new materialisms, ecocriticism, and Latin American cultural studies.”—Laura Barbas-Rhoden, author of Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Reworking the Human’s Limits
Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant

Necropolitical Witnessing

Chapter 1. Forensic Fictions: The Ruinous Archive in Post-Testimonial Witnessing
Carlos Fonseca

Chapter 2. Telling Death Stories in Mexican New Media
Liliana Chávez Díaz

Chapter 3. Permeable Bodies: Reading Materiality in Teresa Margolles and Oscar Muñoz
Natalia Aguilar Vásquez

Chapter 4. Displacing Drug War Violence onto Nonhuman Imaginaries: Rereading Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Fiesta en la madriguera

Lucy Bollington

Animal and Plant Entanglements

Chapter 5. Invasive Specie: Rabbits, Conquistadors, and Capital in the Historia de las Indias (1527–1561) by Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566)
Nicole D. Legnani

Chapter 6. “La trama apocalíptica del Antropoceno”: Digital-Human-Nature Continua in Pola Oloixarac’s Las constelaciones oscuras
Emily Baker

Chapter 7. Communicating Beyond the Human: Posthumanism, Neo-Shamanism, and Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente
Joey Whitfield

Ecology, Hierarchy, Horizontality

Chapter 8. Tomás Saraceno and the Ethics of the Sublime in the Aerocene
Joanna Page

Chapter 9. Feminine Objects, Gendered Subjects: Lygia Pape’s Embodied Aesthetics
Rebecca Kosick

Chapter 10. Photography as Anthropotechnique and the Legacy of Canudos
Edward King

Chapter 11. Terror and Awe: Toward a Posthuman Politics in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz (2010)
Niall H. D. Geraghty

List of Contributors

Index

Books

Authors

Journals

On The Site

Books

Authors

Journals

On The Site

Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human

Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human

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