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The Latin American and Caribbean regions’ historical trajectories have been shaped by complex human-nonhuman interactions. In these histories people are important, even crucial, actors, but not the only ones. Offering a novel approach to the writing of Latin American history, this book brings nine thought-provoking chapters together with a historiographical introduction and critical afterword to centre nonhuman beings and things. The oscillating glare of the sun, the resourcefulness of insects, the tectonic instability of national territories, and the life-giving and intractable impassivity of rivers are some of the other-than-human agents driving history in the volume’s chapters. It problematises Latin American(ist) historiography’s tendency to frame ‘nature’ as a separate ontological domain that is only acted upon – conquered, manipulated, devastated – lacking the self-propelled dynamics capable of shaping the course of events. With broad regional and temporal coverage across Latin America and the Caribbean from the pre-colonial period to the present day, the book responds to environmental history’s call to write biophysical environments into the human past – a reconsideration of historical agency that, in this era of climate change, is needed now more than ever.
‘More-Than-Human Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean offers a rich and complex study of environmental history that breaks new ground in moving from human-centered approaches and methods to take seriously other biological, geographical and even solar processes that together shape human history in Latin America. The interdisciplinary scope of the studies is impressive, along with the types of sources used, geographies and timescales.’
— Martha Few, Liberal Arts Professor of Latin American History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Penn State University, USA
More-Than-Human Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean is more than a thematically coherent collection of scholarly essays by multiple authors. By respectfully engaging Indigenous perspectives, based on long-standing interactions with nature, this work is both Neo-Animist and Transhumanist in its approach. …the authors have us embrace both ancient Indigenous traditions and the vision of a better future.’
—Abel A. Alves, Ball State University, Muncie, USA
…the book will be a welcome starting point for many scholars of the environmental humanities in Latin America. Moreover, the book succeeds in showing historians outside the field of environmental history how more-than-human histories can be of value in more human-centered studies.
— Christopher McQuilkin, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
This volume offers a useful primer on the emerging approaches to the study of history.
— Ed Stoddard, Freelance Journalist/Editor/Consultant, Johannesburg, South Africa
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Introduction: Latin America and the Caribbean’s more-than-human pasts
Diogo de Carvalho Cabral, André Vasques Vital, and Margarita Gascón -
1 Performative objects: Konduri iconography as a window into precolonial Amazonian ontologies
Luisa Vidal de Oliveira and Denise Maria Cavalcante Gomes -
2 Under a weak sun at the Southern rim of South America (1540-1650)
Margarita Gascón -
3 Extreme weather in New Spain and Guatemala: the Great Drought (1768-1773)
Luis Alberto Arrioja Díaz Viruell and María Dolores Ramírez Vega -
4 Water labour: urban metabolism, energy, and rivers in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Bruno Capilé and Lise Fernanda Sedrez -
5 ‘Forjadores de la nación’: rethinking the role of earthquakes in Chilean history
Magdalena Gil -
6 Human-insect relations in Northeast Brazil’s twentieth-century sugar industry
José Marcelo Marques Ferreira Filho -
7 “We are the air, the land, the pampas…”: campesino politics and the other-than-human in highland Bolivia 1970-1990
Olivia Arigho-Stiles -
8 Tongues in trees and sermons in stones: Jason Allen-Paisant’s Ecopoetics in Thinking with Trees
Hannah Regis -
9 Animating the waters, hydrating History: control and contingency in Latin American animations
André Vasques Vital -
Afterword: More complete stories and better explanations for a renewed worldview
Claudia Leal