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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 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
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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