Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human

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. Contributors: Natalia Aguilar Vásquez | Emily Baker | Lucy Bollington | Liliana Chávez Díaz | Carlos Fonseca | Niall H.D. Geraghty | Edward King | Rebecca Kosick | Nicole Delia Legnani | Paul Merchant | Joanna Page | Joey Whitfield Cover Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human Title Copyright Contents LIST OF FIGURES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS Introduction: Reworking the Human’s Limits NECROPOLITICAL WITNESSING 1. Forensic Fictions: The Ruinous Archive in Post-Testimonial Witnessing 2. Telling Death Stories in Mexican New Media 3. Permeable Bodies: Reading Materiality in Teresa Margolles and Oscar Muñoz 4. Displacing Drug War Violence onto Nonhuman Imaginaries: Rereading Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Fiesta en la madriguera ANIMAL AND PLANT ENTANGLEMENTS 5. Invasive Specie: Rabbits, Conquistadors, and Capital in the Historia de las Indias (1527–1561) by Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) 6. “La trama apocalíptica del Antropoceno”: Digital-Human-Nature Continua in Pola Oloixarac’s Las constelaciones oscuras 7. Communicating beyond the Human: Posthumanism, Neo-Shamanism, and Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente ECOLOGY, HIERARCHY, HORIZONTALITY 8. Tomás Saraceno and the Ethics of the Sublime in the Aerocene 9. Feminine Objects, Embodied Subjects: Lygia Pape’s Feminist Aesthetics 10. Photography as Anthropotechnique and the Legacy of Canudos 11. Terror and Awe: Toward a Posthuman Politics in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz (2010) LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS INDEX "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"-- Provided by publisher Explores works from Latin American literary and visual culture that question what it means to be human and examines the ways humans and non-humans shape one another. In doing so, this book provides new perspectives on how the region challenges and adds to global conversations about humanism and the posthuman.