Nature Fantasies : Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America

In this original study, Gabriel Horowitz examines the work of select nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American writers through the lens of contemporary theoretical debates about nature, postcoloniality, and national identity. In the work of José Martí, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Jorge Luis Borges, Augusto Roa Bastos, Cesar Aira, and others, he traces historical constructions of nature in regional intellectual traditions and texts as they inform political culture on the broader global stage. By investigating national literary discourses from Cuba, Argentina, and Paraguay, he identifies a common narrative thread that imagines the utopian wilderness of the New World as a symbolic site of independence from Spain. In these texts, Horowitz argues, an expressed desire to return to the nation’s foundational nature contributed to a movement away from political and social engagement and toward a “biopolitical state,” in which nature, traditionally seen as pre-political, conversely becomes its center. Contents Introduction Part I: Decolonization and Nature 1. The Natural History of Latin American Independence 2. Renewing Niagara Falls and Burning the Archive in the Cuban Poetic Tradition Part II: Toward the Biopolitical State 3. The Fantasy of the Creole as White Indian 4. The End of History and the Return to Nature 5. The Garden, the Camp, and the Biopolitical State Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index About the Author Nature Fantasies is a work of literary criticism and theory that presents and critiques a current of Latin American thought characterized by a desire to return to nature. It considers how nature fantasies involved in the decolonization and the formation of the Latin American nation state have turned into an engine of the state's undoing.