Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment)

Visualizing Loss in Latin America engages with a varied corpus of textual, visual, and cultural material with specific intersections with the natural world, arguing that Latin American literary and cultural production goes beyond ecocriticism as a theoretical framework of analysis. Gisela Heffes poses the following crucial question: How do we construct a conceptual theoretical apparatus to address issues of value, meaning, tradition, perspective, and language, that contributes substantially to environmental thinking, and that is part and parcel of Latin America? The book draws attention to ecological inequality and establishes a biopolitical, ethics-based reading of Latin American art, film, and literature that operates at the intersection of the built environment and urban settings. Heffes suggests that the aesthetic praxis that emerges in/from Latin America is permeated with a rhetoric of waste―a significant trait that overwhelmingly defines it. Preface 7 References 10 Acknowledgments 11 Contents 13 About the Author 15 List of Figures 16 Chapter 1: Introduction 18 1 The Environment in (Eco)Critical Perspective 18 2 Ecocriticism: Then and Now 30 3 Ecocriticism and Latin America 44 4 Visualizing Loss in Latin America 58 References 61 Chapter 2: Destruction: The Garbage Dump as a Global Biocritical Trope 71 1 Unfathomable Fluidity: Toward a Condition of “Exception” 71 2 Collateral Residues of Modernity’s Production, Consumption, and Disposal 77 3 Residual Humans (or Human Ruins) 80 4 Visual Tales of Indistinctness 81 5 Intermission: Verbitsky 93 6 Narratives of Bioenvironmental Destruction 96 7 Contemporary Slums as a Reconfiguration of the Dump (Other, New Conditions of “Exception”) 110 8 Out of Sight, Out of Mind 119 References 125 Chapter 3: Sustainability: Waste and Its Social, Cultural, and Aesthetic Re-significations 131 1 From Destruction to Environmental Conservation: The Enacted Object of Waste 131 2 The “Subversive” Condition of Waste? 136 3 Waste from the Global City 143 4 Cartoneros 156 5 Pepenadores 163 6 Catadores 169 7 Diving in Havana: Dream or Nightmare? 177 8 Intermission II: Berni 185 9 From the Street to the (Art) Workshop and Back Again 188 10 By Way of Conclusion: A Bio/Ecocritical Reading 199 References 201 Chapter 4: Preservation: Nature and Urbanism from Utopia to Dystopia 207 1 Utopian Imaginaries and Urban Territories 207 2 Green Utopias, Ecological Utopias 211 3 Green Utopias in Urban Venues 214 4 Science and Nature in Cities 222 5 Nature (Re)Appropriated: A Utopian Effort for Private Societies in the Twenty-First Century 228 6 Dystopia for all and Futurist Ecocide in the Latin American City of the Twenty-First Century 253 7 Coda 265 References 268 Chapter 5: Bioecocriticism: A New Critical Episteme 272 References 277 Index 278