R1 Review Essay: Latin American Cultural Studies Beyond the Human Andermann, Jens. Tierras En Trance

Review Essay: Latin American Cultural Studies Beyond the Human Andermann, Jens. Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Metales Pesados, 2018. 462 pp. ISBN 9789-5698-4350-1 Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke UP, 2017. 188 pp. ISBN 9780-8223-6897-7 Jenckes, Kate. Witnessing Beyond the Human: Addressing the Alterity of the Other in Post-coup Chile and Argentina. Albany: SUNY UP, 2017. 221 pp. ISBN 9781-4384-6570-8 In the past five years, an increasing number of publications in the field of Latin American cultural studies have engaged with posthumanist, ecocritical, new materialist, or animal studies methodologies. While these various theoretical approaches are divergent in their goals and methods, they share a common point of departure: the recognition that solely centering the human as the primary object of analysis within literary or cultural studies is limiting. Taken together, these works argue that human communities are deeply and inextricably enmeshed in more-than-human milieus, and that this entanglement is reflected in cultural production and should be taken into serious consideration by scholars. The enmeshment of human and nonhuman has become all the more eVident and urgent in this era of climate change. As a species, humans are no longer just biological agents, but creatures that wield geological agency: capable of altering the make-up of the planet with our practices. How we have exercised this agency has imperiled our own survival and that of many other forms of life with which we co-make the planet; it has brought about the ongoing sixth extinction, increased extreme weather events, and exacerbated phenomena like drought that have made life in certain regions (like the Central American dry corridor) unsustainable. Latin America is in many ways at the center of these changes. The Orbis hypothesis put forth by ecologist Simon Lewis and geologist Mark Maslin proposes that the origin of the Anthropocene can be linked to the conquest of the Americas. The atmosphere recorded the subsequent genocide of Amerindians, whose eradication prompted reforestation and led to a noticeable drop in CO2. This atmospheric archive of empire underscores the centrality of processes of colonialism and accumulation in environmental degradation, evident today in the unevenly distributed consequences of climate change, which greatest affect the planet’s most vulnerable populations. So, the turn beyond the human in recent Latin American cultural studies asks how might we begin to disentangle the privileged position of the human in the humanities and bring into focus ways of rethinking our relationship to the more-than-human from a Latin American perspective. In the brief space of this review, I will highlight three recent books published within the field of Latin American cultural studies that have taken such an approach, albeit from divergent sets of questions. In spite of their dissimilar frameworks—decolonial/queer, aesthetic/Deleuzian, and infrapolitical/Derridean—the monographs by Macarena Gómez-Barris, Jens Andermann, and Kate Jenckes can be situated within the umbrella of posthumanist concerns: posthumanist in the expansive sense of a range of theoretical positions that break with human exceptionalism or undermine the separation/elevation of the human over the nonhuman. These works are important interventions in this subfield, which has been pioneered by earlier publications by Mark Anderson, Laura Barbas-Rhoden, Scott DeVries, Jennifer French, Gabriel Giorgi, Gisela Heffes, and Rachel Price, among others. Macarena Gómez-Barris’s slim, dynamic book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives articulates why Latin America is a crucial site for understanding R1 R2 Reviews our current environmental crisis. This crisis is the result of colonial capitalism, which has systematically destroyed human and nonhuman bodies by treating them as expendable commodities. Gómez-Barris’s contribution is aimed at ecocritism writ-large, which within the US academy has often privileged Global North perspectives, and elided the dynamics of race and empire at the root of the crisis. The Extractive Zone endeavors to “decolonize the Anthropocene by cataloguing life otherwise, or the emergent and heterogeneous forms of living that are not about destruction or mere survival within the extractive zone, but about the creation of emergent alternatives” (4). These alternatives enact what Gómez-Barris terms “submerged perspectives” that articulate other epistemologies or ways of seeing the world. The idea of submersion at once conjures up the historic marginalization of these perspectives, as well as the metaphor of water— of being underneath what we typically see, immersed in the muck and diffracted aqueous view. By contrast, that which is typically visible is what Gómez-Barris deems the extractive zone, those biodiverse sites, often occupied by Indigenous or Afro-Indigenous groups, that have been captured by colonial-capitalist worldviews and reduced to the status of an exploitable natural resource. Gómez-Barris’s methodology is heterogeneous, an apt strategy that captures the complexity of extraction in the Andean region today. In part ethnography of Indigenous negotiation with eco-tourism and the new age economy, and in part cultural analysis of visual art (Francisco Huichaqueo, Carolina Caycedo, and Mujeres Creando collective, among others), The Extractive Zone weaves together accounts and contestations of resource extraction in the Andes. Given Gómez-Barris’s professed decolonial queer femme methodology, the perspectives foregrounded are ones that have been marginalized by the racialized logics of our petroeconomy, namely women and Indigenous subjects. Yet Gómez-Barris is wary of identity politics, and critiques with nuance the cooptation of buen vivir ideologies and the contradictory and patriarchal policies of Rafael Correa and Evo Morales. The Extractive Zone can be smoothly incorporated into classes across disciplines and skill-levels, as it is written in accessible and engaging language. I have had success teaching Chapter 4, which examines Colombian multimedia artist Carolina Caycedo’s appropriation of satellite technologies to contest hydroelectric development projects. (This chapter pairs well with other analyses of water extraction and dispossession, such as Rob Nixon’s chapter in Slow Violence, as well as cultural accounts from other regions in Latin America, like the Honduran documentary Berta Vive, and Mexican documentaries El ciruelo and Los reyes del pueblo que no existe.) In Tierras en trance: Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje, Jens Andermann explores sensorial, aesthetic engagement with the nonhuman in Latin American art since 1920. For Andermann, aesthetic practice operates as a space of trance, in which the boundaries between nature and culture blur. This experience of trance—which Andermann theorizes through Deleuze and African diasporic religions—scrambles the usual logic of the landscape, in which the observer lies outside the natural space, and gazes down upon it as an object that can be captured and dominated. By contrast, the experience of trance is one in which aesthetic object and artist/observer commingle as vibrating materialities, sharing and exchanging intensities. The landscape in twentieth century Latin American art, Andermann proposes, is not just a noun but a verb: a bringing of bodies together: human and nonhuman, material and affective (27). Andermann’s theoretical framework can be situated within new materialism, as pioneered by Jane Bennett. This subfield is interested in deconstructing the dualism of nature/culture, human/nonhuman, and subject/object through a return to matter. Andermann pushes back against the idea that the landscape is always configured as a static or inert space, instead tracing out how Reviews R3 it affects and is affected by those that interpolate it. Tierras en trance begins by exploring avant- garde inscriptions of the landscape as a space that exists in opposition to the cosmopolitan city through Sergei Eisenstein, Blaise Cendrars, and Mário Andrade, to argue that in this period natural spaces outside of the city were revalorized as a crucial aesthetic component of national patrimony. The next section also focuses on avant-garde artists, but this time on those who aimed to relocate nature within the heart of the city through architecture and gardens, including Victoria Ocampo, Luis Barragán, and Roberto Burle Marx. The book’s third section turns to “insurgent nature” to examine the politicization of space in Latin American regionalist literature. Reading in an ecocritical key, Andermann proposes that Horacio Quiroga’s short stories resist presenting nature as something pristine and separate from the human realm. In spite of this, Andermann concludes that regionalist authors like Quiroga, Orestes Di Lullo and Bernardo Canal Feijóo were not able to extract themselves from the desire to colonize space and bring stability to the frontier. This problematic line of thought was only overcome in guerrilla narratives of the 70s and 80s like those of Omar Cabezas and Mario Payeras, who endowed the jungle with transformative force. In the book’s final section Andermann turns to “postnatural” art, bio or eco-artworks that exceed categorization and respond to the uncertain becoming of life today. This illuminating book provides a panoramic examination of the aesthetic

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