Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics

The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics offers a comprehensive overview of Latin American aesthetic and conceptual production addressing the more-than-human environment at the intersection between art, activism, and critique. Fields include literature, performance, film, and other audiovisual media as well as their interactions with community activisms. Scholars who have helped establish environmental approaches in the field as well as emergent critical voices revisit key concepts such as ecocriticism, (post-)extractivism, and multinaturalism, while opening new avenues of dialogue with areas including critical race theory and ethnicity, energy humanities, queer-*trans studies, and infrastructure studies, among others. This volume both traces these genealogies and maps out key positions in this increasingly central field of Latin Americanism, at the same time as they relate it to the environmental humanities at large.

By showing how artistic and literary productions illuminate critical zones of environmental thought, articulating urgent social and material issues with cultural archives, historical approaches and conceptual interventions, this volume offers cutting-edge critical tools for approaching literature and the arts from new angles that call into question the nature/culture boundary.

"This volume is a great pedagogical tool for professors teaching at the intersection of the Environmental Humanities and the Latin American region. It also stands as a useful starting point for Latin Americanists at the beginning of their research careers. Finally, it serves as a comprehensive regional survey for scholars working with comparative and interdisciplinary methodologies. Following the publication of the groundbreaking The Latin American Ecocultural Reader (French & Heffes, Northwestern UP, 2020), this edited volume continues to pave the road toward the consolidation of the field. By shedding light on some difficult questions around both politics and aesthetics, it indexes the virtues and potential pitfalls of environmental studies at a regional scale and the field of ecocriticism at large."

– Valeria Meiller, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2024), pp. 1–2.