Latin American and Caribbean Environmental Humanities

How can insights from a region long exploited for raw materials and forced labor inform innovative ecocritical approaches? No comprehensive history of humanistic thinking about the environments of the Americas exists to answer this question. Latin American and Caribbean Environmental Humanities explicates a field whose trajectory has been overlooked, enabling readers to understand the region’s paradigm-shifting environmental thinking and demonstrating linkages between the climate crisis and humanists’ areas of interest. Cultural production in Latin America and the Caribbean has a rich history of exploring tensions between local ecological knowledge and the demands of a global economy. In this wide-ranging book, two scholars will show how the region’s humanistic research on environmental thought has evolved, explaining the field’s little-understood early history, major debates, and current areas of inquiry. Engaging and accessible, it will draw in those who may have heard of the environmental humanities but are unfamiliar with its Latin American particularities.

“Latin American and Caribbean territories—often considered the origin point of natural resources, labor, and migration —have a rich history of cultural production exploring tensions between local ecological knowledge and the demands of a global economy. We show how literatures and cultures on the environment from and about Latin America and the Caribbean have evolved over the decades, explaining the little-understood early history of the environmental humanities in the region, its major debates, and its current areas of inquiry.”

Victoria Saramago, Associate Professor, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures and the College