Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human

Lucy Bollington (Edited by), Paul Merchant (Edited by)

9781683401490

Hardback, published 21 April 2020

304 pages, 15 black & white illustrations
22.9 x 15.1 x 2.2 cm, 0.333 kg

This volume explores works from Latin American literary and visual culture that question what it means to be human and examine the ways humans and nonhumans shape one another. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on how the region challenges and adds to global conversations about humanism and the posthuman.

Contributors identify posthumanist themes across a range of different materials, including an anecdote about a plague of rabbits in Historia de las Indias by Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas, photography depicting desert landscapes at the site of Brazil's War of Canudos, and digital and installation art portraying victims of state-sponsored and drug violence in Colombia and Mexico. The essays illuminate how these cultural texts broach the limits between life and death, human and animal, technology and the body, and people and the environment. They also show that these works use the category of the human to address issues related to race, gender, inequality, necropolitics, human rights, and the role of the environment.Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human demonstrates that by focusing on the boundary between the human and nonhuman, writers, artists, and scholars can open up new dimensions to debates about identity and difference, the local and the global, and colonialism and power.

• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reworking the Human'
  s Limits —
  Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant
• Necropolitical Witnessing
• 1. Forensic Fictions: The Ruinous Archive in Post-Testimonial Witnessing —
  Carlos Fonseca
• 2. Telling Death Stories in Mexican New Media —
  Liliana Chá
  vez Dí
  az
• 3. Permeable Bodies: Reading Materiality in Teresa Margolles and Oscar Muñ
  oz —
  Natalia Aguilar Vá
  squez
• 4. Displacing Drug War Violence onto Nonhuman Imaginaries: Rereading Juan Pablo Villalobos'
  s Fiesta en la madriguera —
  Lucy Bollington
• Animal and Plant Entanglements
• 5. Invasive Specie: Rabbits, Conquistadors, and Capital in the Historia de las Indias (1527–
  1561) by Bartolomé
  de Las Casas (1484–
  1566) —
  Nicole D. Legnani
• 6. "La trama apocalí
  ptica del Antropoceno": Digital-Human-Nature Continua in Pola Oloixarac'
  s Las constelaciones oscuras —
  Emily Baker
• 7. Communicating Beyond the Human: Posthumanism, Neo-Shamanism, and Ciro Guerra'
  s El abrazo de la serpiente —
  Joey Whitfield
• Ecology, Hierarchy, Horizontality
• 8. Tomá
  s Saraceno and the Ethics of the Sublime in the Aerocene —
  Joanna Page
• 9. Feminine Objects, Gendered Subjects: Lygia Pape'
  s Embodied Aesthetics —
  Rebecca Kosick
• 10. Photography as Anthropotechnique and the Legacy of Canudos —
  Edward King
• 11. Terror and Awe: Toward a Posthuman Politics in Patricio Guzmá
  n'
  s Nostalgia de la luz (2010) —
  Niall H. D. Geraghty
• List of Contributors
• Index