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Article Excerpt
In recent decades, numerous Latin American artists and theorists have invited their readers to see "Western Civilization" and the story of its elaboration from below, that is to say, from the global South. Publications that challenged representations of history and cultural encounters appeared worldwide around the 500th anniversary of the Columbus voyage. Others have considered Latin American economies and societies in light of globalization, as Latin American political and economic elites embraced neo-liberalism in the latter decades of the twentieth century. And as the last century closed, increasing numbers of working-class Latin Americans questioned neo-liberal policies, challenging them in elections, social movements, and popular protests that thrust debates into public view from Chiapas, Mexico, to southern Chile.
In this socio-political context, creative literary works, as well as theoretical studies in the social sciences, have examined a history of colonization and economic injustice for diverse communities in Latin America. A key aspect of popular protests and literary works has lately included an interrogation of environmental questions: land and water use, resource exploitation and depletion, crises of human and ecological health. Faced with environmental, social, and economic transformations on a massive scale in an era of global exchange, authors like Tatiana Lobo (Costa Rica), Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua), Homero Aridjis (Mexico), and Luis Sepulveda (Chile) have considered how processes of economic change have transformed landscapes and affected human relationships with the non-human world in Latin America.
In this study on ecology, coloniality, and modernity, I bring together scholarship from Latin American social scientists and from ecocriticism to consider two literary texts from Argentina: La tierra del fuego by Sylvia Iparraguirre and Un piano en Bahia Desolacion by Libertad Demitropulos. (1) Both La tierra del fuego and Un piano en Bahia Desolacion were penned by well-known Argentine writers, and each author has garnered an international audience for her texts. Iparraguirre won several prizes for La tierra del fuego in particular, including the prestigious Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Prize in 2000. Demitropulos has also been recognized as an accomplished writer, having published numerous works before her death in 1998. Despite the international reputation of the authors, though, there have been very few scholarly studies published on their novels, either in Latin America or abroad. The few publications on La tierra del fuego have focused on the challenges it presents to official histories, a line of criticism closely tied to the production of post-dictatorial fiction in Latin America. (2) Of Un piano en Bahia Desolacion, I know of no scholarly studies at all, though there have been some published on Demitropulos's other works, particularly Rio de congojas.
Both La tierra del fuego and Un piano en Bahia Desolacion can be situated broadly within the context of post-dictatorial fiction. In general, this fiction challenges the construction of history and memory in the wake of the trauma of dictatorship. The two novels considered here reach beyond recent crises to recover the memory of a marginalized Argentine landscape. In particular, they speak to the presence of the ecological and cultural diversity in Argentina that fell to an advancing capitalist frontier in the nineteenth century. The novels make explicit connections between human and environmental casualties of a new world order that took shape in an era of European colonialism and Latin American nation-formation. The novels also posit a retreat from modernity that is particularly significant in light of the context of the composition and publication of the texts. My reading of the novels shows how these contemporary works depict the great transformation and crisis of Latin American environments and indigenous societies in the nineteenth century. In reading the texts, I keep in mind a central question posed by ecofeminist Greta Gaard: "What is the root cause of the problem described by this writer?" (227). Following this question through the texts reveals the historical intersections of geo-political machinations and gender politics, as well as their consequences for diverse human communities and ecosystems of Latin America.
As they critique the present social order, Latin American fictions like these share common queries about history with postcolonial texts elsewhere. Though useful, a consideration of twentieth-century Latin American texts in the context of postcolonialism raises problems for both Latin Americanists and postcolonial critics. For many regions of the world, the colonial era began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Latin America is different; its colonial era began shortly after the 1492 voyage of Columbus. At the height of the Spanish empire, Spanish control extended southward from western North America to Tierra del Fuego, at least on paper if not in practice. Social and ecological transformations accompanied the Spanish presence. The Columbian Exchange introduced new flora and fauna, as well as infectious diseases that decimated indigenous populations, particularly those living in urban centres or along trade routes. Indigenous survivors of epidemics and violence were reorganized and displaced. Both mission activity and labour exploitation in intensive agriculture and mining took their toll on native cultures. At the same time, the landscape of Latin America changed. Forests were no longer managed, and secondary growth advanced in previously cultivated regions. Meanwhile, Spanish colonizers imposed another aesthetic and economic model on the landscape, introducing crops and livestock to which they were accustomed in Europe or that were in demand on the world market.
When the end of the colonial era came in the 1820s for most of Latin America, independence did not produce the same social and political upheaval as did independence movements in Africa and the Middle East a century later. The social order based on ethnic privilege and social class had deep roots in society and remained essentially intact after independence. In fact, prominent Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano argues that the end of the colonial era and the "metamorphosis of modernity" in Latin America "served to excessively prolong a system of power whose beneficiaries were social groups that embodied the most perverse results of colonial domination" (148). Racial and social hierarchies remained undisturbed, and Latin American social and economic elites in general had little common interest with the masses of mixed race and indigenous people they governed.
Coloniality beyond the early Iberian version, that is, coloniality after independence, is singularly important to understanding these two Argentine novels, as well as the questions they raise about economic and environmental history. Why? Latin American independence coincided with the emergence of a power-grabbing modernity in Europe where the centre of power had shifted from Iberia to northern Europe, and especially to Great Britain (Quijano 148). Latin America was no longer a subject of empire in the nineteenth century, but its peoples and places felt the effects of empire in profound ways. Both La tierra del fuego and Un piano en Bahia Desolacion explicitly challenge representations of coloniality and modernity that overlook Latin American realities. Furthermore, they demonstrate how changes wrought by nineteenth-century British imperial designs affected places and peoples beyond the direct control of empires, in the new republics of the American continent. They undertake...
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