Changes in the Landscape is a collection of timely essays that bring the methodologies and commitments of ecocriticism to bear on the study of Latin American literature and cultural production. The book’s eleven chapters, written by some of the leading voices in the field, invite readers to consider how the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature was fundamentally transformed during a period when new modes of capitalist production were emerging in the region and around the world. Jennifer L. French’s introductory essay provides a historical and theoretical framework for the collection.

Ranging from the immediate aftermath of the Spanish‑American Wars of Independence (1810–1826) to the early twentieth century (1925), the volume’s essays cover a wide variety of genres and forms of cultural production, from José Hernández’s epic poem Martín Fierro to prose fiction, painting and photography, and the personal albums compiled by Spanish-American women. Individually and collectively, the essays engage with scientific writing as both a discourse of power and a source of potentially significant, even revelatory information about human and nonhuman nature. Changes in the Landscape enables readers to more fully understand the transition from colonial regimes to the ecocidal extractivism of the export boom (1870–1930) by drawing out and analyzing some of the cognitive resources and rhetorical strategies that were available to imagine, protest, or enact new norms and expectations regarding the relations between human and nonhuman life, be it the life of wildflowers, waterfalls, or Cuba’s Ciénaga de Zapata.

Jennifer L. French is the Rosenburg Professor of Environmental Studies and Spanish at Williams College.

Introduction | A Rapidly Changing Landscape: Ecocriticism as an Approach to the Cultural Production of Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Jennifer L. French

1. Canals, Dams, and Colonized Landscapes: Simón Rodríguez versus the Vincocaya Project (Arequipa, 1830)
Ronald Briggs

2. Forests of Sound: Listening, Affect, and Matter in Humboldt and Hudson
Jens Andermann

3. Archives of Extinction: Unproductive Bodies and Human/Nonhuman Expendability in the Argentine Desert
Gisela Heffes, translated by Andrea Rosenberg

4. Cuba’s Ciénaga de Zapata: Despoiled Landscapes and Biodiversity Conservation in the Long Nineteenth Century
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

5. Botanical Beings: On Women, Flowers, and Plants in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Vanesa Miseres

6. Hydraulic Energy, Nature, and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Jorge Quintana Navarrete

7. That Mysterious Something: Nature, Mystery, and Animism in W. H. Hudson’s Early Writings
Lesley Wylie

8. Estanislao Severos Zeballos, or, Nineteenth-Century Argentina’s Environmental Unconscious
Aarti S. Madan

9. La Revista Hispano-Americana (1895–1896): Laura Méndez’s Extractivist Pedagogy
Catalina Rodríguez

10. Memories of a Darwinian: Anarchism and Animality in the Literary Crónicas of Rafael Barrett
Jennifer L. French

11. Graffiti as Earthly Inscriptions: Human Acts and Geological Forces in Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões (1902)
Emmanuel A. Velayos Larrabure

Contributors

Index