One of the challenges of interrogating the increasing precarity of living conditions in some regions of the Americas is seeking for a way of productively addressing the intersections between inequality, climate crisis, and systemic violence. This dissertation analyzes a corpus of contemporary Latin American and Latinx literary and visual works that point us to the significant role played by plantations and monocultures in shaping capitalism, the continuity of the colonial legacy of the plantation, and its devastating effect in a region that has been deemed as a source of raw materials and produce for a globalized world. The corpus I analize is constitued by the following Works: José Alejandro Restrepo’s video-installation Musa paradisiaca, (Colombia, 1996); César Acevedo’s feature film La tierra y la sombra (Colombia, 2017), Juan Cárdenas’s fiction book El diablo de las provincias (Colombia, 2018); Helena María Viramontes’s fiction book Under the Feet of Jesus (U.S., 1995); Lina Meruane’s fiction book Fruta podrida (Chile, 2007), and Samanta Schweblin’s nouvelle Distancia de rescate (Argentina, 2015). I analyze the ways in which these works articulate critical discourses on the experience of precarity, violence, and resilience against the monocultures in different regions of the Americas. Together, the works in my corpus cast light on violent practices that range from the use of pesticides and their effects for vegetal and human life, to the use of physical and sexual violence as coercive mechanisms against workers. In addition, they also point to the colonial history of the plantation and its continuity in the monocultures as part of the landscape of neoliberalism. Moreover, the strategies of aesthetic representation chosen by these artists and authors constantly push the limits of realism, as a way of escaping a sort of worn-out language found in the media or in public denouncement. I draw from a diverse set of theoretical and critical frameworks, mainly Latin American decolonial studies, biopolitics, ecocriticism, and Marxist-feminism. My contribution to the field of Latin American and Latinx studies aims to offer a hemispheric critical framework that serves as a bridge to different frameworks such as Latin American studies and the most recent ecocritical reflections around the still unstable categories “Anthropocene” and “plantationocene”. In doing so, I analyze in my corpus three modes of critique of the plantation: the continuity of its colonial legacy, the plantation as an institution that disciplines labor and life, and the plantation as an all-encompassing institution which practices have an overwhelming impact at a global environmental scale.

Creator

• Gil Gómez, Leonardo

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-4bfz-5c46

Subject

• Latin American literature
• Latin American studies

Language

• es

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15828
• etdadmin_upload_856841

Keyword

• Estudios decoloniales
• Ecocrítica
• Estudios latinoamericanos
• Literatura
• Cultura visual
• Plantación

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright