Environmental violence is a cycle that preserves global power through the unequal distribution of pollutants while affecting society's most vulnerable ecosystems and populations. This concept poses a series of associations and interdependencies between our economic systems, our power structures, and our relation to nature. However, culture could interact with environmental violence beyond the supplementary role it has assigned in the model of environmental violence following Galtung's typology. Culture has autonomy from the economic practices that pollute the environment and its inhabitants. Under certain conditions, specific praxis and beliefs could dismantle the binary between the classical Marxist concepts of base and superstructure on which the relation between cultural violence and environmental violence, as defined, seems to depend. Therefore, there is a need to reconsider how culture, and our ways of understanding it, are part of the cycle in which our ways of production and consumption are incompatible with the stability of the environment and society. This chapter traces how far culture can, in its autonomy, reproduce the practices associated with environmental violence by analyzing a canonical Latin American poetic discourse: the poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda.

In some of the most important Latin American novels of the twentieth century, natural landscapes are often a portal opening onto alternative realities. This chapter examines the assimilation of a surrealist sensibility from the perspective of nature as a character instead of a backdrop in texts like Los pasos perdidos by Alejo Carpentier, La mansión de Araucaima by Álvaro Mutis, and Soufrières by Daniel Maximin. By exploring natural figures like the river, the swamp, and the volcano, this chapter shows the affinities established by Latin American intellectuals with the ideas of surrealism as they align the power of nature with the power of revolution.

By sheer transgression, Roberto Bolano remapped the Latin American literary canon. Through novels, stories, essays, poems, and interviews, he did it by establishing a dialogue – often rapturous, seldom terse – with the major figures of 20th-century literature. Borges was his center of gravity. He admired Nicanor Parra and Cesar Vallejo. He found Isabel Allende kitschy. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a merchant of stereotypes and Mario Vargas Llosa, while obviously talented, was in his eyes too professional. He ridiculed Diamela Eltit and plotted to kidnap Octavio Paz. Beyond his affinities, though, Bolano’s oeuvre reads like a who’s who of the continent’s literati. He wasn’t afraid to use fiction to do criticism and vice versa. His spontaneity is a lesson against academic posturing and lazy thinking.

In Latin American literature almost all paths lead to the fantastic; the region has the distinct anomaly of giving the fantastic mode a central place in its narrative tradition. This essay will not discuss the similarities or differences between fantastical literature, science fiction, and horror, given the numerous hybridizations between subgenres and the fact that this conceptual discussion escapes the limits of the current work. Instead, I have chosen to group them under the rubric of speculative fiction. My aim is to point out some of the possible paths and bifurcations that the genre has taken since 1980, conscious of the possibility of multiple other readings. This essay will discuss the way in which the transition to democracy, neoliberal policies, and technological and social changes in Latin America were portrayed in literature through fictional universes, dystopias, and alternative histories; cyberpunk, hackers, and cyborgs; Chile’s “freak power,” virtual reality, and internet fictions; monsters and other fantastical creatures, eco-horror, and stories from the Anthropocene.

This volume explores how the circulation of goods, people, and ideas permeated every aspect of the continent’s cultural production at the turn of the century. We are interested not only in understanding how literature and the arts confronted the unprecedented penetration of global capital in Latin America, but also in exploring the ways in which rapidly transforming technological and labor conditions contributed to forging new intellectual networks, creating original discourses, exploring innovative forms of knowledge, and reimagining the material and immaterial worlds. This volume shows the new directions in turn-of-the-century scholarship that developed over the last two decades by investigating how the experience of capitalism produced an array of works that deal with primitive accumulation, transnational crossings, and an emerging technological and material reality in diverse geographies and a variety of cultural forms. The various contributions provide a novel understanding of the period as they discuss the ways in which particular commodities, intellectual networks, popular uprisings, materialities, and nonmetropolitan locations redefined cultural production at a time when the place of Latin America in global affairs was significantly transformed.

Between 1870 and 1930, wars in Latin America reveal an increase in the disproportion between political ends and technological innovation. They also show a continual professionalization of armies and soldiers as they attest to a conclusive appropriation of war as a state-sponsored practice and become acts of violence toward space, but only insofar as they are a key element in the production of capitalist space. The Chaco War (1932–1935) serves as a case study, for it exemplifies a critical moment in the history of state violence and capital accumulation. For Bolivia, it gave birth to a new generation of writers and a very distinct literary movement, as it also embodied a historical transition towards ecological imperialism and petroculture. For Paraguay, it was the end of a “national culture of defeat” originated at the end of the War of the Triple Alliance and meant the final territorial annexation of the Chaco Boreal and its resources.

In this chapter the general questions, genres, and authors addressed in the volume are presented.

Surveillance, The Cold War, And Latin American Literature is a cultural and aesthetic analysis of the relationship between secret police agencies and the intellectuals and writers in Latin America during the Cold War. It examines the period from 1950 to 1989 from an interdisciplinary perspective, providing an original understanding of how the Cold War produced stories and created ‘truths’ at a national level through its mechanisms of surveillance and control and how that modus operandi transformed the broader society and its culture. It combines analysis of novels, short stories, and poems by Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, José Revueltas, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, among others, with spy reports and declassified documents from Mexican, Guatemalan, Chilean, and Uruguayan police archives, as well as the CIA, FBI, and Stasi archives. Surveillance traces how the paradigmatic change that began in the Renaissance with Brunelleschi’s re-invention of perspective radically transformed the human locus of enunciation, allowing for the emergence of a new world vision. This consequence of modernity created a basis for paranoid societies like those that emerged during the Cold War in Latin America.