Gabriel Horowitz’s Nature Fantasies: Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America was published by Bucknell University Press in October 2023. Christopher Travis (author of Resisting Alienation: The Literary Work of Enrique Lihn) writes, “Horowitz challenges conventional approaches, particularly in recent environmental criticism, that see a return to nature as an emancipatory act (from the colonial period to today), when quite to the contrary, it might be a reifying act that further leads to a biopolitical state. Those committed to a rigorous Latin American ecocriticism will need and want to engage with this cross examination.”
Description: In this original study, Gabriel Horowitz examines the work of select nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American writers through the lens of contemporary theoretical debates about nature, postcoloniality, and national identity. In the work of José Martí, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Jorge Luis Borges, Augusto Roa Bastos, Cesar Aira, and others, he traces historical constructions of nature in regional intellectual traditions and texts as they inform political culture on the broader global stage. By investigating national literary discourses from Cuba, Argentina, and Paraguay, he identifies a common narrative thread that imagines the utopian wilderness of the New World as a symbolic site of independence from Spain. In these texts, Horowitz argues, an expressed desire to return to the nation’s foundational nature contributed to a movement away from political and social engagement and toward a “biopolitical state,” in which nature, traditionally seen as pre-political, conversely becomes its center.
Contents
Introduction
Part I
1 The Natural History of Latin American Independence
2 Renewing Niagara Falls, Burning the Archive in the Cuban Poetic Tradition
Part II
3 The Fantasy of the Creole as White Indian
4 The End of History and the Return to Nature
5 The Garden, the Camp, and the Biopolitical State
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Gabriel Horowitz is an assistant professor of Spanish at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro.
For more information, see https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/nature-fantasies/9781684484997/
Gabriel Horowitz’s Nature Fantasies: Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America was published by Bucknell University Press in October 2023. Christopher Travis (author of Resisting Alienation: The Literary Work of Enrique Lihn) writes, “Horowitz challenges conventional approaches, particularly in recent environmental criticism, that see a return to nature as an emancipatory act (from the colonial period
