Thursday, May 6, 2021, 2:00pm EST
This event is in ENGLISH

Respondent: Gisela Heffes (Rice University)
Moderator: Jens Andermann (NYU)

Beginning with Andrés Bello’s “Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida”, the first part of this lecture will explore the social and ecological contradictions of capitalist agriculture in Latin America from its inception in the 19th century to its industrialization during the Green Revolution and corporatization in neoliberalism. In the second part, focusing particularly on an array of contemporary novels centered around rural and suburban landscapes, this lecture will examine the role of monoculture and transgenic crops in the precarization of labor relations, gender violence, and environmental degradation in some countries of Latin America in the last decades.

Sebastián Figueroa (Andrés Bello Postdoctoral Fellow, KJCC) is currently working on a book manuscript titled Poéticas de la extracción. Literatura, naturaleza y capitalismo en América Latina, in which he analyzes the relationship between capitalist development, resource extraction, and ecological crisis in Latin American literature from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Gisela Heffes (Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, Rice University) is a writer and the co-editor of The Latin American Eco-Cultural Reader (Northwestern University Press, 2020), and the volume Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (forthcoming in SUNY Press, 2021). Her most recent fictions are Sophie La Belle (a bilingual novella with images, 2016); the novel Cocodrilos en la noche (2020); and the bilingual poetry collection El cero móvil de su boca / The Zero Mobile of Its Mouth (2020).

Co-sponsored by NYU King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC) and NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS).