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book: Nature Fantasies
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Nature Fantasies

Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2024

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

GABRIEL HOROWITZ is an assistant professor of Spanish at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro.

Reviews

“ . . . very sharp, provocative and sophisticated [approach] to nature and literature that open[s] the way to future ecocritical and environmental humanities studies . . . ”— Ímpetu

“A study on the discursive history of nature in Latin America, Nature Fantasies is a far-reaching and well-documented intervention that offers fresh new readings of such classics as Gómez de Avellaneda, Martí, and Heredia. The author argues for the nineteenth-century signifier 'nature' in Spanish America as one housing criollo fantasies that aimed at superseding and erasing both indigenous histories of the region and the continent’s own non-human history. A readable theoretical intervention on our own historical uses of the word-concept 'nature,' this book is also a study that challenges, in productive ways, the very tenets of ecocriticism and what we do as ecocritics.”— Felipe Martínez Pinzón, coeditor of Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon

“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.”— Christopher Travis, author of Resisting Alienation: The Literary Work of Enrique Lihn

“In its candid engagement with the modern Latin American literary canon, Nature Fantasies: Decolonization and Biopolitics in Latin America provides a succinctly written assessment of some of the limitations inherent to current paradigms of thought such as decolonial thinking and the environmental humanities. It makes a valuable contribution to contemporary debates on Latin America’s past and present.”— Gareth Williams, author of Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State

"The author’s insightful textual explications, clearly linked to current conversations on nature writing and postcolonialism, make Nature Fantasies a welcome addition to the scholarship on nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century Latin American literature. Horowitz’s solid grounding in cultural theory bolsters fresh, attentive readings of mostly well-worn texts and a sometimes skeptical engagement with contemporary literary criticism. . . . [A] road map and a point of departure for literary scholars and others working on some of the most pressing existential questions of our time."

— Revista de Estudios Hispánicos

“A formidable and provocative examination of the role of nature thinking (and nature writing) in the historical transition from cultural decolonization to the modern biopolitical state in Latin America. A must-read for anyone interested in the ways nature and politics intersect.”— Alejandro Quin, coeditor of Authoritarianism, Cultural History, and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing

“Gabriel Horowitz’s Nature Fantasies is a ground-breaking book that explores the complex and contradictory construction of ‘nature’ in nineteenth and twentieth century Spanish American cultural production. Horowitz demonstrates how ‘nature’ as it is determined within this history is a figure both of what must be walled off—disciplined or controlled—and of what must be incorporated into the hegemonic sensibility. One of the important implications of Horowitz’s discussion of nature as both the outside and the inside of criollista cultural ideology is that the biopolitical developments of the twentieth century and beyond turn out to have their roots in colonial and post-colonial histories.”— Patrick Dove, author of Literature and “Interregnum”: Globalization, War, and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin A

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

    i
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  • Publicly Available

    Contents

    vii
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    Introduction

    1
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  • Part I: Decolonization and Nature
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    1. The Natural History of Latin American Independence

    17
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    2. Renewing Niagara Falls and Burning the Archive in the Cuban Poetic Tradition

    31
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  • Part II: Toward the Biopolitical State
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    3. The Fantasy of the Creole as White Indian

    47
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    4. The End of History and the Return to Nature

    77
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    5. The Garden, the Camp, and the Biopolitical State

    92
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    Conclusion

    117
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    Acknowledgments

    123
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    Notes

    125
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    Bibliography

    147
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    Index

    157
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    About the Author

    165
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 31, 2023
eBook ISBN:
9781684485024
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.36019/9781684485024
eBook ISBN: 9781684485024
Keywords for this book
Biopolitical state; Biopolitics; Latin America; Nature ideology; Nature fantasy; Romanticism; Decolonization; Creole; José María Heredia; “En el teocalli de Cholula”; Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda; José Martí; Juan A. Pérez Bonalde; Niagara Falls; Cesar Aira; La Liebre; José Hernández; Martín Fierro; Domingo Faustino Sarmiento; Jorge Luis Borges; “El Sur”; Augusto Roa Bastos; Hijo de hombre; Yo el Supremo; El fiscal; Contravida; Cuba; Argentina; Ideology; Paraguay
Audience(s) for this book
For universities and colleges of further and higher education
Downloaded on 22.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.36019/9781684485024/html
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