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More-than-Human Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean: Decentring the Human in Environmental History
Author(s): André Vasques Vita (Author), Margarita Gascón (Author), Diogo de Carvalho Cabral (Editor)
- Publisher: University of London Press
- Publication Date: August 1, 2024
- Language: English
- Print length: 250 pages
- ISBN-10: 1915249511
- ISBN-13: 9781915249517
Book Description
The Latin American and Caribbean regions’ historical trajectories have been shaped by complex human-nonhuman interactions. In these histories, people are important, even crucial, actors, but not the only ones. Offering a novel approach to the writing of Latin American history, this book brings eight thought-provoking chapters together with a historiographical introduction and critical afterword to center nonhuman beings and things. The oscillating glare of the sun, the allure and resourcefulness of animals, the reluctant genetic malleability of plant seeds, and the life-giving and intractable impassivity of rivers are some of the other-than-human agents driving history in the volume’s chapters.
This book problematizes Latin American(ist) historiography’s tendency to frame “nature” as a separate ontological domain that is only acted upon—conquered, manipulated, devastated—lacking the self-propelled dynamics capable of shaping the course of events. With broad regional and temporal coverage across Latin America and the Caribbean from the pre-colonial period to the present day,
More-than-Human Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean responds to environmental history’s call to write biophysical environments into the human past—a reconsideration of historical agency that, in this era of climate change, is more necessary than ever.Editorial Reviews
Review
…the book will be a welcome starting point for many scholars of the environmental humanities in Latin America. Moreover, the book succeeds in showing historians outside the field of environmental history how more-than-human histories can be of value in more human-centered studies.
– Christopher McQuilkin, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
This volume offers a useful primer on the emerging approaches to the study of history.
– Ed Stoddard, Freelance Journalist/Editor/Consultant, Johannesburg, South Africa
More-Than-Human Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean is more than a thematically coherent collection of scholarly essays by multiple authors. By respectfully engaging Indigenous perspectives, based on long-standing interactions with nature, this work is both Neo-Animist and Transhumanist in its approach. …the authors have us embrace both ancient Indigenous traditions and the vision of a better future.’
-Abel A. Alves, Ball State University, Muncie, USA
‘More-Than-Human Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean offers a rich and complex study of environmental history that breaks new ground in moving from human-centered approaches and methods to take seriously other biological, geographical and even solar processes that together shape human history in Latin America. The interdisciplinary scope of the studies is impressive, along with the types of sources used, geographies and timescales.‘
– Martha Few, Liberal Arts Professor of Latin American History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Penn State University, USA
