An Irrevocable River of Things: The Nonhuman Makings of Latin American History

Editors:

Diogo de Carvalho Cabral (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
André Vasques Vital (Centro Universitário de Anápolis, Brazil)
Margarita Gascón (CONICET, Argentina)

Source: Wikipedia.

Since Environmental History’s institutionalization in the late 20th century, only a few books have been published in English on Latin America as a region. The most important ones were Shawn Miller’s An Environmental History of Latin America (2007), Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici’s (eds) Centering Animals in Latin American History (2013), and more recently John Soluri, Claudia Leal, and José Pádua’s A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America (2018). In all of these cases, human representations, intentions, and actions remain methodologically at the centre of the analysis, even though there is an emphasis on the relations between humans and nature (conceived as totalities more or less apart). Thus, agency remains understood mainly in its modern historical sense, as human intentional and conscious action, while abiotic matter and even nonhuman animals are portrayed as more or less passive.

We are gathering essays that take the reverse path, radically decentring the human. We are looking for works that centre on things, nonhuman animals, plants, and any other material phenomena and elements as historical agents. The essays should preferably have inter and transdisciplinary approaches that focus on the role of nonhumans over time and in the constitution of what is conventionally called Latin America. The papers may be linked to different emerging fields that claim an understanding of time and space beyond human exceptionalism and the mind-matter dichotomy such as critical post-humanism, neo-materialism, multispecies history, speculative realism, history of things, and environmental history of materialistic orientation.

Deadlines:

Submission of abstract (300-500 words) together with the author(s) bio (100-200 words): 1 July 2021.
Results of abstract evaluation: 15 July 2021.
Submission of full articles (7,000-8,000 words): 15 October 2021.
Submissions should be sent to nonhumanagencies@gmail.com.
Informal queries should be addressed to decarvad@tcd.ie.