Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultural Production

Challenging anthropocentric perspectives by highlighting cultural representations of plants and animals across Latin American history

The first book to integrate both critical plant studies and critical animal studies within the context of Latin American culture, this collection explores the relationships between plants, animals, and humans across various countries and historical periods and through various kinds of media. Acknowledging nonhuman species as coproducers of culture, this volume offers a deeper understanding of the region's natural environment and humanity's place in it.

Contributors analyze a wide range of cultural production, including recent science films on monarch butterfly migration, nineteenth-century photographs of Panama, the eighteenth-century diary of a nun in New Granada, 1920s Brazilian landscape paintings, contemporary Zapotec poetry, and twentieth-century vegetarian cookbooks from Uruguay and Mexico. By focusing on plants and animals, these essays uncover the entanglements of nonhuman lives with issues such as race, gender, labor, and coloniality, while highlighting other-than-human ways of living, knowing, and communicating. Plants and Animals in Latin American Cultural Production promotes a deeper understanding of cultural forms in Latin America and breaks down disciplinary divides--both between critical animal studies and critical plant studies and between fields such as literary studies, film studies, and art history. Ultimately, this collection challenges anthropocentric perspectives as it offers new pathways to think about and with plants and animals.