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.