More-Than-Human Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean : Decentring the Human in Environmental History

Abstract

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 nine thought-provoking chapters together with a historiographical introduction and critical afterword to centre nonhuman beings and things. The oscillating glare of the sun, the resourcefulness of insects, the tectonic instability of national territories, and the life-giving and intractable impassivity of rivers are some of the other-than-human agents driving history in the volume’s chapters. It problematises 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, the book 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 needed now more than ever.