Nuestra América: A Literary History of the Anthropocene

While my first book focuses on the borderlands since 1848, my second advances a new account of the Anthropocene—the geological epoch in which human societies have a dominant and even determining influence on our nonhuman environments. Climate scientists still disagree about the Anthropocene’s starting date, but they all see the significance of 1492, when Europeans began both a genocide against Native North and South Americans and a trade in enslaved Africans, which together fueled the rise of carbon-intensive capitalism. Much as scientists analyze the Anthropocene’s material traces, Nuestra América wrestles with its cultural causes and consequences, examining how the epoch has taken shape through four processes: exploration, extraction, cultivation, and electrification. Cognates in English, Spanish, French, and other colonial languages, these processes have sustained and been sustained by some of our most prestigious literature and art. However, the processes have always been confronted with alternative cultural practices—with texts, images, and other media for surviving on (without necessarily saving) our planet. By lingering in this tension, Nuestra América revises both literary-critical and geological approaches to periodization. Most concretely, I show how those now labeled “Latinx” register five centuries of socio-ecological struggle among Indigenous Peoples, Spanish-speaking settlers, English-speaking settlers, and others. More broadly, I argue that what ancient Greeks termed “Anthropos” exhibits an epochal contradiction: that it is only by producing and policing all-too-human differences that have we attained such terrible power over our more-than-human planet.