Narrating Extractivism in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

With the renewed turn to the extraction and export of natural resources as a source of economic growth, Latin Americanist scholars and social movements have called attention to the limits and consequences of extractivism. This panel brings together scholars of literary, cultural, and media studies to investigate the discourses and imaginaries that have underpinned and contested extractive economies in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru from Independence to the present. Drawing on new theoretical currents within marxian, ecocritical, and postcolonial studies, the papers consider how cultural production has imagined the economies, ecologies, and labor conditions of resource extraction.

Sub Track

• Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Chair

• Lisa R Burner, Sewanee: The University of the South

Individual Presentations

• Accounts of Fictitious Prosperity: Finance and Fertilizer in the Guano and Nitrate Eras - Lisa R Burner, Sewanee: The University of the South

• En las tierras del Potosí, la primera novela minera de Bolivia - Jack D Martinez Arias, Northwestern University

• Representing the Devil in the Mines: Bolivian Extraction and Alienation in El paraje del tío (1979) and Iris (2014) - Mary Renda

• Media and Resistance: Mapping the Fluidity of Mining Production in Chile - Karla Palma Millanao, Universidad de Chile

Discussant

• Pedro Garcia-Caro, University of Oregon