¿Nuestra Amazonía?: Mediated Claims to Ownership and Belonging in Amazonian Studies

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The Amazon has long figured in the global imaginary as a place in service of the world beyond it. Whether conceived of as a source of rubber, fine woods, petroleum, spiritual tourism, or as the lungs of the world, interventions in the region have aimed to exploit and protect its biodiversity for the benefit of those living outside Amazonia. At the same time, the late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen a surge in regional activism that has mobilized people to block unsustainable development projects and respect relationships of reciprocity with nonhuman beings in the forest. This panel examines how both insiders and outsiders have wielded a variety of forms of media—literature, film, newspaper, photography, and textiles—to make claims about belonging to Amazonia. Collectively, the papers address the way such media inform, constitute, and contest Amazonian geopolitics, for what publics, and to what ends. Asking whose Amazonia is represented and how, the panel explores mediation as both a practice of belonging and an extractivist enterprise.

Sub Track

• Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Session Organizer

• Amanda M Smith, University of California, Santa Cruz

Chair

• Martina Broner, Cornell University

Individual Presentations

• “A Amazônia é nossa!” Struggling for Land and Resources in Western Amazonia - Kathryn A Lehman, Indiana University

• Slow Violence, Photographic Technology, and the Extractive Industry in the Amazon - Carolina Sá Carvalho, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)

• The Negotiation of Ícaros in Shipibo Textiles for Sale - Alexandra C Macheski, University of California, Santa Cruz

• The Ucayali River, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), and the Latin American Boom - Amanda M Smith, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Sensing Indigenous Cosmology in Río Verde: El tiempo de los Yakurunas - Martina Broner, Cornell University