Deadline: October 15, 2025
Contact: Andrés Arteaga, Professor, St. Mary´s University
Email: andres.arteaga@smu.ca
Canadian Hipanist Association/ Asociación canadiense de hispanistas (ACH) 2026
Salamanca, Spain
Organizers: Adriana Kolijn (University of Ottawa) akolijn@uottawa.ca – Andrés Arteaga (Saint
Mary´s University) andres.arteaga@smu.ca
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there seem to be two directions taken by
contemporary eco-literature from Latin America. One direction incorporates the ancestral
knowhow of indigenous and Afro-American communities incorporating a “pensamiento vivo” or
living thought characterized by a “semiotics beyond-the-human” (Kohn, 2021). Another
direction in literature poses the urgent need to adopt an ethical-ecological stance which Joaquín
Marta-Sosa proposes as a “literature of being” in his essay “La ecología literaria como
responsabilidad del escritor” [“Ecological Literature as a writer’s responsibility”] (1984). This
literature arises from a concrete lived reality far removed from “smog” literature originating
from industrialized countries. Marta Sosa furthermore sees this literature as pertinent in Latin
America as it “passes from a colonized literature to a liberated literature” (Marta Sosa 1984,
207). Furthermore, in her book Políticas de la destrucción/poéticas de la preservación (2013),
Gisela Heffes signals another important characteristic of Hispano-American literature, one she
calls a “rhetoric of waste, that which is discarded, recycled or preserved and which is
simultaneously connected with the more general problem of environmental destruction and
preservation” (24). Here, Heffes proposes that an ecocritical reading embraces a wide
understanding of what characterizes nature, going beyond the Edenic stereotypes. Heffes
promotes an analysis that embraces all forms of creative expression from visual arts and cinema
to literature in order to think about the aesthetic dialogue with the more-than-human world. What
characteristics does the contemporary hispano-american literature have compared to that
produced by industrialized nations? What characterizes the decolonized and liberated eco-
literature arising from Latin America? Are there common themes with other eco-literatures in
other languages?
In this panel we invite investigators or authors to propose papers centred on these questions and
with a focus on the contemporary eco-literary production from Latin America.
Papers in Spanish or English are welcome. Please send in proposals between 150-200 words
with contact information and e-mail before October 15, 2025.
Posted on September 12, 2025
