ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for April 2024 is Paul Merchant.
Paul Merchant is an Associate Professor in Latin American Film and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol, UK, where he also co-directs the Centre for Environmental Humanities. His research explores the intersections of environment and culture across the region, with a particular focus on Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled The Ocean to Come: Pacific Futures in Chile and Peru, which examines the significance of the Pacific Ocean as a site of aesthetic and social experimentation in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is the author of Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), and the co-editor of Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (University of Florida Press, 2020), and ReFocus: The Films of Lucrecia Martel (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). He enjoys working with a range of academic and non-academic partners across the world and has recently collaborated with organisations including Fundación Mar Adentro in Chile and MAC Lima in Peru.
How did you become interested in studying ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities?
I have always been interested in questions of space in the study of literature and culture, and my PhD work was about how cinema deals with the intimate spaces of the home. Strangely enough, quite a few of the films that I watched for that project drew explicit links between domestic spaces and much bigger, more apparently ‘natural’ spaces like the ocean, the desert and the mountains. There seemed to be a desire in the work of these filmmakers to think through ideas of belonging in relation to environments beyond the home. So, in a sense, I just followed where the material led me, though of course, I was also conscious that ecocriticism and the environmental humanities were rapidly growing and enormously productive and creative fields. There’s something of a personal connection, too, in that I have very happy memories of learning to sail as a child, and have always been fascinated by (and more than a little scared of) the sea. Sailing, as a practice that requires one to act in concert with, rather than against, natural forces like wind, waves and tide, is quite an apt metaphor for much of the thinking that we do as environmental humanities scholars and practitioners. Indeed, one of the artists I have written about and been in conversation with, Enrique Ramírez, often returns to sailing as a key motif in his video and installation work.
Who is your favorite environmental artist, writer, or filmmaker? Or what is your favorite environmental text?
I can’t imagine I’ll be the first to choose this one, but I honestly can’t think of a work of literature that’s opened my eyes more to the possibilities of what an ‘environmental text’ might be than Richard Powers’ The Overstory. Powers’ masterstroke, for me, is to conceive the entire structure and timeframe of the novel in terms that are more aligned with trees than with humans – roots, trunk, crown, and seeds. In this novel, “decentering the human” therefore comes to mean a lot more than the simple ventriloquisation of a “tree’s perspective”, a technique which always runs the risk of seeming glib. The stories of the novel’s human characters are told with great empathy – but it is always clear to the reader that their lives fit into a living tapestry of a much greater scale. It’s a novel that doesn’t shy away from the terrible devastation that humans can wreak on the environment, but it also keeps the future in its sights, and in doing so, retains some measure of hope.
What are you currently working on?
What can a view from, or even through, the Pacific Ocean reveal about Chilean and Peruvian culture? Addressing a corpus that ranges from the mid-twentieth century to the present, my current book project argues that a Pacific perspective makes it possible to see how culture can help build senses of community both among humans and between humans and the nonhuman environment. In doing so, it shows how in the literature, film and visual arts of both countries, the Pacific has been and continues to be a space for experimentation with possible futures. The book thus moves beyond the frequent critical categorization of Peru as “Andean” and of Chile as belonging to the “Southern Cone,” showing instead shared environmental and social challenges, and common conceptions of how they might be tackled.
Recent years have seen a surge of critical interest in ecological art and literature from Latin America, as the award of a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña at the 2022 Venice Biennale made clear. There has doubtless also been a rapid growth in ecologically-themed cultural production, especially in the field of the visual arts. From Chile and Peru alone, one might name, alongside Vicuña herself, Ana Teresa Barboza and Rafael Freyre, Luz María Bedoya, Claudia Müller, and Seba Calfuqueo. All of these artists, whose work will be addressed in this book, are concerned to some extent with the ocean and its connected bodies of water. Yet scholarship in the growing field of Latin American environmental humanities has remained largely terrestrial in focus. My book project contends that there is much to be gained from bringing this body of work into contact with the equally vibrant field of global blue humanities and critical ocean studies. An oceanic perspective allows a clearer view of how the astonishing range of creative engagements with the environment in contemporary Chile and Peru can contribute to a global conversation on how to live well in changing ecological circumstances.
What is something you are reading right now that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
I’ve just started reading How the World Made the West, by Josephine Quinn. This is a big book in all senses – Quinn, who is a historian of the ancient world, argues that conceiving of “Western civilization” as having separate roots from its Eastern counterparts is wrong, and moreover lies at the root of many contemporary conflicts and misunderstandings. She sets out to show how “the West” was built through thousands of years of global encounters across continents (the arrival of Indian numerals in Europe through Arabia is just one example). Quinn’s methods, geographical focus and chosen historical period are obviously very different from mine, but I am inspired by her willingness to make bold arguments, and to think of societies and cultures as participants in a constant conversation. This is a conceptual frame that animates my own work, and that I hope to develop in a future project about Latin America’s transpacific cultural connections. Quinn’s work is a model of how scholarship in the humanities can speak to contemporary problems while remaining authentic and grounded in deep expertise.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you?
Professor Imre Szeman, who is Director of Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability at the University of Toronto, inspires me through his ability to combine methodological and conceptual innovation with a thoughtful approach to how to make voices from the humanities heard in contemporary environmental debates. We were lucky enough to have Imre visit us in Bristol in November last year, to give the annual lecture at our Centre for Environmental Humanities. He surprised us all by giving us a close reading of Bill Gates’ book on the environment, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. The lecture was a model of how to use humanities methods to provide constructive critical commentary on the ideas of a figure who is very influential in policy and business circles. Imre has been a key figure in developing important areas of study within the environmental humanities, like energy humanities and petrocultures, but he wears this expertise and experience very lightly, and is always open to new ideas and collaborations. At a time when the future shape of the humanities seems very uncertain, I think he shows that it is possible to find a path.
