ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for June 2023 is Azucena Castro.
Azucena Castro is a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm University. She is also a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University, where she collaborates with the research group materia. Formerly, Castro was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Geography of the University of Buenos Aires, and a member of the Nature, Culture, Territory research group. She earned her Ph.D. at Stockholm University with a dissertation titled, Strange Ecologies: Postnatural Readings of Twenty-First Century’s Latin American Long Poems. Castro’s research brings together discussions in environmental and energy humanities with Latin American and Caribbean cultural studies. Her editorial contributions include, among others, the book Futuros multiespecie. Prácticas vinculantes para un planeta en emergencia (Multispecies Futures. Kin-Making Practices for Planetary Emergency), published by Bartlebooth in 2023.
How did you become interested in studying ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities?
Since my Bachelor’s studies, I’ve been intrigued by the way poets intertwine words and nonhuman beings, summoning presences such as the wind, trees, and storms via apostrophe, fussing the process of image-making with nature’s generative capacities, and in doing so blurring the boundaries of the human body. A verse by the Argentinean “riverine” poet, Juan L. Ortiz, captures this very well: “De pronto sentí el río en mí,” [suddenly I felt the river in me]. While writing my MA thesis on Latin American women poets, I delved into Val Palmwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993). Although my thesis was not ecocritical, Palmwood’s exposure of the intertwining of patriarchal, colonial, and environmental violence through the critique of Western Modernity’s cultural paradigms deeply influenced my thinking.
Born and raised in a small agricultural city (agrociudad) in Córdoba, Argentina, I also have long been attentive to territorial imaginaries shaping our understanding of land in relation to gender and race, particularly in Argentina, where industrial agriculture is inextricably linked with settler colonialism, patriarchal structures, and ongoing attempts at indigenous erasure. While pursuing my Ph.D. in Sweden, then, I wanted to understand how Latin American environmental poetry counters modern dualisms, such as subject-object and inside-outside, in the Western landscape traditions. I delved into ecocriticism and environmental humanities through an engagement with Latin American literary and cultural scholarship, the emergent literature in environmental and posthuman geography studies in Chile, Brazil and Argentina, and the fascinating Swedish research in feminist/queer/decolonial posthumanities. These three veins have profoundly inspired and shaped my research practice.
Who is your favorite environmental artist, writer, or filmmaker? Or what is your favorite environmental text? Why?
Choosing one is challenging, so I’ll mention a few I’ve been studying. First, Argentinean philosopher Rodolfo Kusch’s ethnographic-philosophical writings in América Profunda (1962). His work engages the Andean earthly, embodied concept of Earth-inhabitation as an alternative to the Western philosophical tradition’s concept of “Being.” Next, Brazilian indigenous writer and environmental activist Ailton Krenak’s reflections in Ideas para Adiar o Fim do Mundo [Ideas to Prevent the End of the World] and Futuros ancestrales [Ancestral Futures]. Both books respond to the Mariana Dam disaster in Minas Gerais, in 2015, challenging the notion that development can be sustainable. Instead, they propose alternative futures based on indigenous stewardship of the floresta (the forest’s material and spiritual realms as a living organism). At a seminar co-organized with the research group materia at Stanford University, we showcased the poetic film Apijemiyeki (2019) by Brazilian-French artist Ana Vaz. This film fascinated me, especially the way Vaz employs a method of excavation to critically reflect on the construction of modern Brazil. The film elaborates on an archive of drawings from the Waimiri-Atroari people of the Amazon while reflecting on the (in)adequacy of the cinematic image as a technology to portray indigenous erasures in the national narratives. The Essays by the artistic collective Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol focus on Tierra del Fuego’s peatlands as nested territories preserving the ancestral knowledge and biocultural memory of the Selk´nam people, defying Argentina’s indigenous erasure politics. I also studied Mapuche Huilliche poet Roxana Miranda Rupailaf’s Shumpall (2011), a cosmogonic poem that stages a ritual and erotic trance of a woman-fish, thus mobilizing a powerful cosmopolitical and territorial myth at a time of intensified extractivism on Mapuche lands (Wallmapu). Next academic year, I plan to teach a course on environmental poetry featuring poets who defy the nature-culture divide: Juan L. Ortiz, Josely Vianna Baptista, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Daniel Samoilovich, Cecilia Vicuña, and Raul Zurita, among others. Lastly, I’d like to highlight the fascinating art-science project entre―ríos led by Lisa Blackmore. Focused on river ecologies and hydroelectric infrastructures in Latin America, this initiative extends the frontiers of the environmental humanities’ towards community collaborations with art, and beyond academia.
What are you currently working on?
I have recently concluded two works focusing on the geological turn in artistic and speculative practices. The first is a more-than-human geography study titled Lithic Geopoetics: Notes for an Inhuman Geography from Artistic Practices with Stones in Argentina and Peru, which is forthcoming in Punto Sur. Journal of Geography at the University of Buenos Aires. The second is a cluster of multimedia essays titled GeoSemantics: Inhuman Becomings and Earthly Memories in the Global South, which will soon be published online in ASAP/Journal (Hopkins Press).
Currently, I am completing a book analyzing the postnatural turn in Latin American poetry from 1970 to the present. The book investigates how life and the living manifest in the sound and materiality of poetry, challenging the nature-culture dichotomy inherited from Western Modernity. It identifies a postnatural shift in contemporary poetry preoccupied with portraying the blurred boundaries and intertwined epistemologies between humans and nonhumans. Additionally, in my postdoc project, I am working on a second book focused on more-than-human futures and multispecies justice as expressed in Latin American and Caribbean speculative art and literature from the 1960s to the present. This project explores the emergence of invasive species at the intersection of speculative genres, regional financial speculation, and sustainable future discourses.
During my postdoc at the University of Buenos Aires, I developed an interest in energy justice and socio-environmental movements, such as Patagonia sin represas, which protests against Chilean and Argentine national hydroelectric dam projects in Patagonian rivers. In relation to this, I have collaborated with the Nature, Culture, Territory group to trace the environmental history of hydropower in Patagonia, focusing on the emergence of social and environmental movements from the 1970s to the present. I would also like to mention the energy humanities project I am co-directing, titled No aire, no te vendas: Energy Sovereignty and Collective Creation in the Context of the Eolic Parks in La Guajira, funded by the Intersecting Energy Cultures Working Group (University of Pennsylvania). This community-based art-science project examines intersecting extractivisms focusing on renewable energy in La Guajira, Colombia, in comparison with regions historically labeled as “deserts” in national discourses, such as Patagonia and northern Brazil.
Finally, I am interested in further developing the transdisciplinary environmental humanities in Latin America through art-science-activism collaborations. To this end, alongside Jorge Marcone —a scholar who has greatly inspired my research— we co-organized a Humanities-Science conference last year. The conference, held at the South American Resilience and Sustainability Studies Center (SARAS) in Maldonado, Uruguay, aimed to reevaluate sustainability from a transdisciplinary environmental humanities perspective. Along with colleagues from Uruguay and Chile, I have co-edited the special issue Environmental Humanities in Latin America: From Transdisciplinary to Undisciplined Practices (Humanidades, University of Montevideo, 2023). This issue foregrounds, for the first time, situated projects and methods in transdisciplinary environmental humanities across Latin America, ranging from study programs and museum practices to art-science and community-based initiatives.
What is something you are reading right now (environmental humanities-related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally? Comment briefly on why or how it inspires you.
I’m currently reading Galo Ghigliotto’s genre-bending visual-textual novel, El museo de la bruma (2020). This novel enacts a museum in Patagonia where the exhibited objects, both present and absent, bear witness to genocidal violence against the Selk´nam people and nonhumans by Patagonian landowners. In doing so, the book repurposes the museum—an institution once instrumental in colonial expansion. I’m also reading Paula Serafini’s eco-territorial and ecofeminist study, Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism (2022). This is a masterful analysis that explores the role of creative practices in collective action contexts that challenge the territorial meanings coopted by extractivist imaginations. Lastly, I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of Jens Andermann’s newly translated book, Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape (2023). This book promises a fascinating journey through the fissures of the landscape form in Latin American art, literature, travelogues, and architecture from the 1920s to the present. Doing so, it seeks to trace precarious alliances and after-life assemblages amidst the end of worlds prospects.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you? Why?
There are many scholars in Latin American environmental humanities and cultural studies whose work I find inspirational and from whom I continue learning, as they have opened new and unconventional pathways to study relations between nature, culture, capitalism, and the planet. I draw inspiration from Gisela Heffes, Victoria Saramago, Jorge Marcone, Mary Louise Pratt, Jens Andermann, Ursula Heise, Joni Adamson, Jason Moore, Lisa Blackmore, Héctor Hoyos, and Elizabeth Povinelli, to name a few. However, two scholars particularly influenced my research methods and pursuits. The first is Macarena Gómez-Barris, whose illuminating work on “submerged perspectives” in The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017), taught me about the importance of adopting research methods ‒ as the “femme-queer-decolonial” ‒ that can foreground the performative and aesthetic forms of political resistance of Indigenous and local knowledges to extractive capitalism. The second is Gabriel Giorgi, whose fascinating book Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica (2014) investigates animality in Latin American literature from the twentieth century to the present from a biopolitical lens. It shows how nonhuman animals have emerged as common but insurgent forms, thereby blending human and animal life, and with that reshaping the understandings of the Latin American literary-cultural archive from a post-anthropocentric perspective. Both works profoundly shape my understanding of multispecies relations and multispecies justice—notions that I’m currently striving to conceptualize in my ongoing research.
