Description
In her anthology Poéticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación, Gisella Heffes defines the term 'ecocriticism' as "a land centered practice from which literary and cultural studies can be researched, analyzed, and explored," specifically through environmental and critical lenses. Using her three subsequent classifications as a launching point, my research was organized into six distinct categories: colonialism, extractivism, the Panama Canal, deforestation, conservation, and post-apocalypse and analyzed how humans, but more specifically, foreign polities, have impacted the Central American landscape. In this interdisciplinary exploration -- consisting of comparative explorations of written texts, visual arts, film, and other media -- I have explored alternatives to Western and colonial views of the environment. These alternatives typically come in the form of what Gómes-Barris calls 'submerged perspectives': ways of viewing that challenge coloniality and offer a new way of approaching environmental concerns. I have thus focused on how Indigenous and other underrepresented groups have been able to resist ecological destruction through these submerged perspectives; these and other decolonial epistemes that function outside of the colonial framework ultimately have the potential to shift Western hegemony over the natural world.
Submerged Perspectives': Ecocriticism in Central America
In her anthology Poéticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación, Gisella Heffes defines the term 'ecocriticism' as "a land centered practice from which literary and cultural studies can be researched, analyzed, and explored," specifically through environmental and critical lenses. Using her three subsequent classifications as a launching point, my research was organized into six distinct categories: colonialism, extractivism, the Panama Canal, deforestation, conservation, and post-apocalypse and analyzed how humans, but more specifically, foreign polities, have impacted the Central American landscape. In this interdisciplinary exploration -- consisting of comparative explorations of written texts, visual arts, film, and other media -- I have explored alternatives to Western and colonial views of the environment. These alternatives typically come in the form of what Gómes-Barris calls 'submerged perspectives': ways of viewing that challenge coloniality and offer a new way of approaching environmental concerns. I have thus focused on how Indigenous and other underrepresented groups have been able to resist ecological destruction through these submerged perspectives; these and other decolonial epistemes that function outside of the colonial framework ultimately have the potential to shift Western hegemony over the natural world.