This course explores how the study of literature and cultures is being re-envisioned in the tension between environmental crises and the emergence of posthumanism and multispecies studies. If culture is no longer seen as essentially different and separated from the nonhuman world of plants, animals, geology, or atmospheric events, what new theories and methodologies can effectively decentre our reading of cultural objects?

We will read scholarship from anthropology, STS, and feminist, literary and film studies, alongside Latin American texts spanning Indigenous art to science fiction.

While the importance of nature in Latin American literature and visual culture has long been recognized, recent scholarship has critiqued texts that represent nonhuman elements as resources waiting to be known and dominated. This critique has often produced a normative search for works with more complex, or accurate, ecological representations—a move that remains within the logic of representation itself. This course moves beyond that framework: How can we read films, novels, and images not just as representations of more-than-human relations, but as works co-shaped by human and nonhuman agencies and materials? What methodologies allow us to attend to how climate, infrastructures, or other species influence the very form and production of cultural works?