More-Than-Human Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean

A consideration of other-than-human elements defining history in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Latin American and Caribbean regions' historical trajectories have been shaped by complex human-nonhuman interactions. In these histories, people are important, even crucial, actors, but not the only ones. Offering a novel approach to the writing of Latin American history, this book brings eight thought-provoking chapters together with a historiographical introduction and critical afterword to center nonhuman beings and things. The oscillating glare of the sun, the allure and resourcefulness of animals, the reluctant genetic malleability of plant seeds, and the life-giving and intractable impassivity of rivers are some of the other-than-human agents driving history in the volume's chapters. This book problematizes Latin American(ist) historiography's tendency to frame "nature" as a separate ontological domain that is only acted upon--conquered, manipulated, devastated--lacking the self-propelled dynamics capable of shaping the course of events. With broad regional and temporal coverage across Latin America and the Caribbean from the pre-colonial period to the present day, More-than-Human Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean responds to environmental history's call to write biophysical environments into the human past--a reconsideration of historical agency that, in this era of climate change, is more necessary than ever.