Gisela Heffes

Crocodiles at Night follows the difficult journey of death through the eyes of a woman as she travels between her home in Houston and her ailing father in Argentina." Dad died today. It was foretold, but I didn't see it coming." Although the outcome of Crocodiles at Night does not remain a surprise beyond the first paragraph, it expands outwards in philosophical, heartfelt reverberations true to Heffes's style. Crocodiles at Night explores familial ties, memories and images of places that are no longer the same, the vagaries of the medical system, and social critique in this unfeigned, excruciating view of death and how it affects all who experience it.

det gör mig ont att tänka på det som finns kvardet som är kvar av sommarendet som är kvar av världenjag tänker ofta på det som är kvar och på detsom är bortaGisela Heffes är författare och lärare i latinamerikansk litteratur och kultur vid Johns Hopkins-universitetet. Utöver hennes banbrytande arbete i ekokritik och humanekologi, har hon publicerat en rad böcker, essäer och artiklar på olika teman, till exempel urbana utopier, folkförflyttningar och migration, moderskap och argentinsk judisk litteratur. Hon är bland annat författare till romantrilogin Ischia, Praga & Bruselas (2005). Hennes tvåspråkiga titlar omfattar kortromanen Sophie La Belle y las ciudades en miniatura / Sophie La Belle and The Miniature Cities (2016) och diktsamlingen El cero móvil de su boca / The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth (2020), vilken översatts till franska, portugisiska och tyska och som i och med denna utgåva nu finns tillgänglig även på svenska.

Changes in the Landscape is a collection of timely essays that bring the methodologies and commitments of ecocriticism to bear on the study of Latin American literature and cultural production. The book’s eleven chapters, written by some of the leading voices in the field, invite readers to consider how the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature was fundamentally transformed during a period when new modes of capitalist production were emerging in the region and around the world. Jennifer L. French’s introductory essay provides a historical and theoretical framework for the collection. Ranging from the immediate aftermath of the Spanish-American Wars of Independence (1810–1826) to the early twentieth century (1925), the volume’s essays cover a wide variety of genres and forms of cultural production, from JosÉ HernÁndez’s epic poem MartÍn Fierro to prose fiction, painting and photography, and the personal albums compiled by Spanish-American women. Individually and collectively, the essays engage with scientific writing as both a discourse of power and a source of potentially significant, even revelatory information about human and nonhuman nature. Changes in the Landscape enables readers to more fully understand the transition from colonial regimes to the ecocidal extractivism of the export boom (1870–1930) by drawing out and analyzing some of the cognitive resources and rhetorical strategies that were available to imagine, protest, or enact new norms and expectations regarding the relations between human and nonhuman life, be it the life of wildflowers, waterfalls, or Cuba’s CiÉnaga de Zapata.

Changes in the Landscape is a collection of timely essays that bring the methodologies and commitments of ecocriticism to bear on the study of Latin American literature and cultural production. The book’s eleven chapters, written by some of the leading voices in the field, invite readers to consider how the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature was fundamentally transformed during a period when new modes of capitalist production were emerging in the region and around the world. Jennifer L. French’s introductory essay provides a historical and theoretical framework for the collection. Ranging from the immediate aftermath of the Spanish-American Wars of Independence (1810–1826) to the early twentieth century (1925), the volume’s essays cover a wide variety of genres and forms of cultural production, from JosÉ HernÁndez’s epic poem MartÍn Fierro to prose fiction, painting and photography, and the personal albums compiled by Spanish-American women. Individually and collectively, the essays engage with scientific writing as both a discourse of power and a source of potentially significant, even revelatory information about human and nonhuman nature. Changes in the Landscape enables readers to more fully understand the transition from colonial regimes to the ecocidal extractivism of the export boom (1870–1930) by drawing out and analyzing some of the cognitive resources and rhetorical strategies that were available to imagine, protest, or enact new norms and expectations regarding the relations between human and nonhuman life, be it the life of wildflowers, waterfalls, or Cuba’s CiÉnaga de Zapata.

Visualizing Loss in Latin America engages with a varied corpus of textual, visual, and cultural material with specific intersections with the natural world, arguing that Latin American literary and cultural production goes beyond ecocriticism as a theoretical framework of analysis. Gisela Heffes poses the following crucial question: How do we construct a conceptual theoretical apparatus to address issues of value, meaning, tradition, perspective, and language, that contributes substantially to environmental thinking, and that is part and parcel of Latin America? The book draws attention to ecological inequality and establishes a biopolitical, ethics-based reading of Latin American art, film, and literature that operates at the intersection of the built environment and urban settings. Heffes suggests that the aesthetic praxis that emerges in/from Latin America is permeated with a rhetoric of waste—a significant trait thatoverwhelmingly defines it.

Visualizing Loss in Latin America engages with a varied corpus of textual, visual, and cultural material with specific intersections with the natural world, arguing that Latin American literary and cultural production goes beyond ecocriticism as a theoretical framework of analysis. Gisela Heffes poses the following crucial question: How do we construct a conceptual theoretical apparatus to address issues of value, meaning, tradition, perspective, and language, that contributes substantially to environmental thinking, and that is part and parcel of Latin America? The book draws attention to ecological inequality and establishes a biopolitical, ethics-based reading of Latin American art, film, and literature that operates at the intersection of the built environment and urban settings. Heffes suggests that the aesthetic praxis that emerges in/from Latin America is permeated with a rhetoric of waste—a significant trait thatoverwhelmingly defines it.

Ischia is a portrait of an unnamed narrator and her friends: wandering through the margins of different cities, especially Buenos Aires, they search for purpose in an increasingly uncertain world. An intricate, gutsy, and raw novel, Ischia is populated with outsiders who navigate the vicissitudes of life in Argentina and the world. Ischia, the female narrator, is the youngest in a family of seven brothers and relates her experiences as she waits for a ride to the airport. Told through dizzying would-have, could-have conditionals, Ischia overlaps and blurs the past, present, and future of three young characters defined by lack of certainty or expectation. These three lives unfold between disenchantment and humor, and the narration transports readers into a world of memories, desires, and dreams. The novel advances lyrically through themes both solemn and lighthearted, shaping the contours of imagined, hilarious, and surreal experiences.

Indaga la relaci n entre la emergencia de la ciudad americana como realidad geopol tica y la construcci n del ideal ut pico en diversas escrituras latinoamericanas, atendiendo a la diversidad que entra a el ideario ut pico en lo ficcional, ideol gico e intelectual, y a la configuraci n de una sociedad perfecta e idealizada.

Forthcoming