Ronald Briggs

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.

Moral electricity—a term coined by American transcendentalists in the 1850s to describe the force of nature that was literacy and education in shaping a greater society. This concept wasn't strictly an American idea, of course, and Ronald Briggs introduces us to one of the greatest examples of this power: the literary scene in Lima, Peru, in the nineteenth century. As Briggs notes in the introduction to The Moral Electricity of Print, ""the ideological glue that holds the American hemisphere together is a hope for the New World as a grand educational project combined with an anxiety about the baleful influence of a politically and morally decadent Old World that dominated literary output through its powerful publishing interests."" The very nature of living as a writer and participating in the literary salons of Lima was, by definition, a revolutionary act that gave voice to the formerly colonized and now liberated people. In the actions of this literary community, as men and women worked toward the same educational goals, we see the birth of a truly independent Latin American literature.