Taming the Chaos: Nature, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Writing in Modern Latin America.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relation between nature and sovereignty in 19th and 20th-century Brazil, Colombia, and Paraguay by focusing on the cultural production (literary and visual) related to the rainforest regions of these three countries: the Amazon and Paraná. It privileges the concept of nature as something historically produced in opposition to traditional notions that regard it as an immutable substratum of reality. In this sense, nature is conceived of as a discursive practice that erases history in order to generate the ‘natural’ preconditions—broadly defined to include the realm of the non-human, instinctual human drives or violence not monopolized by the State —that support the need to impose social control. While this work demonstrates how certain cultural mediations of sovereignty in Latin America rest on the articulation between the natural and the political, it also illustrates processes in which literature opens spaces of critical and ethical reflection that reorient politics away from the control of sovereignty. This study combines readings of works by canonical figures (Euclides da Cunha, José de Alencar, José Eustasio Rivera, Augusto Roa Bastos) and less well-known authors (Lope de Aguirre, Alberto Rangel, Rafael Barrett) with analyses of monumental architecture, landscape painting, photography, and cinema. Theoretically, it draws on early modern theories of natural law (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), critical approaches to the concept of sovereignty (Schmitt, Benjamin, Foucault, Agamben), recent discussions on the production of nature and the body-politic in science studies (Haraway, Latour), and contemporary Latin American cultural theory.