Imagining a New Natural History

Nicolás Campisi, assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University, is the author of The Return of the Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times. Lucas Mertehikian is director of the Humanities Institute at the New York Botanical Garden.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The New Natural HistoryNicolás Campisi and Lucas MertehikianPart I. The Institutions of Natural History1. The Museum of Modernity: Photographic Archive, Patrimonial Collection, and Selk’nam GenocideIgnacio Pastén López and Ignacio Veraguas Caripan2. Árbol Ramón, the Axolotl/Ajolote, and LEGOs: Mexico City’s Papalote Children’s MuseumEmily Hind3. A Contemporary Cabinet of Curiosities: Play, Improbability, and the Reinvention of the World in Liliana Porter’s El hombre con el hacha y otras situaciones brevesJerónimo Duarte-RiascosPart II. Natural History and Ancestral Knowledge4. Reactivating Richard Spruce’s Amazonian Biocultural ArchiveLuciana Martins5. Poetics of an Expanded HumanityFlorencia Garramuño6. Telling Natural Histories in Crispín Amador Ramírez’s El infierno del paraíso and Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Woman of LightMatylda FiglerowiczPart III. Ecocriticism, New Materialism, Posthumanism7. The Necrospace of the Anthropocene: An Anachronistic ArchiveGisela Heffes8. The Ecological Novel: Unearthing a Latin American Land ArchiveCarlos Fonseca9. Disorder of Time in the Anticolonial MuseumGabriel Giorgi10. Emilio Renart’s New Sense of SpaceFlorencia MalbránPart IV. Human and Nonhuman Histories11. Exhibitions in the Face of the Climate Crisis: How Is the Anthropocene Shaping Hemispheric Aesthetics?Valeria Meiller12. The Act of Collecting in Latin American DocumentaryAntonio Gómez13. Marias and Joões: Naming in Maria Esther Maciel’s Poetic EncyclopediasNathaniel WolfsonAfterword 267Joanna PageList of Contributors 273Index 277