Imagining the Plains of Latin America

Axel Pérez Trujillo Diniz is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies, Durham University, UK.

• Introduction: The Continental Imaginaries of Latin America One: The Empty Desert of the Pampas Two: The Ruined Lands of the Altiplanos Three: Predation in the Orinoco Llanos Four: Naming the Pantanal Wetlands Conclusion References Notes Index

From Sarmiento to Rivera to Gallegos, Axel Pérez Trujillo examines Latin America’s most renowned writers through an ecocritical lens to trace, with great specificity, the transnational legacy of settler ecologies from the nineteenth century onward. His patient reading of plains imaginaries homes in on specific biomes to shed light on fascinating and understudied categories like continentalism, tropology, and predation. With an eye toward highlighting the urgency of ecocriticism, Pérez Trujillo challenges us to rethink representation and reality, space and subject, and hemispheric notions of what constitutes progress and modernity.