Esperanza Mayobre, from the series El A.M.O. y el esclavo
Ecologies of Value: Environmental Aesthetics and the Critique of Extraction in Latin America
My second major project analyzes contemporary literary and artistic works that reflect on the anthropocentric, colonial, gendered, and racial preconditions of extraction. Drawing from queer, eco-materialist, and nonhuman aesthetics, my chapters engage with cultural modes of knowing that critique the socioecological impacts of economic value from the margins of the global capitalist system—the Amazon, the Caribbean, the Andean highlands, and the US-Mexico border. In doing so, and as I suggest, these works delve into the disavowed violence of the commodity form, channeling problems relevant to the present ecological crisis and the potential for art to imagine alternate futures.