Call for Book Chapters: Latin American Colonial Foundations/Practices, Legacies of Extractivism in the Andes, the Caribbean, and the Amazon

Tracing Extraction: Decolonizing Environmental Legacies in the Amazon, Andes, and Caribbean

One of the least well understood aspects of the contemporary environmental crisis is the controversy surrounding the linkages between the human and the nonhuman. Scientists of the “social” and “natural” variety alike chase an illusory no-man’s-land between the sociopolitical dimensions of historical causality and the independent, autonomous laws of the natural world. These attempts invariably run into contradictions that are worth trying to untangle. For example, how can we make sense of claims on the one hand attributing the crisis to human agency, and on the other hand claims about the inherent agency and sentience of landforms such as mountains and lakes? While environmental activists have been using indigenous people as figureheads for conservation movements for roughly half a century now, there is increasing confusion and frustration as foundational assumptions supporting these linkages have begun to crumble. The Amazon basin, for example—long the archetype of primal nature—is more and more understood as at least partly the result of intentional human actions that took place while northern Europe was uninhabitable and buried under sheets of ice. Likewise, positioning indigenous peoples as the “natural” protectors (or managers) of the land also threatens to continue colonial legacies of labor extraction, placing the onus of responsibility and work on the shoulders of those whose voices and practices might have slowed or prevented the current crisis if they hadn’t been ignored or demonized by colonial Europeans.

This edited volume addresses some of the deeper roots of this multifaceted issue by reflecting on the competing and radically distinctive relationships with nature and human labor held by European missionaries and indigenous South Americans during the colonial period. The goal is to assemble case studies that collectively allow a closer look at how the colonial period laid the foundations for the exploitative and devastating conditions—from eco-tourism to climate change to lithium mines—that face human and non-human forms of life today. The studies will trace the roots of extractivism from the colonial period through independence and today’s climate crisis by following lines of discourse, material things, and practices.

In sum, this edited volume engages with material, discursive, historical, and ethnographic explorations of how ideas of nature in Latin America have threaded their way through history. Examples include the way such ideas have permitted the accumulation of wealth and power, shaped the history of environmental discourse, and changed the course of ecological dynamics. Contributions may examine both how indigenous subjectivity aligns with conceptualizations of nature as sentient or animate and/or how they have been represented in this way by others. They may also shine light onto the ways in which European invaders themselves embodied understandings of nature orthogonal to extractivist dogmas of inert matter. In this way, the volume aims to contribute to a decolonial environmental history that privileges multivocality and the irreducible complexity of indigenous human-environment relations both in the present and transhistorically.

This edited volume seeks to reunite multidisciplinary scholarly and creative work from various disciplines in the Humanities and Social sciences that can offer a reflective and critical intervention to the current environmental history in Latin America broadly conceived.

This volume welcomes proposals focusing on (but are not limited to):

• Decolonial approaches to environmental history
• Transhistorical accounts of indigenous environmental cultures
• Colonial representations of the nonhuman and their legacies
• Extractivist dynamics in contemporary environmental practices such as eco-tourism or nature conservation
• Historically or ethnographically grounded explorations of alternatives to nature/culture binaries
• Studies of legal cases involving extractive industries in conflict with indigenous communities

We accept chapters in Spanish and English. This is a bilingual Spanish and English edited volume.

If you are interested in contributing to this edited volume, please submit your proposal (500-word max.), and biography (150-word max.) to the editors Dr. Angelica Serna Jeri (a.serna@duke.edu) and Dr. Joshua Shapero (jshapero@unm.edu) by February 15, 2025

Proposal acceptance will be notified by April 15, 2025

Contributors whose abstracts get selected will receive the Vernon Press submission guidelines to prepare a 6000 to 8000-word chapter. Full chapter submissions are to be submitted by August 15, 2025.