Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema

Carolyn Fornoff (Editor), Gisela Heffes (Editor)

Research output: Book/Report/Conference proceedingBook

Abstract

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema brings together fourteen scholars to analyze Latin American cinema in dialogue with recent theories of posthumanism and ecocriticism. Together they grapple with how Latin American filmmakers have attempted to "push past the human," and destabilize the myth of anthropocentric exceptionalism that has historically been privileged by cinema and has led to the current climate crisis. While some chapters question the very nature of this enterprise—whether cinema should or even could actualize such a maneuver beyond the human—others signal the ways in which the category of the "human" itself is interrogated by Latin American cinema, revealed to be a fiction that excludes more than it unifies. This volume explores how the moving image reinforces or contests the division between human and nonhuman, and troubles the settler epistemic partition of culture and nature that is at the core of the climate crisis. As the first volume to specifically address how such questions are staged by Latin American cinema, this book brings together analysis of films that respond to environmental degradation, as well as those that articulate a posthumanist ethos that blurs the line between species.
Original languageEnglish (US)
PublisherSUNY Press
Number of pages376
ISBN (Print)9781438484037, 9781438484044
StatePublished - Jun 2021

Publication series

NameSUNY series in Latin American Cinema

Keywords

  • Latin American cinema
  • ecocriticism
  • posthumanism
  • climate change

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