Strange Ecologies : Postnatural Readings of Twenty-First Century Latin American Long Poems (Roxana Miranda Rupailaf, Daniel Samoilovich and Luigi Amara)

This study discusses the articulation of a form of ecological thought grounded in a postnatural aesthetics in twenty-first century long poems from Latin America. I argue that the relationship between poetry and ecology, as analyzed in Latin American ecopoetry, and particularly in the long poem of the 70s and 80s, needs to be supplemented with a postnatural framework, in order to theorize the articulations of ‛the living’ ‒assemblages between human and more-than-human worlds‒ in the contemporary long poem. Working within a socioecopoetic paradigm, previous studies in ecopoetry understand the expression of ecological thinking in poems as a portrayal or denunciation of the ecological crisis primarily expressed in the poem’s thematic content. I maintain, however, that contemporary long poems manifest the relationship between poetry and ecology in experiments with poetic form, producing thus estrangement effects, which enable a most profound poetic engagement with current ecological issues as poetic voices from the Global South. The purpose of this dissertation is, then, to theorize the experimental poetic practices that the contemporary long poem deploys in order to articulate an ecological thought. My main argument is that the formal articulations of ‛the living’ in the long poem can be understood as what I call strange ecologies, a notion that refers to poetic practices that, by generating estrangement effects, exhaust the modern divide between humanity and nature. I propose that such poetic practices can be conceptualized adopting an aesthetic-theoretical framework from the postnatural South situated in the history of extractivism and colonialism in Latin America. The proposed notion questions the assumptions of nature as understood in the essentialist terms that sustained the dichotomy nature/culture since the Enlightenment in Western Modernity. In this sense, the main theoretical assumptions are postnatural and posthumanist. From these perspectives, I argue that a postnatural understanding of the relation between nature and culture in the long poem offers a means to reformulate the articulation of ecological thinking in Latin American poetry. As the poetic practices in twenty-first century long poems exhaust the idea of subject and world, aesthetic autonomy as well as the dichotomies life/death and the biological/the social, strange ecologies challenge the nature/culture divide. Accordingly, I sustain that the poetic practices of twenty-first century long poems embody and reformulate the postnatural condition. By mapping the articulations of the living in three distinct cases of strange ecologies ‒Roxana Miranda Rupailaf’s queer incorporation of an ancestral Mapuche-Huilliche myth in the long poem Shumpall (2011), Daniel Samoilovich’s neo-objectivist language that interweaves nature, culture and capital in fractal and grotesque patterns in the theatrical long poem El despertar de Samoilo. El siglo XX ¿qué se fizo? (2005) and Luigi Amara’s psychogeographic walk at ground level in the essayist and visual long poem A pie (2010)‒, I contend in this study that the ecology of estrangement in the long poem challenges the anthropocentric paradigm of Modernity as well as the neo-extractivist practices in Latin America. In the analysis, I show how the poetic practices of strange ecologies inscribe the effects of neo-extractivism in formal experiments where the more-than-human worlds emerge in the historicity of language, thus laying the grounds for a postnatural Latin American poetry