Ecologies of Grief: Water, Memory and the Afterlives of Extraction
Description
Historical and political violence has increasingly been examined through the lens of memory and environmental degradation, where the material presence of rivers, lakes, and shorelines above ground, as well as other subterranean water forms, bears the sedimented traces of trauma and ecological harm. In Las aguas bajan turbias (Dark River, 1952), set in the yerba mate plantations of the Alto Paraná, the river becomes a symbol and, perhaps, the film’s main protagonist. Used in the processing of yerba mate, its turbid waters carry the bodies of exploited workers—mensúes—discarded and left to drift downstream, as discarded evidence of social and ecological devastation. The Paraná becomes both a conduit for capitalist extraction and a vessel bearing the dead.
This image of the river as witness and bearer of violence finds resonance in multiple contemporary artistic and literary productions. Claudia Aboaf’s El rey del agua, Fernanda Trías’s Mugre rosa, and Nona Fernández’s Mapocho each explore how water functions as both a material force and a symbolic archive of ecological and political violence. In El rey del agua, Aboaf imagines a speculative future in the Buenos Aires Delta where water is rationed, commodified, and controlled by a populist strongman. Trías’s Mugre rosa unfolds in a port city overtaken by a toxic epidemic and environmental decay, where pink spores infect the air and fish rot in the harbor. In Mapocho, Fernández reimagines Santiago’s central river as a spectral repository of Chile’s erased histories—from colonial violence to the dictatorship’s disappearances. Taken together, these novels position aquatic landscapes as haunted and contested terrains, where the residues of extractivism, state violence, and trauma converge, compelling us to read water as a witness, a grave, and a site of narrative resistance.
Ecologies of Grief seeks proposals that examine aquatic imaginaries in Latin America and other global contexts where extractivism and historical trauma converge. This seminar aims to explore how bodies of water function as both necro-spaces and sites of memory in literature, film, visual arts, and performance. We invite proposals that investigate how water becomes a locus for articulating trauma and ecological grief. We invite proposals that investigate how water becomes a locus for articulating trauma and ecological grief. Waters, in this framework, are understood as dynamic archives and material sites that transform cultural memory across time and geography.
We welcome papers that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Material residues of trauma in aquatic landscapes
- Water as a necro-space
- Artistic and activist interventions in water-based ecologies
- Narratives that intertwine extractivism, ecological crisis, and ecological trauma
- Indigenous and Afro-descendant cosmologies of water and memory
- Water as an agent of resistance and spiritual continuity.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Elizabeth M. Pettinaroli. Associate Prof. of Spanish and Chair of Latin American and Latinx Studies at Rhodes College. Her scholarship is dedicated to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. She co-edited Ecoficitions, Ecorealities, and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World (2019) with A. M. Mutis and I. Kressner, Troubled Waters: Rivers in Latin American Imagination (2013) with A.M. Mutis, and contributed to A History of Colombian Literature (2016) among other publications.
Speaker Bio
Fernando Varela is an assistant professor of Spanish at Texas Lutheran University. His research centers on environmental humanities in Latin American literature and culture. He has published articles in journals such as Environmental Humanities, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Literature, Extinction, and Fossils in the Americas.
Speaker Bio
Karen Ren is a Ph.D. student at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She holds a BA in Psychology and an MA in East Asian Studies from McGill University. Her research explores queer Asian cinema, slow cinema, non-fiction film, and film festivals. Her doctoral project examines inter-Asian queer cinema as a vehicle for critical queer regionalism and queer modernity, with particular attention to Sinophone queer films produced in Southeast Asia.
Speaker Bio
José Rafael Ponciano (they/them, he/him) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. They hold a B.A. in Spanish and Latin American Studies from the University of Waterloo, and an M.A. in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures from the University of Toronto.
Their research centers around cultural production in Central America, with a special focus on Guatemala. Their interests include queer and kinship theory, affect theory, masculinities, and post-humanism.
Papers
Speaker Bio
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Speaker Bio
Maria Paula Lizarazo is a PhD student in Hispanic Literature at Stony Brook University. She investigates Latin American and Amazonian cultural productions that engage with extractivism and armed conflict.
Before joining Stony Brook, she worked as an environmental journalist for newsrooms in Colombia and Brazil, and has been awarded several fellowships to develop in-depth reporting projects.
Speaker Bio
Georgiana "Georgi" de Rham is a PhD student in the Department of English at UC Davis. Her research interests include contemporary poetry, improvisation and performance, sound studies, water, and the environmental humanities. She has a professional background in small scale agriculture, logistics, and horse care, and has a Master's degree in English from McGill University.