Monocultures in Latin American Cultural Production
Description
Monocultures—of sugarcane, soy, cotton, eucalyptus, grass, oil palm, bananas, agave, and more—are a recurrent subject of contemporary Latin American social struggles and cultural production. Yet, while fields such as geography and critical agrarian studies have been eager to take up agro-extractivism as an object of study and analytical framework (Veltmeyer & Ezquerro-Cañete, 2023), literary and cultural studies situated in Latin America have mostly examined extractivism through the lenses of mining and fossil fuels. With the exception of scholarship based in the Caribbean and the US South, critical engagements with how monocultures are represented in literature, film, mass media, performance and visual art across the Americas remain scarce. This is despite the fact that the extractive nature of monocrop agribusiness has been a central focus of Black and Indigenous struggles for land, labor, autonomy and food sovereignty throughout the region, as well as a persistent concern for writers, filmmakers and artists including Lina Meruane, Samantha Shewblin, Juliana Javierre, Juan Cárdenas, Kütral, Itamar Vieira Junior, Denílson Baniwa, Francisco Huichaqueo Pérez, César Acevedo, Juan Pablo González, among others.
This seminar examines cultural production as a critical lens for analyzing the political, ecological, and epistemological violence of monoculture plantations in Latin America. We seek contributions that investigate how aesthetic forms—particularly innovative modes of representation—reveal the material and symbolic transformations wrought by monocultures on territories, communities, nation-states, and the planet. Of special interest are analyses of horror tropes, oneiric narratives, more-than-human perspectives and intertextual engagements with pop culture and mass media aesthetics. We encourage explorations of both established and emergent representational strategies that expose what monocultures are and do, while envisioning modes of contestation and resistance to monocultural economies and political ecologies. Additionally, we are interested in works that interrogate the broader imposition of monocultural forms in other spheres of life, such as race, gender, sexuality, urbanism, architecture, mass media and popular culture.
Further lines of inquiry may include: the cultural production of social movements engaged in struggles against monocrop agribusiness; critical conversations between Black, Indigenous and white/mestizo counter-plantation imaginaries; greenwashing, “cropaganda” and advertising aesthetics; and representational modes that expose the relationships between commercial and illicit crop economies, as well as industries such as processed foods and biofuels.
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Speaker Bio
Valentina Villarraga is a doctoral student in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She has published in edited volumes and academic journals. She has participated in international conferences organized by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), among others. Her current research focuses on contemporary cultural responses to the ecological and climate crisis, with an emphasis on the role of plagues, toxicity, and monocultures.
Speaker Bio
Catalina Arango Correa is a Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Latin American cultural production and its engagements with socio-environmental concerns, especially large-scale resource extraction in rural Indigenous or Afro-descendant communities and territories.
Speaker Bio
Mathilda Shepard is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at Texas Tech University, where she researches and teaches in the fields of Indigenous studies, visual culture, the environmental humanities and gender and sexuality studies. Her current monograph, Green Deserts: Monocultures, Media and Armed Conflict in Colombia, examines cultural responses to plantation agribusiness in 21st-century Colombia. She has published in journals including JLACS, Interventions, and LALVC.
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Victoria Jara is an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her research examines how contemporary Latin American and Canadian women novelists and filmmakers depict environmental injustices, with a particular focus on representations of girls, Indigenous women, and environmental migrants. She published her first manuscript Socio-Environmental Crisis in Women’s Novels and Films in The Americas: The Poetics of Destruction, Care, and Insurgency (Routledge, 2025).
Speaker Bio
Sofie Brown is a PhD student from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. Her dissertation analyzes the representation of history in contemporary Latin American literary production.
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