As Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez has recently stated, “Everybody will end up writing ecohorror.” Ecohorror is pervasive in Latin American and Latinx literary production, from Samanta Schweblin and Helena Maria Viramontes’s novels of pesticide pollution to the post-nuclear ruined landscapes featured in works by Verónica Gerber Bicecci and Yxta Maya Murray and the pandemic dystopias written by Fernanda Trías and Edmundo Paz Soldán. Scholars such as Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles have defined ecohorror as the privileged genre and the dominant mode of the Anthropocene, as it represents not only visible monsters but also slow and far-reaching processes more akin to the temporality of climate change. In addition to reflecting the Anthropocene’s derangements of scale and thus aligning with Amitav Ghosh’s call for fiction to depict the magnitude and uncanniness of the climate crisis, ecohorror elicits negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, and fear. It thus plunges us into ethical and political debates about its complicity with environmental alarmism or, instead, its urgent call to climate action.

This panel seeks to interrogate ecohorror as a genre that reveals the deep-seated inequalities of the Anthropocene as experienced in the Americas. How do Latin American and Latinx works of ecohorror contend with environmental racism, the degradation of bodies and territories, and the deep pasts and futures of the Anthropocene? How do they depict invisible threats like viruses and agrochemical substances? Do authors regard technological solutions such as geoengineering as the chance to avert climate catastrophe or the reinforcement of disaster capitalism? Do they critique the blind spots of notions like the Anthropocene with its portrait of humanity as an undifferentiated community? If so, what role do Latin America and the Latinx world play within this critique of gender, racial, and socioeconomic inequalities?

We welcome abstracts discussing Latin American and Latinx works of ecohorror that tackle environmental issues such as mining and oil extraction, nuclear waste, pesticides, and deforestation, to name a few. The panel will explore literature’s relationship with other art forms (film, photography, installation, digital art, etc.) and its incorporation of feminist, Indigenous, and Afro-Latin American concepts into their own making, such as strategies of communality (Floriberto Díaz), bodies-territories (Verónica Gago) or pluriverse (Arturo Escobar). We will also discuss ecohorror’s connection with genres like dystopia, science fiction, and the ecogothic.

Please direct all questions to Nicolás Campisi (nicolas.campisi@georgetown.edu) or María José Navia (mjnavia@gmail.com).