This seminar convenes researchers working in Latin American literature, philosophy, and environmental humanities, broadly construed. It aims to demonstrate how literary work from Latin America contributes to expanding cosmological imaginaries and to illuminating the possibilities of planetary futures.

Recent decades have seen cultural productions from Latin America reflecting on the Anthropocene and the planetary role of the human. The Brazilian theorist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, for instance, reworks the philosophies of Bruno Latour and Gilles Deleuze on system and organism by incorporating Amerindian cosmology that urges renewed modes of experiencing the other-than-human environment. In literature, Clarice Lispector’s novels offer an imaginative account of non-anthropocentric ontology based on her intuitive storytelling of the laws of nature informed by modern physics. Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories stage the confrontation between finite human cognition and cosmic infinitude, anticipating contemporary concerns with scale, the Anthropocene, and the difficulty of representing planetary and cosmic wholes. Among more recent writers, Samanta Schweblin depicts toxic ecologies of contamination and bodily porosity, while drawing attention to Andean and Amazonian cosmovisions.

This seminar takes such works as points of departure for a broader inquiry. We ask how Latin American literature has theorized relations between the human and the other-than-human; how indigenous and diasporic cosmologies unsettle the universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene; and how literary form itself – the fable, the speculative tale, the essayistic fragment – becomes an instrument for imagining alternative planetary futures. Rather than treating Latin America as a mere case study within global environmental humanities, we position its literary and philosophical traditions as generative sites of cosmological theory in their own right.

We invite contributions addressing, but not limited to: non-anthropocentric ontologies; STS; extractivism, contamination, and ecological precarity; indigenous cosmologies and their literary mediation; and the poetics of scale. Together, these conversations aim to reframe what planetary thinking can mean when approached from the global South.