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.