Environmental Approaches to the Latin American and Caribbean Arts
Due Date: 02-15-2026
The abundance of natural resources in Latin America has been essential to the region’s economic development since colonial times. The exploitation of these resources has driven environmental degradation, extinction, and displacement of human and nonhuman communities. Latin American artists have not been indifferent to these pressing issues. As Scott DeVries demonstrates in A History of Ecology and Environmentalism in Spanish American Literature, Latin American writers have expressed concern for the environment since the nineteenth century and continue doing so today. Moreover, since the last decades of the twentieth century, explicit environmentalist writing has emerged, condemning environmental degradation and pressing for political and social changes. This is the case of Gioconda Belli (Nicaragua), Luis Sepúlveda (Chile), Homero Aridijis (México), and Mara Pastor (Puerto Rico), among others. Visual artists and filmmakers—including Alicia Barney (Colombia), Regina Vater (Brazil), and Dhara Rivera (Puerto Rico)—likewise explore environmental themes, revealing the deep entanglements between ecological degradation and systems of coloniality, patriarchy, and capitalism.
We invite submissions that engage with environmental questions in Latin American and Caribbean literature and the arts. We welcome academic essays, creative writing, and artistic work that reflect—but are not limited to—the following guiding questions:
–How has Latin American literature and the arts addressed and challenged extractivist interventions across the region?
–How has the transformation brought about by plantations—such as monocultures and greenhouses—been represented and theorized? In particular, how have literary and artistic works engaged with the concept of the “Plantationocene,” understood as a system rooted in colonial machinery that has reshaped the planet through the exploitation of human and non-human beings and the restriction of their mobility?
–How have climate change, deforestation, pollution, and the environmental consequences of armed conflicts—forms of what Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence”—been perceived, narrated, and contested in Latin American literature and the arts?
–What insights do the literatures and artistic expressions of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities offer regarding the environment, human and nonhuman beings, and the interconnectedness of life? Can these historically marginalized epistemologies guide those outside these communities toward rethinking relational ethics and alternative ways of engaging with the world?
Submissions are welcome in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word biographical note to the guest editors by 15 Feb. 2026: Claudia M. Paez Lotero (cpaezlot@sju.edu) and Susana L. M. Antunes (antunes@uwm.edu). We will provide feedback on your proposal by 31 March 2026.
Final essays for the research article section should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words (including abstract, keywords, and bibliography). Completed manuscripts are due 1 July 2026.