Trash and Limits in Latin American Culture
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€80.99
A01=Micah McKay
Alicia Dujoyne
Alvaro Enrique
Andres Neuman
Anthropocene
Argentina
Author_Micah McKay
Basurama
Biopolitics
Boca de Lixo
Brazil
By the Lake of Sleeping Children
cartonero
Cartoneros
Category=ATFA
Category=DS
Category=JBCC
Cesar Aira
chronicas
consumer culture
contemporary capitalism
Costa Rica
discard studies
ecocriticism
Eduardo Coutinho
El Salvador
environmental humanities
environmentalism
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ernesto Livon-Grosman
Fernando Contreras Castro
Film History
Gallinazo Avisa
garbage
garbage dump
Giorgio Agamben
Horacio Castellanos Moya
humanity
Ilha das Flores
Jorge Furtado
Julio Ramon Ribeyro
landfills
literary criticism
Literature
Los gallinazos sin plumas
Lucy Walker
Luis Alberto Urrea
Luxo e Lixo
Mexico
narrative
novels
Peru
Quien mato a Diego Duarte
recycling
scavenger
Sergio Chejfec
Short Stories
threshold
trash
waste
Waste Land
work
Product details
- ISBN 9781683404057
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 12 Mar 2024
- Publisher: University Press of Florida
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The ecological, social, and aesthetic functions of garbage in literature and film from Argentina to Mexico
This book looks at the role of waste in Latin American cultural texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and makes the case for foregrounding trash as an object of analysis in literary and cultural studies in Spanish America and Brazil. By considering how writers and filmmakers engage with the theme, Micah McKay argues that garbage illuminates key limits related to the region’s experience with contemporary capitalism.
Recognizing trash as an important social reality, McKay traces its appearance in a diverse range of products: novels and documentary films with dumps as settings, short stories whose main characters are garbage pickers, and works that portray writing as a process of piecing together found materials. McKay argues that waste and the problems it poses are key to understanding marginalization, political struggle, and the production of aesthetic value.
Drawing on insights from material ecocriticism, discard studies, and biopolitics, McKay theorizes that trash opens a space of reflection on what it means to be human, the possibilities for building community amid catastrophe, gendered notions of labor and care, and the pitfalls of neoliberal environmentalism.
McKay shows how trash in literature and film helps readers and viewers contemplate the limits of how we inhabit the planet.
Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This book looks at the role of waste in Latin American cultural texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and makes the case for foregrounding trash as an object of analysis in literary and cultural studies in Spanish America and Brazil. By considering how writers and filmmakers engage with the theme, Micah McKay argues that garbage illuminates key limits related to the region’s experience with contemporary capitalism.
Recognizing trash as an important social reality, McKay traces its appearance in a diverse range of products: novels and documentary films with dumps as settings, short stories whose main characters are garbage pickers, and works that portray writing as a process of piecing together found materials. McKay argues that waste and the problems it poses are key to understanding marginalization, political struggle, and the production of aesthetic value.
Drawing on insights from material ecocriticism, discard studies, and biopolitics, McKay theorizes that trash opens a space of reflection on what it means to be human, the possibilities for building community amid catastrophe, gendered notions of labor and care, and the pitfalls of neoliberal environmentalism.
McKay shows how trash in literature and film helps readers and viewers contemplate the limits of how we inhabit the planet.
Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Micah McKay, assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Alabama, is coeditor of Environmental Cultural Studies Through Time: The Luso-Hispanic World.
