Gilman 479

The program in Latin America, Caribbean and Latinx Studies is glad to present Valeria Meiller (Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Texas at San Antonio) for a lecture on

IN DEFENSE OF THE LAND: AGAINST ECO- & ACOUSTIC COLONIALISM IN 21st CENTURY PLURILINGUAL POETRY OF ABIAYALA

The environmental humanities have advanced persuasive arguments that explain how extractivism has manufactured our climate predicament, and how Indigenous cosmologies have long been resisting these extractive power dynamics through their interrelational ways of knowing and being. However, —and particularly in what concerns literary studies—the modes in which these cosmologies are bound to language specificity is a relatively unexplored matter; as the majority of the interventions in the field remain focused on literatures produced in colonial languages. In Defense of the Land advances the argument that the loss of linguistic diversity—which is reflected on the preeminence of literatures in and literary attention to colonial languages—needs to be accounted for as an effect of stressors related to climate change; and, conversely, that contemporary poetry in lenguas originarias serve as a site of environmental preservation and restoration that topples literature with language with territory.

Valeria Meiller will analyze how this dynamic plays out in the work of two contemporary poets from Mesoamerica, who live and write in the region known as La Montaña in Guerrero, Mexico: Nahua poet Martín Tonalmeyotl (Alzacoalota, 1983) and Mè’ph’àà poet Hubert Matiúwàa (Malintepec, 1986). She will explore how Tonalmeyotl and Matiúwàa’s poetic praxis simultaneously challenge linguistic extinction and land depletion as two interrelated phenomena stemming from settler’s administration of Indigenous land. Furthermore, she will inquire how, by serving as sites of environmental preservation and reparation for endangered languages and ecosystems, their poems demonstrate plurilingual poetry’s capaciousness for conceptualizing literatures and territories beyond the nation-state’s regimes of eco- and acoustic colonialism.