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

March 12th
5:30 PM
Gilman 479

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.

I 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). I 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, I 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.

ECOPOETRY/ECOPOETRY: THE AFFORDANCES AND PITFALLS OF ECOLOGICALLY ENGAGED POETIC PRAXIS (poetry workshop–contact [email protected] to sign-up)

March 13th
10 AM – 12 PM
Gilman 119

This workshop presents three theoretical entryways to the concept of ecopoetry—understood broadly as ecologically engaged poetic praxis—: Anglophone ecocriticism, Latin American environmental aesthetics, and Indigenous literary production. Following a brief introduction about the affordances and potential pitfalls of “ecopoetics” within these three literary traditions, workshop participants will go on to read and analyze trilingual poems by Mario Castell (Guaraní/Spanish/English) and Martín Tonalmeyolt (Nahualt/Spanish/English). We will discuss how these poems—originally written bilingually by their authors in Guaraní/Spanish and Nahuatl/Spanish; and later translated into English—conform and/or challenge notions of ecopoetry as understood in different literary traditions of the hemispheric Americas. Combining close reading and theoretical reflection, this workshop explores how plurilingual literatures challenge traditional modes of readership and Western worldviews of what constitutes literature, language, and the environment.

*This project’s materials and reflections draw from the facilitator’s project: www.rugeelbosque.com