Provincialising Nature: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Politics of the Environment in Latin America offers a timely analysis of some of the crucial challenges, contradictions and promises within current environmental discourses and practices in the
First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as well--a translation of existing worlds and their thought--categories into the categories and self-understandings of capitalist modernity. Now featuring a new preface in which Chakrabarty responds to his critics, this book globalizes European thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins.
Employing methodological perspectives from the fields of political geography, environmental studies, anthropology, and their cognate disciplines, this volume explores alternative logics of sentient landscapes as racist, xenophobic, and right-wing. While the field of sentient landscapes has gained critical attention, the literature rarely seems to question the intentionality of sentient landscapes, which are often romanticized as pure, good, and just, and perceived as protectors of those who are powerless, indigenous, and colonized. The book takes a new stance on sentient landscapes with the intention of dispelling the denial of “coevalness” represented by their scholarly romanticization.
This book focuses on the issues of global environmental injustice and human rights violations and explores the scope and limits of the potential of human rights to influence environmental justice. It offers a multidisciplinary perspective on contemporary development discussions, analysing some of the crucial challenges, contradictions and promises within current environmental and human rights practices in Latin America. The contributors examine how the extraction and exploitation of natural resources and the further commodification of nature have affected local communities in the region and how these policies have impacted on the promotion and protection of human rights as communities struggle to defend their rights and territories. The book analyses the emergence of transnational activism in the context of collective action organised around socio-environmental conflicts, the infringement of basic human rights and the emergence of alternative and sometimes conflicting development models. Furthermore, it critically discusses why governments are often willing to override their commitments to sustainability and human rights to promote their development agenda. The chapters originally published as a special issue in The International Journal of Human Rights.
The need to reassess the discourse of sustainable development in terms of equity and justice has grown rapidly in the last decade. This book explores renewed and distinctive approaches to the sustainability and justice debate, integrating a range of perspectives that include moral philosophy, sociology and law. By bringing together young and senior scholars from the field of global environmental law and governance from around the world, this work is divided into three sections, covering sustainable development and justice, sustainable development in context, and sustainable development and judiciaries. This book will appeal to academics, law practitioners and policy-makers interested in shaping future socio-legal research on global environmental law and governance.
A fascinating exploration of an oft-overlooked aspect of classical Hollywood films, Projecting the World offers a series of striking new analyses that will entice cinema lovers, film historians, and those interested in the history of American neocolonialism.
Displacing Theory Through the Global South calls for reflection on the historical and geopolitical inequalities that have shaped theorization. It asserts that what appears 'universal' often involves generalizations that flatten the particular. Critiquing the colonialist, imperialist, and Eurocentric perspectives that have historically impacted theorization in general and, more specifically, knowledge production about the so-called Global South, this volume seeks a different form of engagement that moves beyond such strictures. Featuring essays that unsettle distinctions between the general and the particular, it proposes a commitment to expanding notions of universality, making theorization not only relevant and generative, but ultimately, transformative.
This edited book provides a broad collection of current critical reflections on heritage-making processes involving landscapes, positioning itself at the intersection of landscape and heritage studies. Featuring an international range of contributions from researchers, academics, activists, and professionals, the book aims to bridge the gap between research and practice and to nourish an interdisciplinary debate spanning the fields of geography, anthropology, landscape and heritage studies, planning, conservation, and ecology. It provokes critical enquiry about the challenges between heritage-making processes and global issues, such as sustainability, economic inequalities, social cohesion, and conflict, involving voices and perspectives from different regions of the world. Case studies in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Turkey, the UK, Columbia, Brazil, New Zealand, and Afghanistan highlight different approaches, values, and models of governance. This interdisciplinary book will appeal to researchers, academics, practitioners, and every landscape citizen interested in heritage studies, cultural landscapes, conservation, geography, and planning.
This book opens up a unique intellectual space where eleven female scholar-activists explore alternative forms of theorising social reality. These‘Women on the Verge’ demonstrate that a new radical subject– one that is plural, prefigurative, decolonial, ethical, ecological, communal and democratic- is in the making, but is unrecognisable with old analytical tools. Of central concern to the book is the resistance of some social scientists, many of them critical theorists, to learning about this radical subject and to interrogating the concepts, methodologies and epistemologies used to grasp it. Echoing the experiential critique of capitalist-colonial society that is taking place at the grassroots, the authors examine how to create hope, decolonise critique and denaturalise society. They also address the various dimensions of the social (re)production of life, including women in development, the commons, and nature. Finally, they discuss the dynamics of prefiguration by social movements, critiquing social movement theory in the process. This thought-provoking edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of gender studies, social, Marxist and Feminist theory, postcolonial studies and politics.
Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the last few decades as the full scope of anthropogenic climate change manifests itself and large-scale natural resource extraction has expanded into formerly remote areas that seemed beyond the reach of industrialization. Scientists and popular culture alike have turned to the term "Anthropocene" to capture the global scale of environmental and even geological transformations that humans have carried out over the last two centuries. The chapters in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America examine the dynamics and interplay between local cultures and the expansion of global capitalism in Latin America, emphasizing the role of art in bearing witness to and generating awareness of environmental and social crises, but also its possibilities for formulating solutions. They take particular care to draw out the ways in which local environmental crises in Latin American nations are witnessed and imagined as part of a global system, focusing on the problems of time, scale, and complexity as key terms in conceiving the dimensions of crisis. At the same time, they question the notion of the Anthropocene as a species-wide "human" historical project, making visible the coloniality of natural resource extraction in Latin America and its dire effects for local people, cultures, and environments. Taking an ecocritical approach to Latin American cultural production including literature, film, performance, and digital artwork, the chapters in this volume develop a notion of ecological crisis that captures not only its documentary sense in the representation of environmental destruction (the degradation of the oikos), but also the crisis in the modern worldview (logos) that the acknowledgment of crisis provokes. In this sense, crisis is also the promise of a turning point, of the possibilities for change. Latin American representations of ecological crisis thus create the conditions for projects that decolonize environments, developing new, sustainable ways of conceiving of and relating to our world or returning to old ones.