The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things

Literature and Environmental Ethics from Latin America

Mark Anderson

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780826506771
  9780826506788
• eBook ISBN:
  9780826506795
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things begins by analyzing the ethical debates and political contexts relating to Latin American "rights of nature" legislation and the political ontology of nonhuman speech within a framework of intercultural and multispecies diplomacy. Author Mark Anderson shows how Latin American authors and thinkers complicate traditional humanistic perspectives on nature, the social, and politics, exploring how animals, plants, and environments as a whole might be said to engage in social relations and political speech or self-representation.

Drawing Native Amazonian thought into productive tension with a variety of posthumanist theoretical frameworks—ranging from Derrida's conceptualization of passive decision and hospitality to biosemiotics, Karen Barad's theorization of intra-activity, and Isabelle Stengers' proposal for cosmopolitical diplomacy—Anderson analyzes literary works by Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector, José Eustasio Rivera, and Davi Kopenawa that reframe environmental ethics in terms of collective, multispecies work and reciprocal care and politics as a cosmopolitics of friendship rooted in diplomacy across difference. Finally, Anderson examines the points of connection and divergences between Latin American relational ontologies and Euro American posthumanist theories within Indigenous Latin American remodernization projects that reappropriate and repurpose ancestral practices as well as develop new technologies with the goal of forging alternative modernities compatible with a livable future for all species.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Representing “Nature”
• 1. The Rights of Nature from Latin America
• 2. Rights, Ethics, and the Testimony of Things: A Theoretical Framework
• 3. Humanistic Institutions, Animal Affectivity, and Passive Decision
• 4. The Familiar Animal and the Aesthetics of the Stray
• 5. Biosemiotics, the Arche of the Forest, and the Politics of Multispecies Representation
• 6. The State of Plants and the Cosmopolitics of Friendship
• Conclusion. Indigenous Posthumanisms: Rethinking Modernity for Cosmopolitical Practice
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index