Ilka Kressner - Böcker

Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World brings together critical studies of Latin American and Latinx writing, film, visual, and performing arts to offer new perspectives on ecological violence. Building on Rob Nixon’s concept of "slow violence," the contributions to the volume explore processes of environmental destruction that are not immediately visible yet expand in time and space and transcend the limits of our experience. Authors consider these forms of destruction in relation to new material contexts of artistic creation, practices of activism, and cultural production in Latin American and Latinx worlds. Their critical contributions investigate how writers, cultural activists, filmmakers, and visual and performance artists across the region conceptualize, visualize, and document this invisible but far-reaching realm of violence that so tenaciously resists representation.The volume highlights the dense web of material relations in which all is enmeshed, and calls attention to a notion of agency that transcends the anthropocentric, engaging a cognition envisioned as embodied, collective, and relational. Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence measures the breadth of creative imaginings and critical strategies from Latin America and Latinx contexts to enrich contemporary ecocritical studies in an era of heightened environmental vulnerability.

Reframing traditional conceptions of ecologyEcologies of Resistance brings together fourteen groundbreaking studies on Latin American and Latinx writing, visual and performing arts, film, and activism that propose alternatives to prevailing colonial and neocolonial conceptions of ecology. The contributors question the artificially imposed separation of the human and nonhuman, human dominance over place, and the concept of progress measured in strictly economic terms. They also examine how the notion of ecology has been discursively framed to justify colonial systems of power. With its integration of Ancestral, Afro-Latin American, and Latinx perspectives, this collection proposes new worldviews that emphasize marginalized voices and contest modernity's troubled legacy.Ecologies of Resistance blurs the lines that have traditionally separated artistic expression from political activism and theory. Its innovative cross-disciplinary approach and exploration of alternative practices and theories from Latin America and Latinx contexts enriches contemporary ecocritical studies and the quest for a world that upholds plural forms of being.

Reframing traditional conceptions of ecologyEcologies of Resistance brings together fourteen groundbreaking studies on Latin American and Latinx writing, visual and performing arts, film, and activism that propose alternatives to prevailing colonial and neocolonial conceptions of ecology. The contributors question the artificially imposed separation of the human and nonhuman, human dominance over place, and the concept of progress measured in strictly economic terms. They also examine how the notion of ecology has been discursively framed to justify colonial systems of power. With its integration of Ancestral, Afro-Latin American, and Latinx perspectives, this collection proposes new worldviews that emphasize marginalized voices and contest modernity's troubled legacy.Ecologies of Resistance blurs the lines that have traditionally separated artistic expression from political activism and theory. Its innovative cross-disciplinary approach and exploration of alternative practices and theories from Latin America and Latinx contexts enriches contemporary ecocritical studies and the quest for a world that upholds plural forms of being.

Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World brings together critical studies of Latin American and Latinx writing, film, visual, and performing arts to offer new perspectives on ecological violence. Building on Rob Nixon’s concept of "slow violence," the contributions to the volume explore processes of environmental destruction that are not immediately visible yet expand in time and space and transcend the limits of our experience. Authors consider these forms of destruction in relation to new material contexts of artistic creation, practices of activism, and cultural production in Latin American and Latinx worlds. Their critical contributions investigate how writers, cultural activists, filmmakers, and visual and performance artists across the region conceptualize, visualize, and document this invisible but far-reaching realm of violence that so tenaciously resists representation.The volume highlights the dense web of material relations in which all is enmeshed, and calls attention to a notion of agency that transcends the anthropocentric, engaging a cognition envisioned as embodied, collective, and relational. Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence measures the breadth of creative imaginings and critical strategies from Latin America and Latinx contexts to enrich contemporary ecocritical studies in an era of heightened environmental vulnerability.

Some of the most important writers of the twentieth century, including Borges, Cortázar, Rulfo, and García Márquez, have explored ambiguous sites of a disquieting nature. Their characters face merging perspectives, deferral, darkness, or emptiness. Such a space is neither a site of projection (as utopia or dystopia) nor a neutral setting (as the topos). For the characters, it is real and active, at once elusive and transforming. Despite the challenges of visualizing such slippery spaces, filmic experimentations in Spanish American cinema since the 1960s have sought to adapt these texts to the screen. Ilka Kressner’s Sites of Disquiet examines these representations of alternative dimensions in Spanish American short narratives and their transformations to the cinematic screen. The study is informed by contemporary critical approaches to spatiality, especially the concepts of atopos (non-space), spaces of mobility, sites of différance, of a self-effacing presence, and sonic spaces. Kressner’s comparative study of textual and cinematic constructions of non-spaces highlights the potential and limits of inter-arts adaptation. Film not only portrays the sites in ways that are intrinsic to the medium but, during the cinematic translation, it further develops the textual presentations of space. Text and film illuminate each other in their renderings of echoes, gaps, absences, and radical openness. The shared focus of the two media on precarious spaces highlights their awareness of the physical and situational conditions in the works. Therefore, it vindicates the import of space and dwelling, and the often underestimated impact of surroundings on the human body and mind. Despite their heterogeneity, the artistic elaborations of these ambivalent atopoi all share a liberating impulse: they assert creative and open-ended interactions with space where volatility ceases to be a negative term.