Among the various narratives that underpin the construction of America as an imagined territory are the symbolic representations of geography, landscape, territory, and land, understood as a poetics. Nature and the environment appear as a conceptual and ontological problem in the construction of the American sense of self; it is the “enemy” that swallows, that destroys wills, but at the same time a source of wealth and prosperity, whose exploitation, however, leads to annihilation and devastation. This symposium proposes to discuss the transformation of concepts and ideas surrounding nature, landscape, and geography in Latin American history and literature, in order to understand the symbolic paths that have led to devastation. The methodological approach draws on intellectual and conceptual history, as well as on the discussion of geopoetics proposed by Kenneth White. The interest lies in reviewing, from our own tradition, the ways of representing the relationship between humans and the environment, as well as the political, cultural, and artistic aspects that run through it and that have led to a gradual depredation of the environment and, with it, other forms of violence. For White, geopoetics inherently carries an intention to construct a world –in terms of symbolic representation through thought–; in other words, it involves the complex relationship of the poetic, the philosophical, and the political within a work. A world that, it is understood, emerges from humanity’s full awareness of the earth and its understanding of the cosmos. Literature presents itself as a map, a system, of how we think about territory and what lies within it: “And every language is, of course, a map.” Our literature is our map, our navigation route in the face of the great problems of the world. Our world. The symposium, in short, aims to discuss these aspects from the notions of Latin American literature in order to propose new categories for organizing the world in order to represent a devastated world. It is not, then, only a matter of the representation of the geographic and ecological dimensions of a literary text, but of the awareness, the knowledge, of the territory from which one writes and reads; but it is not limited to studying our relationship with space, nor to representations of environmental devastation. Proposals for discussion may be submitted in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
