Extractivism in LATAM Culture

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course will study cultural production that depicts how multinational corporations have exploited workers and landscapes across Latin America. We will read novels, short stories, and poems about mining, oil extraction, and the plantation economy (bananas, coffee, sugar, yerba mate) from the early twentieth century to the present. Some of the historical events we will cover include the rubber boom in the Amazon rainforest, the various massacres of workers from the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International), and mining tragedies in Chile and Peru. Throughout the course, we will explore how the myth of El Dorado – the promise of an Amazonian city of gold – shaped the modern idea of Latin America as an exporter of raw materials and how this fantasy of endless wealth continues to underpin extractivism in our era of human-induced climate change. Finally, we will examine post-extractive imaginaries through the work of Indigenous cultural producers who conceive other ways of relating with the land via practices such as degrowth and communitarian living.