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Increased awareness of climate change has led to a shift in the way we address and intervene in environmental issues in the new millennium. Yet the interest in making sense of the environment has a long history in literature and the arts. How have Latin American writers and artists understood and depicted their environments and environmental questions? How do the form and content of texts and cultural artifacts influence our understanding of the non-human world? Can works of fiction shape ecological transformations? In this course we will discuss texts from the early colonial period to the present, including the literary works of Graciliano Ramos, Horacio Quiroga, and Clarice Lispector; political ecology; film; Ana Mendieta’s earth-body art; contemporary experiments in bio-art; postcolonial theory; and the intersection of environmental justice with such topics as nationalism and human rights. Going beyond ecocriticism’s original focus on the Anglo-American world, we will engage recent scholarship on Latin America that sheds light on the region’s cultural and geopolitical importance to the global climate, with particular attention to Brazil. This course aims to introduce students to current debates in Latin American Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene and thus contribute to an incipient but expanding field.