Gwybodaeth Modiwlau

Environmental history in the Neotropics (Latin America and the Caribbean LAC) is an emerging and timely interdisciplinary field. However, many environmental histories in the Neotropical region are yet to be told, such as the histories of the Neotropical glaciers, of the Andes, of queer territories, of Escobar’s hippos, of native seeds, and so on.
This module introduces the environmental history of the Neotropical region and its method. As such, its contents may be placed chronologically and geographically beyond administrative and political frontiers. This module also provides tools to approach history from a different perspective using the ‘Capitalocene’ as a timeframe. Its lessons are invitations to think of elements such as ecoregions, socioecosystems, or nature as historical subjects. Additionally, this module also considers a Latin American decolonial lecture of the environmental history, presenting ways to dialogue with Global South (or Souths’) epistemologies which have less capitalist visions of ‘Nature’.

Lectures:
1: Key concepts and geographies
2: Pre-Columbian and colonial environmental history
3: Racial landscapes and scientific expeditions in the dawn of globalisation.
Case Studies: 1) The Great Caribbean; 2) The Humboldt expeditions.
4: Extractive landscapes and banana wars: Liberal reforms and capitalist expansion.
Case studies: 1) Banana plantations; 2) Guano in the Pacific.
5: El Dorado: Extractive landscapes of mining
6: Landscapes of freedom and resistance.
Case study: The Palenques and the Pacific Black communities in the nineteenth century.
7: Environment and public health: History of the disease.
8: More urban than rural: The urbanisation of LAC.
9: Landscapes of revolution: Peasants and Indigenous peoples in the twentieth century.
Case studies: Mexican, Cuban and Bolivian revolutions.
10: Postdevelopment approaches to the environmental history of the twentieth century.
Case study: The long Green Revolution (e.g. coffee; to be studied in depth in a seminar).
11: Histories of water and forests.
Case study: The Amazon Forest.
12: Histories of Neotropical animals.
13: Histories of conservationism and exclusion.
Case study: National parks.
14: Landscapes of insurgence.
Case studies: 1) The Tupamaros; 2) The Colombian guerrillas.
15: Climate history and disasters in LAC.
Case studies: 1) El Niño and La Niña; 2) Melting Andean glaciers.
16: The flow of energy, materials or biomass. Use of social metabolism and quantitative methodologies.
(This lecture is associated to a workshop seminar)
17: Impact of free trade and neoliberal reforms in the Neotropical landscapes.
18: Contemporary territorialities of the Abya Yala.
Case studies: 1) Zapatism; 2) Ecofeminisms and decolonial feminisms.

Seminars:
1: Literature review and framework analysis of historiographies in LAC environmental history: A workshop using Zotero.
2: Applying environmental history methodologies. 'Home' project.
3: Student Choice Seminar. (proposed: history of Neotropical flora, Neotropical edible plants, Neotropical medicinal plants, Neotropical fauna).
4: Coffee plantations’ origins and Green Revolution deforestation.
5: Social metabolism and quantitative/ statistical analysis.
6: Rights of nature and the Latin American ‘pink tide’.