Visualizing Loss in Latin America engages with a varied corpus of textual, visual, and cultural material with specific intersections with the natural world, arguing that Latin American literary and cultural production goes beyond ecocriticism as a theoretical framework of analysis. Gisela Heffes poses the following crucial question: How do we construct a conceptual theoretical apparatus to address issues of value, meaning, tradition, perspective, and language, that contributes substantially to environmental thinking, and that is part and parcel of Latin America? The book draws attention to ecological inequality and establishes a biopolitical, ethics-based reading of Latin American art, film, and literature that operates at the intersection of the built environment and urban settings. Heffes suggest that the aesthetic praxis that emerges in/from Latin America is permeated with a rhetoric of waste—a significant trait that overwhelmingly defines it.

Ischia is a portrait of an unnamed narrator and protagonist who, along with her friends, wanders through the margins of different cities, especially Buenos Aires, searching for something they don't know and seems unfathomable. An intricate, gutsy, and raw novel, Ischia is populated with outsiders who navigate the vicissitudes of life in Argentina and the world. Ischia, the first-person female narrator, is the youngest in a family of seven brothers and relates her experiences as she waits for a ride to the Argentine international airport. Told through the dizzying would-have-could-have of conditionals, Ischia overlaps the past, present, and future of three young characters defined by lack of certainty or expectations. These three lives unfold between disenchantment and humor, and the narration transports the readers into a universe of memories, desires, and dreams. The novel advances lyrically through themes both solemn and lighthearted, shaping the contours of imaginaries, hilarious, and sometimes even surreal experiences.

The Latin American Eco-Cultural Reader is a comprehensive anthology of literary and cultural texts about the natural world. The selections, drawn from throughout the Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil, span from the early colonial period to the present. Editors Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes present work by canonical figures, including JosE MartI, BartolomE de las Casas, RubEn DarIo, and Alfonsina Storni, in the context of our current state of environmental crisis, prompting new interpretations of their celebrated writings. They also present contemporary work that illuminates the marginalized environmental cultures of women, indigenous, and Afro-Latin American populations. Each selection is introduced with a short essay on the author and the salience of their work; the selections are arranged into eight parts, each of which begins with an introductory essay that speaks to the political, economic and environmental history of the time and provides interpretative cues for the selections that follow.The editors also include a general introduction with a concise overview of the field of ecocriticism as it has developed since the 1990s. They argue that various strands of environmental thought - recognizable today as extractivism, eco-feminism, Amerindian ontologies, and so forth - can be traced back through the centuries to the earliest colonial period, when Europeans first described the Americas as an edenic 'New World' and appropriated the bodies of enslaved Indians and Africans to exploit its natural bounty.