Biocultural Exoticism in the Feminine Landscape of Latin America

Abstract

The colonial language “of the imperial eye” about Latin America is summarized in an exotic myth about the landscape, which today combines with Western globalization at its ecological crossroads. Latin America offers a key hermeneutic for analysis, because it exposes aesthetic ideological roots that accompany biocultural homogenization. In the twentieth century, orientalism came to be criticized for perpetuating a false, Western colonial image of the East. Here, we focus on Latin American exoticism by critically examining themes of feminized geographic landscapes. We review epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical alternatives to the exoticism of Latin American landscapes and bodies as seen by the “imperial eye.” Latin American artistic, literary, and political concepts and movements have been taking seriously landscapes and bodies, enabling a critique of the exotic. These expressions also offer an alternative, post-exotic, eco-epistemology, and aesthetic hermeneutic to the negative hermeneutic or the curse that resulted from the colonial expansion of Europe and the new postmodern biocultural homogenization or biocultural exoticization imposed by Western globalization. We emphasize intimate associations between ecological contexts and social practices to revalue the geographies and co-inhabitants, including the political subjects, their identities, and their cultures. A major contribution offered by Latin American environmental arts, thoughts, and movements is the understanding of nature as a great body in which we co-inhabit.