Description:

Abstract: In Peru, as well as in other Andean countries, the Amazon is easily associated with a history of extractivism, peasant colonization, international border conflicts, guerrilla warfare, drug trafficking and, most recently, environmental disasters of planetary repercussions. Nevertheless, the Amazon remains highly unknown and exotic, even for these countries' intellectuals.

What has been the role of 20th-century Amazonian fiction in this process? What misunderstood stories about nature and society it has told? And why are these stories currently relevant for the resilience of socio-ecological systems in the Peruvian Amazon?

Jorge Marcone is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Program in Comparative Literature, and in the Environmental Studies Major at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the South American Resilience and Sustainability Institute (SARAS), in Uruguay. His current areas of interest are on the environmental humanities, Amazonian literatures, and indigenous environmentalisms and film. In the past, Marcone has published on the Spanish American Regional Novel, Mexican literature, Chicana literature, Jose Maria Arguedas, Pablo Neruda, José Emilio Pacheco, among others.