Electroshock and Hydropower: Writing the Great Acceleration in Brazil’s Military Dictatorship

Abstract: This article proposes to expand the scope of the environmental humanities by reading works that address repression under the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s as narratives of the Anthropocene. While critical convergences between the environmental humanities and post-dictatorial literature remain rare in Latin American studies, this article bridges that gap by showing how the presupposition of a limitless supply of electrical energy so central to the Great Acceleration was embodied in paradigmatic literary genres and problems of the re-democratization period in the 1980s. First, I discuss elegiac environmental poetry about the building of megadams for hydroelectric power generation; second, I analyze the myriad of narrative forms about torture, which the military dictatorship primarily carried out through electroshock. “Electroshock and Hydropower” reads these bodies of work as two sides of the same coin in an attempt to push literary approaches to the environment beyond the traditional scope of environmental studies.