El proyecto ecocrítico: reflexiones sobre la colonización académica de la naturaleza (latinoamericana)

This article delves into the culturalist paradigms of contemporary literary criticism in order to assess the scope of the so-called ecocriticism and its forms of academic colonization in the Latin American context. To this end, it examines its contexts of emergence in the Anglophone academy following the fall of the Berlin Wall within the framework of the neo-historicist turn and its corollary, the third wave of cultural studies. It then analyzes the trajectory of ecocriticism in Latin America, where it has been adopted with enthusiasm but conditioned by the hegemonic logics inherent to its emergence. In that sense, the article argues that, due to its excessive zeal for exposing socio-environmental issues, ecocriticism, instead of fostering an enriching theoretical debate, has conveniently and perniciously evaded the question of a methodology akin to literary studies, while ignoring the aesthetic autonomy of literature.