The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things - by Mark Anderson

About the Book

Thinking through ethics and nonhuman representation in Latin American writing

Book Synopsis

The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things begins by analyzing the ethical debates and political contexts relating to Latin American "rights of nature" legislation and the political ontology of nonhuman speech within a framework of intercultural and multispecies diplomacy. Author Mark Anderson shows how Latin American authors and thinkers complicate traditional humanistic perspectives on nature, the social, and politics, exploring how animals, plants, and environments as a whole might be said to engage in social relations and political speech or self-representation.

Drawing Native Amazonian thought into productive tension with a variety of posthumanist theoretical frameworks--ranging from Derrida's conceptualization of passive decision and hospitality to biosemiotics, Karen Barad's theorization of intra-activity, and Isabelle Stengers' proposal for cosmopolitical diplomacy--Anderson analyzes literary works by Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector, José Eustasio Rivera, and Davi Kopenawa that reframe environmental ethics in terms of collective, multispecies work and reciprocal care and politics as a cosmopolitics of friendship rooted in diplomacy across difference. Finally, Anderson examines the points of connection and divergences between Latin American relational ontologies and Euro American posthumanist theories within Indigenous Latin American remodernization projects that reappropriate and repurpose ancestral practices as well as develop new technologies with the goal of forging alternative modernities compatible with a livable future for all species.

Review Quotes

"In a planet that is witnessing the extinction of thousands of species every year, the question of how to safeguard and interact with non-human subjectivities has never been so urgent. Drawing from literature, law, philosophy, and Latin American Indigenous thought, this tour-de-force of a book investigates how such interaction has been imagined, theorised, and put into practice."
--Lúcia Sá, author of Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture

"This is a brilliant and indispensable book. Mark Anderson reframes conversations about the politics and ethics of the non-human by thinking of interspecies diplomacy as a conceptual laboratory. He opens new critical vocabularies at the intersection of Amazonian epistemologies, Latin American literary thought and posthuman theory. A must-read intervention for the critical debates to come."
--Gabriel Giorgi, author of Formas communes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica

"A thoroughly researched and well-written book on a pressing topic, Anderson's conceptualization of the rights of nature is of interest not only to Latin American scholars but also to researchers working on environmental rights in other geographical contexts."
--Patrícia Vieira, author of States of Grace: Utopia in Brazilian Culture

"Drawing on a collection of primary texts and the theorization of influential scholars and thinkers/activists from beyond the academy (e.g., the Yanomami, the Zapatistas, Indigenous social movements in Ecuador and Mexico), Anderson observes the increasingly untenable conceptual, political, and physical divide between human and other-than-human worlds that has come to light over the last century, largely as a consequence of the global climate crisis."
--Tracy Devine Guzmán, author of Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence

About the Author

Mark Anderson is an associate professor at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America.