Chapter 14 - Plants in the Literatures of Latin America and the Caribbean

Summary

Plants have played a central role in cultural imaginaries across South and Central America and the Caribbean. This chapter, organised chronologically from the colonial period to the present, focuses on key literary traditions and/or works from Latin America and the Caribbean that engage directly with plants, including sugar cane, the ceiba pentandra, and rubber. The chapter includes discussion of a number of works in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, including John Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764), Euclides da Cunha’s À margem da história [The Amazon: Land Without History] (1909), and Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte [The Wilderness] (1954). Although the works under discussion belong to different historical, national, and linguistic contexts, recurrent plant-inflected tropes and concerns emerge, including those relating to questions of aesthetics and literary form; cultural identity and belonging; environmental care and destruction; and the complex and ever-evolving relationships between human and non-human worlds.