Narrativa de la selva en el siglo XXI: extractivismo, violencia lenta y subjetividades más que humanas en La mirada de las plantas, de Edmundo Paz Soldán

Abstract

This work carries out an analysis of La mirada de las plantas, the one of the last published novels by Edmundo Paz Soldán, as a rewriting of the narrative of the Latin American «narrativa de la selva». In it, the Bolivian author makes an original use of key hypotexts from American literature of the first half of the 20th century (by José Eustasio Rivera and Adolfo Bioy Casares) to undertake an analysis of contemporary data extractivism, a consequence of the advent of the so-called surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2021), which the novel relates to the different extractivisms that have occurred in Latin America throughout the capitalocene. I conclude how this novel represents a complete formulation of the narrative of the Anthropocene or ecoterritorial turn in Latin American literature of the 21st century, proposing a brief description of this phenomenon.