On the late afternoon of the 10th of April, our keynote speaker, Bolivian writer and professor of Latin American literature at the University of Cornell, Edmundo Paz Soldán, delivered his paper ‘Formas de narrar la crisis ambiental’.
As one of the organisers of the conference, I had managed to slip into a couple of panels I was interested in, but I had spent most of the day running around the Arts Complex of the University of Bristol making sure there were no conference-related fires to put out. Which is to say, the prospect of being able to sit down and listen to what Edmundo had to say about what was clearly one of the main themes of the conference, the environmental crisis, was a welcome one.
Though predominantly in English, the paper was delivered bilingually, with Edmundo switching to and from Spanish, offering what I can only assume were his own translations of recently published works such as Fernanda Trías’ El monte de las furias (published only a couple of months earlier). As his title suggests, the paper was about the specifically literary challenge of narrating the climate crisis – in other words, a question of poetics.
He offered a broad, capacious, and thought-provoking rereading of the Latin American literary canon, encompassing Mexican, Brazilian, Peruvian, Argentinean, Uruguayan, and Colombian literatures (I kept count). I was especially struck by the ecological reading of the modernista writer Amado Nervo’s 1908 poem ‘Las nubes’. It turns out that the often-saccharine Mexican poet was ahead of the game when it came to landscapes and man-made environmental crises. It made me reassess my feelings towards Nervo’s work.
Edmundo also gave us an unexpected interpretation of Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s ‘Los gallinazos sin plumas’, a classic of Peruvian short fiction. Ribeyro’s text has been traditionally read as text-book social realism, offering a grim picture of poverty in Lima. Edmundo’s reading showed us how social commentary, read from the vantage point of today, inevitably bleeds into environmental concerns. Ribeyro’s characters live in abject poverty because they are surrounded by garbage and waste, thereby casting a light on the well-known links between capitalism and the climate crisis.
He also discussed some contemporary examples: Verónica Gerber, César Aira, Patricio Pron, Juan Cárdenas, Cristina Rivera Garza (whose presence was ubiquitous throughout the conference). The usual suspects were also mentioned, of course, namely hyperobjects, the slow cancellation of the future, the Anthropocene, solastalgia, and so on.
This rereading of the canon, particularly when Edmundo discussed the novela de la selva as a genre of ecological novels critical of capitalist extractivism, got me thinking about Ricardo Piglia’s comments on the essence of literature. Piglia liked to say that he wasn’t sure what the ultimate essence of literature was, if there was any in the first place: literary works weren’t even made up of themes, because these tend to change with each generation and epoch. SLAS conferences can serve as maps, as it were, to chart the current trends of the field. SLAS 2025 was no exception in this regard, especially in relation to the climate crisis. Specifically in literature, Edmundo seemed to suggest to us, ecology is also a lens through which the canonical and the contemporary can be read and reread to find new meaning.
Carlos is a Nicaraguan poet and scholar, currently working as a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. His academic work focuses on world literatures (with an emphasis on Latin American literature), literary translation, and Central America.
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