Presentation of doctoral project by Oscar Sebastian Tellini (GU), doctoral student in Spanish literature. All interested are welcome!
During the Fifties and Sixties, Latin America was impacted by a strong economical boom, which involved practices of developmentalism and extractivism.
It was at that time that the animal became a prominent presence in the cultural and media discourses. The emergent field of Latin American animal criticism has approached this animal emergence by analysing a set of literary works both from a philosophical perspective centered on the human-animal relationship (Yelin, 2010) and from a biopolitical perspective and its reflection on the ethics of the living (Giorgi, 2014).
In this study, I intend to contribute further knowledge to the field by relating the animal presence in the context of developmentalism and extractivism to racial, gender and social class issues. To do so, I intend to focus not only on literary works but also on other cultural materials and practices, in particular, museum exhibitions and TV cooking programs of that time.
My hypothesis is that these animal configurations in cultural materials from the 1950s and 1960s, which I refer to as cultural zoographies, bring to the fore and question the division human-animal sustained by the dynamics of capitalism and extractivism, as well as their intrinsic forms of violence against both marginalized human and non-human communities. By combining Animal Studies and Ecocriticism, I will analyse an understudied cultural production that features the animal in extractive contexts, to establish how the meanings of animals were shaped and disputed in diverse cultural productions at a particular period, when both animal use intensified and animal rights movements began.