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A central theme throughout Machado de Assis's works is the way characters look at each other inside and outside houses. This article argues that vision, race, and houses define his narrative strategies in the short stories "Pai contra Mãe" and "O Caso da Vara," and the novels Dom Casmurro, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, and Esaú e Jacó. In doing so, it shows how eyes are key to understanding racism, houses, and, more broadly, Machado de Assis's position as a writer who engaged in universal topics as well as those specific to Brazilian society.

In the present essay, I argue that taxidermy is a fundamental element in Brazilian novelist Santiago Nazarian’s Neve negra (2017). To do so, I frame my argument by using studies on anthropocentrism and the relationship between the human and the non-human through taxidermy. The first part of the essay examines recent studies on taxidermy and primary sources from the nineteenth century that center on the art and science of skinning, preparing, and mounting dead specimens. The second part focuses on a close reading of Nazarian’s novel by studying the narrator’s patriarchal and masculine anxieties in conjunction with taxidermy and the non-human characters that appear in the novel.

The myxoma virus (MYXV) was used in Australia in 1950 to control, albeit temporarily, the overpopulation of the invasive European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus). A different strand of the virus was released in France two years later, resulting in the drastic decline of European rabbits in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe. The MYXV’s disease, myxomatosis, is a highly contagious and normally fatal infection in a rabbit species lacking resistance, such as the European rabbit. As myxomatosis was spreading across the European continent, Spain started to invest in nuclear energy. The use of myxomatosis as a bioweapon and the creation of nuclear energy capable of radioactive pollution are also at the core of Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura’s La caza (The Hunt, 1966). This article argues that The Hunt provides an important examination on extinction and biopolitics at both local and global levels through its portrayal of myxomatosis and radioactivity.