3 Adventures in the Global Amazon

Abstract

This chapter, building on Ch. 1, explores how a sense of globally connected places develops from innovative aesthetic techniques in two works that focus on the Amazon rainforest as an icon of environmentalist concern. German installation artist Lothar Baumgarten’s experimental nature documentary The Origin of the Night: Amazon Cosmos presents images and sounds that ostensibly portray the Brazilian jungle, but are revealed as images of the river Rhine in Germany at the end of the film. The superimposition of the two landscapes generates a complex reflection on global interconnectedness. Japanese American novelist Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest revolves around a mysterious substance discovered in the Brazilian jungle that becomes the point of departure for global business and media ventures and is ultimately revealed to be geologically transformed First-World trash. Yamashita’s thematic focus on a local place transformed by the global, as well as her combination of Latin American techniques derived from the work of Mário de Andrade and Gabriel García Márquez with North American postmodernist strategies, create a narrative world that links the local, national, and global realms in innovative ways. Both works aim to create an “eco-cosmopolitan” awareness of global cultural and ecological spaces.

Popular Music and the Anthropocene

“…In fact, what we are trying to understand today are the dynamics , the breaks, the fractures that drive, traverse and reconfigure ecosystems (Callicott 1999; Blandin 2007; Larrère and Larrère 2009 and 2015). As Ursula Heise (2008) has noted, this understanding of the closed ecosystem has deeply influenced the ecological philosophy that has often extolled the balance, stability and pristine beauty of the local. Just think of Thoreau (1854) writing about Walden, Leopold (1949) observing the cycle of seasons and the renewal of species or the way in which in which the environmental ethic of Naess's Deep Ecology movement (1989) is embodied in proximity and the local community.…”

Planetary memory in contemporary American fiction

“…15 Reformulating the scale of our critical lenses, it should come as no surprise that these critics reject a narrow attention to place, explicitly targeting Berry's rejection of the 'planetary' in the case of Heise and Rob Nixon. As Nixon responds to Berry in his influential account of 'slow violence', personal agency and responsibility are indispensable, but 'shrink[ing] solutions to the level of the private and the small is evasive', seeing that 'planetary problems cannot simply be resolved by the aggregated actions of responsible individuals', 'most blatantly', he adds, 'in relation to climate change'.…”

Speculating on childhood and time, with Michael Ende’s Momo (1973)

“…These emphases on logical futures are strongly coloured by the experiences of recent global events, such as the 2007 credit crunch (Lane, 2013), climate change, old and new wars, refugee crises amidst exponential population growth, environmental degradation, species loss and rising inequalities (Hirst et al, 2015). How limiting a one-sided focus on economics and science is to human aspirations for diverse futures is obvious when considering the catastrophe, end-of-the-world, post-apocalyptic themes that currently dominate the imagination in movies, art (Ginn, 2015; Giuliani, 2015; Strauss, 2015) and literature (Canavan, 2012; Heise, 2008). This emphasis on dystopia in culture includes a focus on the future of childhood (Bone, 2015; Lee, 2013) and is evident in current trends in dystopian children’s and adolescent literature (Hintz et al, 2013).…”