Imagining a New Natural History

How writers, artists, and curators are taking creative new approaches to the discipline of natural history

Offering a fresh perspective on the Latin American climate crisis through the lens of natural history and its institutions, Imagining a New Natural History presents essays that analyze how books, artworks, and contemporary museum practices reconceive approaches to the discipline that cast humans and nature as separate entities. The creative works examined in this volume feature real and fictional archaeologists, museum curators, botanists, and taxidermists and explore subjects such as the catalog, the cabinet of curiosities, and the exhibition.

The contributors to this volume include leading scholars within Latin American studies and the environmental humanities, and the materials they study span diverse media, geographies, historical periods, and linguistic traditions, including Indigenous and Latinx cultural productions. They show how Latin American writers, artists, and critics provide a way of reckoning with the realities of climate change and the Anthropocene, as well as with the conceptual and aesthetic challenges that such realities pose to them. Through the perspectives of these artistic and literary practices, the natural history collections of anthropological museums, herbaria, and laboratories become explorations into the current climate predicament.