Nicanor Parra’s eco-poetry as a space of diss

Abstract

In Chile, since the fifties, we start to note a developing trend of ecologist poets and writers denouncing the predatory model of economic growth, calling for collective action. The publication Ecopoemas by the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra in 1982 became a milestone that recovers the environmental thinking of several previous authors while proposing new ethical-aesthetic paradigms capable of articulating dissenting subjectivities in the three ecological registers (Guattari).

With this work, I intend to study ecopoems as an agonist space of dissent. The work focuses on exploring how Nicanor Parra’s ecopoetry configures performativity and affectivity of political dissent. First, I analyze ecology as a discourse of resistance installed politically and aesthetically as oppositional in Parra’s poems; second, I describe how this discourse configures an ecocentric us in which new actors will be able to produce affections and gestures of political dissent with the promise of collective action. Finally, I consider the validity of Parra’s ecopoetry in the context of Latin American Political Ecology.