Call for Submission - Letras de Hoje

SPECIAL ISSUE: Imaginations of the Anthropocene in Literature

What would an ecological mentality think? What types of literature have considered ecological thinking (Morton, 2023)? How can literary narratives fertilize ecological thoughts in the face of climate and anthropocenic pessimism? Which literatures can imagine possible worlds (Graúna, 2013)? The idea of eco or oikos, home, the place where we live, the dominant ecology (patriarchal, western, heteronormative) has, since the invasion of Abya Yala, produced landscapes, sociability and imaginaries dominated by catastrophe. Which literatures have been thinking and rethinking the colonial fracture (Ferdinand, 2021), human and non-human? What literatures have been imagining-creating worlds (Pratt 2022)? Which literatures have been telling stories or proposed ecological plots and/or string figures (Donna Haraway) that challenge the Capitalocene (2015) and oppose the Necrocene (Clark 2019)? In her book, O mundo desdobrável: ensaios para depois do fim (2021), Carola Saavedra raises the following questions: “What can literature do? What horizons is it capable to reach? Or, more specifically, what can literature do in a collapsing world, haunted by global warming, pandemics, the rise of the far right, increasing poverty, among other tragedies?” Given this formulation, this dossier seeks articles, essays and interviews that discuss and tension the concept of Anthropocene and adjacent concepts (Capitalocene, Necrocene, Plantatiocene, Plasticocene, Chthulucene among others) in literature, pervaded by countercolonial and decolonial perspectives, gender, ecocriticism, indigenous thoughts, indigenous futurisms (Dillon, 2012) and Afrofuturism (Dery, 1994). Which literatures, based on these tensions, have sought to highlight imaginations and languages that would be representative of these discussions? Which literatures have been thinking of a projection of utopian or dystopian futures permeated by counter-colonization (Bispo, 2023) or by ancestry, which are, essentially, anti-anthropocene ways of making worlds and creating sociability. Besides the appeal to the ruins, what else can emerge in/from devastated landscapes?

Period: 20/12/2023 a 10/03/2024

Editors

Profa. Dra. Fernanda Vieira de Sant' Anna (UEMG)

Profa. Dra. Leila Lehnen (Brown University)

Profa. Dra. Natalia Borges Polesso (PUCRS – CNPq/FAPERGS)