Megaprojects and Literature in Chile, Panama, and Brazil

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the interrelation of infrastructure, nature, and the human body in Latin American literature. At the mid-twentieth century, infrastructure became the primary tool of developmental statecraft and across Latin America megaprojects became the idols of modernity that obscured environmental effects on vulnerable populations in adjacent regions. While literary analysis of environmental change often fails to consider the complex entanglements of infrastructures and non-human nature and runs the risk of reproducing age-old binaries of nature and culture, this dissertation addresses these concerns in two ways: first, by expanding what is considered traditional infrastructure—like roads and lead pipes—to hydrologic, plant, and chemical infrastructures, and second, by analyzing how these infrastructures operate as environmental forces of power and control. This dissertation employs an assemblage theory framework that focuses on intersections of environmental change and the discourses and literatures that create meaning. The Chuquicamata mine in Northern Chile, the Panama Canal, and Zona Franca of Manaus emerge in literary works by Pablo Neruda, Gil Blas Tejeira, Joaquín Beleño, Márcio Souza, and Milton Hatoum as complex assemblages of infrastructures and non-human nature that enmesh and poison the bodies of miners, Afro-Antilleans, and those living on the urban margins of Latin America. This dissertation makes the following claims: first, literary works function as testimony that bears witness to the hidden, negative effects of megaprojects; and second, these negative effects can be traced in the literary text at the overlap between infrastructure, non-human nature, and the human body.