The Material Turn In Latin America

The chapter proposes that the first sense of a material turn is away from idealism. The second is away from the linguistic turn, a major undertaking of the 20th century, which did indeed attempt to subsume many lines of inquiry under an examination of language, with all its recursiveness and multiplicity. In recent years, the material turn has consisted of an onslaught of work that revolves around things, precisely, or stuff, commodities, nature, technologies – matter, for short. In addition to the relative exhaustion of previously prevailing schools of thought and the intellectual bankruptcy of traditional humanistic and anthropocentric discourse across the disciplines, there is the non-linguistic, increasingly palpable reality of climate change, a challenge to shared assumptions and ways of life. Global warming has served as a wake-up call to occupy ourselves less with the human and/or to reframe the place of the human within the continuum of nature and culture. The chapter is organized into four sections: the first revises a materialist Latin American archive that continues to gain new relevance. The second appraises relevant monographs from the last twenty years or so, which revisit that archive in conversation with contemporary materialisms. The third explores the partial overlap with other lines of research in Latin Americanist scholarship. The final section engages criticism against the material turn and explores its limits.