Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change

Subjunctive Aesthetics argues for the importance of ecocritical approaches within the field of Mexican Studies. While environmental historians of Mexico have been leading the charge in terms of foregrounding the nonhuman as a legitimate object of analysis, Mexican cultural studies is just beginning to do. This monograph engages with established and up-and-coming Latin American ecocritical scholars who argue that Latin America offers an important corrective to Anglocentric approaches to the Anthropocene by foregrounding colonialism and empire. Studies indicate that Mexicans are more worried about climate change than any other global issue, more anxious about natural disasters than any other quotidian threat (including crime), and that suicide rates have risen along with temperatures. These fears are grounded in reality: in the last twenty years, Mexico issued more than 2,000 extreme weather warnings linked to hydrometeorological events, and ranked in the top ten countries in terms of absolute economic losses caused by (un)natural disasters. Mexico is also one of the deadliest countries in the world for environmental activists: in 2018 alone, twenty-one defenders of the land were murdered, and many others criminalized or intimidated. Pervasive social anxiety in Mexico about ongoing and future climate change is reflected in the outpouring of eco-cultural production over the past decade, a body of work that has yet to be comprehensively studied. The exponential explosion of cultural responses to climate change is not limited to any one genre: Mexican poets like Karen Villeda and Isabel Zapata have thematized extinction, sci-fi writer Alberto Chimal recently published a dystopian young adult climate fiction, and performance artist Naomi Rinco´n Gallardo has created works that contest extractivism’s murderous tactics. Subjunctive Aesthetics brings together these artists and others to collate a diverse constellation of Mexican cultural responses to climate change that index the multifaceted nature of this crisis. Carolyn Fornoff argues that what unites this array is the way in which it deploys the subjunctive—not the what is, but the what if—in order to disrupt current paradigms of energy consumption and envision a more just and sustainable planetary future.