Rewriting Environmental Aesthetics in Mexico

Please join us for a discussion with Carolyn Fornoff (Cornell University) about her book Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (Vanderbilt UP, 2024). During the twenty-first century, Mexico has escalated extractive concessions at the same time that it has positioned itself as an international leader in the fight against climate change. Cultural production emergent from this contradiction frames this impasse as a crisis of imagination. In Subjunctive Aesthetics, Carolyn Fornoff studies how contemporary writers, filmmakers, and visual artists grapple with the threat that climate change and extractivist policies pose to Mexico’s present and future. It explores how artists rise to the challenge of envisioning alternative forms of territoriality (ways of being in relation to the environment) through strategies ranging from rewriting to counterfactual speculation.

Featuring:

• Carolyn Fornoff (Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies, Cornell University)
• Santiago Acosta, Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Yale University
• Luna Nájera, Senior Lector I and Associate Research Scholar, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Yale University