Energy Matters: Latin America and the Cultural Critique of Energy is a special issue forthcoming in Environmental Humanities co-edited with Manuel Silva-Ferrer.

The last report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2022) emphasized how energy consumption, from fossil fuels to renewables, has driven the socio-ecological crisis of global warming and climate change. Given its multifaceted position as a worldwide provider, consumer, and driver of nature and energy commodities, Latin America has played a key role in terms of experiencing the equation between energy, nature extraction, and modernity sustained by economic growth and the expansion and access to goods and services. However, little attention has been paid to how energy choices and uses are influenced by ethics, behavior, institutions, history, beliefs, and values in this particular geography. The special issue Energy Matters: Latin America and the Cultural Critique of Energy will trace and explore the latter by paying attention to the intersections between cultures, materialities, politics, and energy consumption in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela.

This special issue aims to address the historical, geographical, geological, and material magnitudes of energy, as well as critical engagements with energy as a condition of possibility for cultural production. It sets out to analyze and historicize the relations between cultural products, cultural production, and energy from the outlook of material, textual, visual, and political case studies. The special issue aims to contribute to the ongoing debate in the energy humanities by incorporating the often-neglected perspective of Latin America in both understanding energy systems and planning for the future. Rethinking the place of nature and energy in the history of modern capitalism allows us to interpret the economies of peripheral countries as semantic regimes where capital, nature, and power converge. The latter highlights one of the central theses of Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil: that nature-exporting societies are neither on the margins nor the periphery of the world but constitute a fundamental part of modernity’s unfolding.