Ecothriller and Ecocritiscm in Latin America

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Yasmin Temelli
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 535042435

The global environmental crisis and its consequences are undoubtedly among the socio-political challenges that, along with the Corona pandemic, have had the greatest impact on public discourse in recent years. The ecological problems that are currently coming to light in all clarity had already been foreshadowed for several decades. As a result, not only in the Global North, but also in Latin America from the 1990s onwards, an increasing environmental awareness can be observed, which manifests itself, among other things, in the founding of political parties with an ecological agenda as well as environmental protection organisations, such as the Grupo de los cien, established by the Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, whose members include prominent authors such as Elena Poniatowska and Gabriel García Márquez. The close interaction of activists, writers and filmmakers in Latin America leads to an intensive examination of ecological subjects in literature and film. The wide-ranging subgenre of the eco-thriller, in which the social and health consequences resulting from environmental changes as well as the crimes committed against environmentalists are also dealt with, is proving to be particularly sensitive to environmentally-related themes. Despite the very extensive literary as well as cinematic production of eco-thrillers, a scholarly examination of this genre has not yet systematically taken place in Latin American studies. This project aims to address precisely this research desideratum: For the first time, it focuses on literary and cinematic eco-thrillers from Latin America and is dedicated to their genre-specific and media-specific forms of staging with regard to the modelling of ecological problems – especially in a comparative comparison with US-American and European forms of ecocriticism. The contribution of civil society and cultural initiatives in Latin America is also taken into account.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants