Jamie de Moya-Cotter
Biruté Ciplijauskaité Dissertation Fellow in Peninsular Spanish Literature and Culture (2025–2026)
PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, UW–Madison
Entangled Narrations of an Extractive Anthropocene: Eco-Storytelling from the Andes and Amazonia
Tracing narratives of extractivisms that begins with the Amazonian rubber trade and ends in the Peruvian highlands, this dissertation project examines the way modes of storytelling interact with legacies of extractivism across Andean and Amazonian landscapes. In critiquing canonical works steeped in the epistemology of extractivism, I contend that Andean and Amazonian filmmakers and rappers resist the extractivist impulse toward development and use their works to reconsider the paradigm of settler-colonial modernity. Representing themselves on their own terms, they cultivate alternative postdevelopment imaginaries and cultural practices that value the reproduction of multispecies life over capital.
Jamie is a PhD Candidate in Latin American Literatures and Cultures. His research focuses on social environmental issues in the Andes and Amazonia and how narratives of symbioses between humans and more-than-humans can teach us to relearn a capacity for awareness towards our more-than-human world that often disappears in the rhythms of extractive capitalism. In investigating these themes, his dissertation examines various modes of Andean and Amazonian storytelling in film, music, and literature that critique and imagine beyond the extractivist paradigm.
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