Jamie de Moya-Cotter
Birutė Ciplijauskaitė Dissertation Fellow in Peninsular Spanish Literature and Culture (2025–2026)
PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, UW–Madison
Extracting Utopia: Indoamérica en el año 3580 and the Horizon of Extractivist Developmentalism
In the obscure essay-novel Indoamérica en el año 3580 (1940), the author José Montenegro Baca drafts a portrait of a remade Latin America in the distant future. This portrait reimagines the old guard of Latin American extractivisms that oversaw the plundering of the region’s biomes by colonial empires and transnational companies, replacing them with a vision of resource extraction that aligns with and sustains the modernizing mission of a unified Latin American political entity (Indoamerica). In this seminar, I examine Montenegro Baca’s utopian inclinations regarding systems of resource extraction to drive Latin American progress that exhibit a tendency toward what I define as extractivist utopianism. Within the context of environmental humanities scholarship and Andean and Amazonian studies, I use this term to signify the imagination of worlds and futures where human societies have the capacity to subjugate, dominate, and transform landscapes in accordance with an extractivist logic while rhetorically erasing or minimizing the social environmental consequences these activities entail.
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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