Antoine Acker (University of Turin), Olaf Kaltmeier and Anne Tittor (Bielefeld University)
Abstract
Written from an environmental history background and a political ecology perspective with an emphasis on developments in Latin America, this introduction to the fiar issue Negotiating Nature: Imaginaries, Interventions and Resistance provides a conceptual reflection upon the problematic interrelations between coloniality, capitalism, and nature. First, the concept of Nature itself is questioned in regard to its colonial implications. Second, the material exchange and biotic flows towards and within the Americas are explored. Third, the social production of nature in the Americas is addressed. And fourth, the entanglements between colonial and capitalist nature(s) are discussed. Conflictive negotiations of nature and resistance are the topic of the fifth part. This introduction ends with the plea for a decolonization of nature that implies the need to re-conceptualize the relations between human society and its non-human environment.