Geological Groundings: Earthly Memories and Inhuman Becomings in Latin American Cultures

How does the Latin American cultural archive reflect a geological grounding, a turn, and a return to the Earth in times of ecological collapse and accelerated extractivism? This special issue examines unsettling modes of earth-centred criticism and insurgent geologies that challenge dominant narratives of the geological turn by situating it within the material, political, and epistemic struggles of Latin America. By reframing geology as a political and semiotic terrain of insurgency and counter-coloniality, this issue advances a cultural critique of the (neo)extractivist logic that has shaped Latin America's engagements with the Earth in Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, the USA, as well as from Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian geological groundings. The articles featured in this special issue build on decolonial ecology, Latin American cultural studies, and energy humanities to foreground criticisms of geology as a white colonial construct, the mineral costs of the digital turn, the metabolism of metals in the energy and commodity markets, and the relations between slavery and the Earth as a spiritual being, among others. Through literature, cinema, digital media, and visual art, the Geos emerges as an archive of earthly memories and inhuman becomings that speak, resist, and demand new forms of perception of the Earth and of territorial struggles in Latin America.