Paper short abstract:

Laura A. Ogden will present from her new book entitled "Loss and Wonder at the World’s End" (Duke 2021), which catalogs the ways environmental change and colonial history are entangled in the Fuegian Archipelago of southernmost Chile and Argentina.

Paper long abstract:

Laura A. Ogden will present from her new book entitled "Loss and Wonder at the World’s End" (Duke 2021). In the book, she brings together animals, people, and things— from beavers, stolen photographs, lichen, American explorers, and bird song--to catalog the ways environmental change and colonial history are entangled in the Fuegian Archipelago of southernmost Chile and Argentina. Ogden archives forms of loss—including territory, language, sovereignty, and life itself—as well as forms of wonder, or moments when life continues to flourish even in the ruins of these devastations. Her account draws on long-term ethnographic research with settler and Indigenous communities; archival photographs; explorer journals; as well as experiments in natural history and performance studies. "Loss and Wonder at the World’s End" frames environmental change as imperialism’s shadow, a darkness cast upon the Earth in the wake of other losses.