KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Am Marktplatz 2
85072 Eichstätt
Natalia.Eduardo@ku.de
Born and raised in Guatemala, Colombia and Spain. I moved to Germany in 2015 and studied my B.A. in Cultural Studies and Spanish Philology at the Potsdam Universität and an M.A in interdisciplinary Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Since the beginning of my academic career, I have been interested in socio-cultural practices that explore questions of the dynamic constitution between knowledge productions and their material representations. In my bachelor’s thesis, I investigated the subaltern production of knowledge in the formation of historical memory within indigenous women’s activist initiatives in relation to national historiography during the post-war period in Guatemala. This work, entitled „Feminist and Decolonial Practices of Remembering in Postwar Guatemala,“ was awarded the Gender Prize 2020 of the University of Potsdam. For my Master’s thesis in Latin American Studies, I researched the technical and social history of the United Fruit Company’s Central American banana industry and its literary, cultural, and political traces in Caribbean societies. These interests have led me to explore philosophical and methodological approaches from science and technology studies and global studies in my academic practice, and I would like to deepen these approaches as part of my doctoral research. Complementary to my academic journey, I am a writer of poetry and short stories and work as an editor in the magazin ALBA Lateinamerika lesen.
From Soil to Road, from Water to Canal: Re-thinking Infrastructures and World-making practices of Place in Caribbean and Central American Science Fiction Literature
The starting point of my dissertation is an exploration of literary and cultural production that offers ways of understanding underlying experiences embedded in modern/colonial infrastructures. I propose to explore mobility routes around plantations in Central America and the Caribbean as places with their own complexities, rather than as invisible connections between points. Throughout this study, I aim to explore processes of deterritorialization in relation to the formation of modern capitalist infrastructures, questioning their dynamics of connectedness/fragmentation in relation to their role in constructing not only a material world, but also a discourse of progress.
The need to understand and analyze modern infrastructures in their role in the co-creation of landscapes has led me to become interested in the entangled histories in and through the commercial routes that connect people to plantations, goods, and transportation systems. My interest in practices of place-making in Central America and the Caribbean lies, in part, in the narratives that contribute to or counter a modern colonial world-making that profoundly alters the politics of land governance and rights. This region provides an important scenario for examining the ways in which Western and colonial narratives use infrastructure to construct fixed notions of landscape, reinforcing dichotomies implicit in civilizational and linear epistemologies while obscuring the more fluid dynamics of spatial practices.
Throughout my work, I aim to engage with Caribbean and Central American science fiction in order to understand the dynamic interactions between humans and infrastructures that are often visible through environmental conflicts. My analysis of these conflicts is not limited to a critique of colonial and modern power dynamics embedded in infrastructure and environmental issues but extends to a deeper examination of their underlying structures. From an interdisciplinary literary studies perspective, I follow the approaches of scholars and thinkers such as Elizabeth Deloughrey and Cristina Rivera Garza in their examination of literature as a means not only to propose critiques and alternative narratives that challenge modern colonial epistemologies, but also to rethink the role of literature in building an environmental imagination in the Caribbean and Central America that invites a rethinking of infrastructures and technologies.