Abstract

In light of today’s ecological crisis, we urgently need to recover ways of imagining the relationship between body and land, because the dominant narrative of separating nature from culture has limited our capacity to envision sustainable futures. My dissertation reframes literature’s role in confronting environmental precarity by tracing how early twentieth-century Mexican writers anticipated concerns central to contemporary environmental theory. Their texts are uniquely positioned in this regard. Materializing in the wake of the Mexican Revolution and between two world wars, coloniality, and early forms of extractivism, they confront the environmental consequences of industrialization, warfare, and environmental degradation, using the resources of poetic form to imagine alternate ways of being in the world. In her 1922 prose poem “Bajo la mortaja de nieve duerme La Iztaccíhuatl en su inercia de muerte,” Nahui Olin imagines a volcano as a metaphor for collective feminine resistance: “the global mass of women sleeps… they are Iztaccíhuatl.” By reframing the avant-garde through an ecocritical lens, my dissertation revises dominant accounts of the historical avant-garde—an archive often constrained by gender and geography, typically situated in Europe between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. These earlier accounts frame avant-garde art and literature as resisting institutionalization and aligning with a new praxis of life, traditionally emphasizing institutional critique, war, and technology. In contrast, I foreground nature and embodiment as central to the experimental aesthetics of writers in my corpus. More importantly, I position Mexico City as a transnational site of literary experimentation in the Global South, comparable to New York and Paris in shaping international modernism. In my dissertation, “Volcanoes, Islands, and Cities: Ecopoetics of the Transnational Avant-Gardes in the Americas, 1910–1950s,” I argue that this transnational network of avant garde experimental writers created ecological imaginaries that challenge colonial extractivist paradigms. My project is a reclamation of ecological thought within texts that reframe the relationship between body and landscape, offering conceptual tools for reimagining our relation to the environment. Each of the writers discussed in my dissertation—from the feminist poetics of Nahui Olin (1893–1978) and Alice Rahon (1904–1987) to a Nahuatl text by Luz Jiménez (1897–1965)—begins from the landscape of Mexico City to develop an ecological imaginary that reclaims the feminized body. The volcano Iztaccíhuatl, known as the Sleeping White Woman for its snow-covered silhouette, appears in each of their works. I argue that these texts use experimental poetics, including prosody, multilingualism, and formal innovation, to reimagine the relationship between bodies and landscapes. My intervention centers on the claim that avant-garde writers in the Americas developed an ecological imaginary that reclaims a conflation historically used to justify the subjection of women and nature. To situate my intervention within existing scholarship, I build on previous studies of the Mexican avant‑garde and of Mexico City’s cultural and environmental histories, reframing the city as an environment that merits closer attention in avant‑garde studies. While foundational theorists like Peter Bürger emphasized experimentation and resistance to the institutionalization of art, often within a limited geography, recent scholars, such as Tatiana Flores and Ignacio Infante, have expanded the archive geographically and politically. My research builds on this scholarship by challenging the prevalent conceptual separation between the avant-garde and nature that is reproduced in contemporary scholarship, where the avant-garde is often defined by its engagement with war, technology, and urban modernity, rather than environmental concerns. Beyond this disciplinary conversation, my project draws on decolonial feminist theory, ecocriticism, and new materialism. Although ecocriticism typically situates ecological thought in the contemporary, 1960s conservation movements, some early modernist and modernist scholars have begun recovering ecological themes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts. However, this recovery remains largely overlooked within the transnational avant-garde. My archive recovers writers who are often overlooked in Anglophone scholarship on the historical avant‑garde, with the exception of scholars working on avant‑gardes in the Americas, whose work I extend further through an ecocritical lens. I argue that the writers in my corpus anticipate decolonial feminism and new materialism, understanding the body’s relationship to nature, long before terms like “natureculture” and “transcorporeality” entered the lexicon of feminist, new materialist discourse. Each chapter traces ecological imaginaries in Mexico City. Built on a lake, it was once the pre-Hispanic city of Tenochtitlan. The city was originally conceived as a continuum of the natural world and is the only pre-Hispanic capital in the Americas to continue to be a capital today. Building on the long-standing relationship between volcanoes and urban ecology in Mexico City, I examine poetic representations of Iztaccíhuatl during the Mexican Renaissance (1920s-1940s), a term used by artists, writers, and scholars at that time to describe a period of intense cultural activity. After independence in 1821, I argue that volcanoes became symbolic sites for negotiating indigeneity and Mexico’s precolonial past. Avant-garde artists often engaged these landscapes through primitivist and auto-primitivist aesthetics, reclaiming Indigenous forms as part of national identity. Chapter 1 begins with Nahui Olin’s 1922 prose poem “Bajo la mortaja de nieve duerme La Iztaccíhuatl en su inercia de muerte,” which reimagines the volcano as a global body of a woman, sealed by snow and ready to awaken in defiance of patriarchal law. I show how Olin’s Spanish poem makes Iztaccíhuatl appear as a dormant yet powerful feminized body, one that asserts agency and challenges dominant narratives separating landscape and body. I also complicate her work by bringing indigenismo into view and by drawing on “auto‑primitivism,” the term Tatiana Flores uses to describe the Mexican avant‑garde’s engagement with Indigenous art. In chapter 2, I turn to Alice Rahon’s French poem “À Ixtaccíhuatl” published in Dyn (1942), where she, like Olin, writes about Iztaccíhuatl, situating the volcano within a timeless landscape. The French-born, naturalized Mexican artist relocated to Mexico at the onset of World War II. Before settling in Mexico City, she traveled with Wolfgang Paalen and Eva Sulzer through North America, documenting Native American art in Alaska and British Columbia. I show how Rahon’s adoption of primitivist aesthetics drew on Indigenous motifs, reflecting a broader Surrealist fascination with non-Western cultures. I draw on Tabea Alexa Linhard’s observations that artists fleeing fascism often upheld colonial ideals—a tension that surfaces in Rahon’s use of primitivist aesthetics. This engagement also exposes the colonial contradictions many European artists carried into Mexico. Chapter 3 centers Luz Jiménez’s Nahuatl text “Tewewentsin Iwan Tetepeh” (1950), published in Mexihkatl Itonalama. Although Jiménez is most often known as an artist model who became the face of the nation with her image appearing across hundreds of photographs, drawings, and murals, Jiménez was also a translator, linguist, and cultural mediator. In this text, she reimagines Iztaccíhuatl as a living body within a network of other living mountains. Jiménez positions these volcanoes within a feminist and modernist revision of Iztaccíhuatl. In a brief coda, I turn to the Caribbean to show how these dynamics also unfold elsewhere in the Americas, where volcanic events connect the regions, through the work of two poets: Martinican poet and writer Jeanne “Jane” Nardal (1902-1993) and French poet Jeanne Mégnen (fl. 1938–1945). Although the volcanoes in the Caribbean and Mexico are distinct from one another, I argue that they invite a hemispheric approach. For instance, when Mount Pelée erupted in 1902, the sky above Mexico City turned vivid pink and alive, then deepened into fire-red. Hundreds of miles apart, Mount Pelée impacted Mexico City’s skyline. I turn to two poems on the island of Guadeloupe: Mégnen’s poem “La belle au bois dormant” [Beauty in the Sleeping Woods] (1941), published in Tropiques, and Nardal’s prose poem, “Le Soir tombe sur Karukera” [Night Falls on Karukera Island] (1932), published in La Revue de Monde. As in earlier discussions of Olin, Rahon, and Jiménez, Nardal imagines the island as a woman’s body. Through auto-primitivism, she destabilizes primitivist tropes and critiques coloniality. Mégnen’s poem, written nearly a decade later, constructs Guadeloupe’s volcanic landscape through the volcano, La Soufrière, as a site of resistance to the Vichy government’s occupation. These poems show how ecological thought was occurring in other sites across the Americas. I argue that these works invite a hemispheric approach that centers the Americas as a productive site of ecological thought during the historical avant-garde. In “Volcanoes, Islands, and Cities,” I argue that these artists address early forms of extractivism and environmental imperialism and redefine the relationship between body and environment. Instead of seeing bodies as separate from the environment, they are enmeshed within it, subverting colonial tropes that feminized the land and centering embodiment as a site of ecological and socio-political resistance. This intervention expands environmental humanities by showing how experimental modernist texts engaged ecological thought well before mid-20th-century crises, positioning land and embodiment as central and repositioning the genealogy of environmental thought within experimental modern literature.

Committee Chair

Ignacio Infante

Committee Members

André Fischer; Bernadette Meyers; Kathryn Davis; Stephanie Kirk; Tabea Linhard

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Author's Department

Comparative Literature

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

4-28-2026

Language

English (en)

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Available for download on Thursday, April 27, 2028

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