Manifesto: Fertilizing mourning – Global South’s offering to a world in flames

Eliana Otta

doi:10.1386/jgmc_00060_1

ISSN: 2052-3971
E-ISSN: 2052-398X

Manifesto: Fertilizing mourning – Global South’s offering to a world in flames
By Eliana Otta¹
View Affiliations Hide Affiliations

¹ ISNI: 0000000115406984 Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
Source: Journal of Greek Media & Culture, Volume 8, Issue Greece and the South: Grammars of Comparison, Protest, and Futurity, edited by Maria Boletsi and Dimitris Papanikolaou, Oct 2022, p. 247 - 257
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00060_1
Language: English
- Received: 12 Aug 2021
- Accepted: 05 Jul 2022
- Published online: 01 Oct 2022

Abstract

This manifesto takes the coincidence of Peru’s and Greece’s bicentennials of independence, and their overlap with the COVID-19 pandemic, as a departure point, in order to propose a different understanding of mourning from the Global South. The article is an open invitation to reinforce mourning’s capacity to be a reproductive life force, responding to contemporary experiences of loss in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accelerated processes of extinction, especially in resource extraction zones, like the Amazon. Taking inspiration from ancient Indigenous techniques for soil regeneration, fertilizing mourning is a call to merge traditional knowledge, collective practices and non-anthropocentric world-views that resist individualism and capitalism both in the Global South and in places that defend communal life in the north of the planet. This manifesto proposes that to transform prevalent colonial, modern structures, it is necessary to develop a different relationship with nature, by reconsidering the entanglements between life, death and regeneration.

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/jgmc_00060_1

2022-10-01

2026-04-15

Metrics

Full text loading...

References

Ahmed, Sara. ( 2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh:: Edinburgh University Press Ltd;.
[Google Scholar]
Anon. ( 2020;), ‘ Cultura en Duelo: los Sabios y Líderes Indígenas que el COVID-19 se Está Llevando. ’, Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental, 9 August, https://www.actualidadambiental.pe/indigenas-el-legado-de-los-lideres-que-el-covid-19-se-esta-llevando/. Accessed 2 July 2022.
[Google Scholar]
Anon. ( 2022;), ‘ The pandemic’s true death toll: Our daily estimate of excess deaths around the world. ’, The Economist, 22 February, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates. Accessed 2 July 2022.
[Google Scholar]
Anzaldúa, Gloria. ( [1987] 2016), Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Madrid:: Capitán Swing;.
[Google Scholar]
Athanasiou, Athena. ( 2017), Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black, Edinburgh:: Edinburgh University Press;.
[Google Scholar]
Badal, Marc. ( 2014), Vidas a la Intemperie, Notas Preliminares Sobre el Campesinado, Madrid:: Ediciones Campo Adentro;.
[Google Scholar]
Benjamin, Walter. ( [1955] 1968), Illuminations, New York:: Schocken Books;.
[Google Scholar]
Braidotti, Rosi. ( 2012), Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rossi Braidotti, New York:: Columbia University Press;.
[Google Scholar]
Butler, Judith. ( 2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London:: Verso;.
[Google Scholar]
Butler, Judith, and Athanasiou, Athena. ( 2013), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Cambridge:: Polity;.
[Google Scholar]
Calvo, César. ( [1981] 2009), Las Tres Mitades de Ino Moxo y otros Brujos de la Amazonía, La Habana:: Fondo Editorial Casa de las Américas;.
[Google Scholar]
Campt, Tina. ( 2019;), Adjacency: Luke Willis Thompson’s Poethics of Care. , Flash Art, 8 October, https://flash---art.com/article/adjacency-luke-willis-thompsons-poethics-of-care/. Accessed 2 July 2022.
[Google Scholar]
Carrington, Damian. ( 2021;), ‘ Amazon rainforest now emitting more CO₂ than it absorbs. ’, The Guardian, 1 July, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/14/amazon-rainforest-now-emitting-more-co2-than-it-absorbs. Accessed 2 July 2022.
[Google Scholar]
Cordingly, David. ( 2007), Cochrane the Dauntless: The Life and Adventures of Thomas Cochrane, New York:: Bloomsbury Publishing;.
[Google Scholar]
de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. ( 2018), Construyendo las Epistemologías del Sur: para un pensamiento alternativo de alternativas: Antología Esencial (ed. M. P. Meneses, J. A. Nunes, C. L. Añón, A. A. Bonet and N. L. Gomes), vol. I, Buenos Aires:: CLACSO;.
[Google Scholar]
Federici, Silvia. ( [2004] 2018), Calibán y la Bruja: Mujeres, Cuerpo y Acumulación Originaria, Madrid:: Traficantes de Sueños;.
[Google Scholar]
Gómez, Castro. ( 2005), La postcolonialidad explicada a los niños, Popayán:: Editorial Universidad del Cauca;.
[Google Scholar]
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. ( 2015), Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Minneapolis, MN:: Milkweed Editions;.
[Google Scholar]
King, Christopher C.. ( 2018), Lament from Epirus: An Odyssey into Europe’s Oldest Surviving Folk Music, New York:: W.W. Norton & Company;.
[Google Scholar]
Kopenawa, Davi, and Albers, Bruce. ( [2010] 2013), The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Cambridge, MA:: Harvard University Press;.
[Google Scholar]
Kotouza, Dimitra. ( 2019), Surplus Citizens: Struggle and Nationalism in the Greek Crisis, London:: Pluto Press;.
[Google Scholar]
Lander, Edgardo. ( 2020), Crisis civilizatoria: Experiencias de los gobiernos progresistas y debates en la izquierda latinoamericana, Quito:: Flacso Ecuador;.
[Google Scholar]
Leader, Darian. ( [2008] 2014), La Moda Negra: Duelo, Melancolía y Depresión, Madrid:: Sexto Piso;.
[Google Scholar]
Mahler, Anne Garland. ( 2017;), ‘ Global South. ’, Oxford Bibliographies, 25 July, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0055.xml?rskey=eMzKAW&result=16. Accessed 16 August 2022.
[Google Scholar]
Mbembé, J.-A.. ( 2003;), ‘ Necropolitics. ’ (trans. L. Meintjes), Public Culture, 15:1, pp. 11–40.
[Google Scholar]
Méndez, Cecilia. ( 2000), Incas Sí, Indios No: Apuntes para el Estudio del Nacionalismo Criollo en el Perú, Documento de Trabajo nro 56, Lima:: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos;.
[Google Scholar]
Mies, María. ( [1986] 2014), Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Hants:: Zero Books;.
[Google Scholar]
Mombaça, Jota. ( 2019;), ‘ Descolonización como apocalipsis. ’, Terremoto. , 6 May, https://terremoto.mx/revista/descolonizacion-como-apocalipsis/. Accessed 21 February 2022.
Plantzos, Dimitris. ( 2021;), ‘ Hellas mon amour: Revisiting Greece’s national “sites of trauma”. ’, in E. Solomon. (ed.), Contested Antiquity, Archaeological Heritage and Social Conflict in Modern Greece and Cyprus, Bloomington, IN:: Indiana University Press;.
[Google Scholar]
Ray, Gene. ( 2016;), ‘ Loss, love and mourning in the time of eco-genocide. ’, In Search of the Lost Future Conference, 14 December, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311614833_Loss_Love_and_Mourning_in_the_Time_of_Eco-Genocide. Accessed 2 July 2022.
[Google Scholar]
Rose, Deborah Bird. ( 2011), Wild Dog Dreaming, Love and Extinction, Charlottesville, VI:: University of Virginia Press;.
[Google Scholar]
Seremetakis, Nadia. ( 1991), The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani, Chicago, IL:: The University of Chicago Press;.
[Google Scholar]
Tindall, Robert,, Apffel-Marglin, Fréderique, and Shearer, David. ( [2017] 2019), Yana Allpa: El Biocarbón, Una Solución Ancestral Amazónica a la Crisis Climática, Lima:: Apus Graph Ediciones;.
[Google Scholar]
Varese, Stefano. ( 2011;), ‘ El Dilema Antropocéntrico: Notas Sobre la Economía Política de la Naturaleza en la Cultura Indígena. ’, Quaderns de l’Institut Català d’Antropologia, 27, pp. 97–122, https://raco.cat/index.php/QuadernsICA/article/view/258372. Accessed 2 July 2022.
[Google Scholar]
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, and Danowski, Deborah. ( 2017), The Ends of the World, Cambridge:: Polity;.
[Google Scholar]
Otta, Eliana. ( 2022;), ‘ Manifesto: Fertilizing mourning – Global South’s offering to a world in flames. ’, Journal of Greek Media & Culture, 8:2, pp. 247–57, https://doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00060_1
[Google Scholar]

/content/journals/10.1386/jgmc_00060_1

Manifesto: Fertilizing mourning – Global South’s offering to a world in flames

Journal of Greek Media & Culture 8, 247 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00060_1

/content/journals/10.1386/jgmc_00060_1

Data & Media loading...

Article Type: Article

Keyword(s): Amazon; collectivity; extractivism; Indigenous communities; necropolitics; sacred struggles; Yana Allpa

Manifesto: Fertilizing mourning – Global South’s offering to a world in flames

Abstract

Metrics

References

Most Read This Month

Most Cited Most Cited RSS feed

From the subject of the crisis to the subject in crisis: Middle voice on Greek walls

Critically queer and haunted: Greek identity, crisiscapes and doing queer history in the present

Depicting the pain of others: Photographic representations of refugees in the Aegean Shores

Crisis of sovereignty in recent Greek cinema

Participatory journalism policies in newspapers’ websites in Greece

The archaeology of in-between places: Finds under the Ilissos River bridge in Athens

Whose crisis? Dogtooth and the invisible middle class

Sex, violence, dogs and the impossibility of escape: Why contemporary Greek film is so focused on family

Reclaiming Greece’s national star: Aliki Vougiouklaki, from sex kitten to working girl

Film criticism and the legitimization of a New Wave in contemporary Greek cinema