Non-Anthropocentric Relational Worlds in Andrea Mejía's "La quema" and Laura Ortiz Gómez's "Un toro bien bonito"

Abstract

This article looks at short stories by Andrea Mejía and Laura Ortiz Gómez through the lens of debates on the Anthropocene in the social and natural sciences that refer to a much-needed transition into a more habitable world of interspecies relationships and relational ontologies. It situates Mejia and Ortiz Gómez’s short stories in the context of the so-called Colombian post-conflict period —the period after the peace accord that purportedly ended the longest-run armed conflict of the Western Hemisphere— and of the recent delivery of the results of years of work with victims of this conflict by the Truth Commission that was created by this accord. The reading of the stories emphasizes how Mejía and Ortiz Gómez explore literature as a space to reflect on rural violence in Colombia, to make amends with nature as another victim of the conflict, and to imagine alternative futures beyond the nature/culture divide and the ontologies that place human life at the center, which have proven to be so harmful in our current ecological and climatic crisis.