When Jaguars Imagine: Rethinking Latin America Through Eco-Affective Fiction

What if fiction could reshape the way we relate to the planet? That question was central to a recent lecture by Alejandra Laera, the Fall 2025 DRCLAS Robert F. Kennedy Professor in Latin American Studies, who examined how contemporary Latin American novels are rewriting humans’ place in the world. A leading scholar of Argentine literature at the University of Buenos Aires, Laera presented research that unsettles familiar hierarchies separating humans from the environments and species that surround them.

Laera is hosted by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard. The event was moderated by María Bovea-Pascual, 2025–26 DRCLAS Graduate Student Associate and Ph.D. candidate in that same department.

Her proposal centers on the concept of imaginación narrativa ecoafectiva — eco-affective narrative imagination — a literary approach that invites readers to reconsider human centrality. This method, she argued, “is not just an aesthetic experiment; it is a political proposition,” broadening the emotional and ethical terrain in which ecological relationships become thinkable.

At the heart of Laera’s framework is ecoafectividad, a mode of feeling and perceiving that acknowledges interspecies connection in and with the environments we inhabit. Eco-affective narratives weave together organic and inorganic life, suggesting that rivers, forests, minerals, and animals possess their own sensory worlds and participate in shared histories. If readers begin to feel with nonhuman beings, Laera noted, they may also start to rethink extractive attitudes that have long governed the region’s landscapes.

The Jaguar’s Gaze

One of the most powerful examples Laera explored was the recurring figure of the jaguar, an apex predator and cultural icon across Latin America. In the novels she analyzed, “the jaguar is not a metaphor. It is a subject capable of perception, memory, and affect.” This shift in narrative agency challenges literature to express forms of sensing and knowing that exist beyond human language.

Learning to read from a jaguar’s point of view requires inhabiting a border zone between human imagination and more-than-human experience. What does the night smell like to a creature whose survival depends on scent? What is memory when it isn’t shaped by words? As the jaguar’s sensory world comes into focus, human characters and readers must reposition themselves not above other forms of life but among them.

The implications extend far beyond aesthetics. In a region where environmental devastation is often justified through stories of progress and control, narrative intervention can be a political form of care. Laera emphasized that “if environmental devastation is sustained by certain ways of seeing the world, literature can transform them, “shifting readers’ perceptions in ways that policy alone cannot.

Eco-affective fiction works on the level of emotion and attention: it destabilizes human exceptionalism and foregrounds the relationships that sustain coexistence: predator and prey, water and earth, the visible and the invisible. It insists that survival is not just technical but relational.

Audience members engaged Laera in conversation about the stakes of storytelling at a moment of rapid ecological change. The discussion underscored a shared concern: if the world is transforming, our narratives must transform with it. Laera’s research suggests that contemporary authors are already undertaking that work, opening literature to perspectives that exceed the human and, in doing so, training us to notice the fragile and enduring ties that shape life on the planet.

Eco-affective fiction, she proposed, does not merely represent crisis; it provides a grammar for living within it. When jaguars imagine, the challenge, and the invitation, is to imagine with them.