By linking ecological and postcolonial issues as theoretical approach to an analysis of Pan-American literature, this essay's starting point is that the brutalization of people is linked to the brutalization of space - a process rooted in the past. My hypothesis is that these interrelated brutalizations constitute, although in diverse ways, the political, cultural and ecological unconscious of the Pan-American experience: the repressed phantasm of colonial violence that returns as response to a Verleugnung, making its presence felt at the level of enunciation and lived experience. The objective of this essay is to analyze how literary memory translates this double brutalization in select works by Margaret Atwood (Canada), Linda Hogan (USA), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe) and Benedicto Monteiro (Brazil).
Memory; political, cultural, ecological unconscious; Pan-American literature; geography; cultural episteme