Can rupture be a generative force rather than merely a destructive event? Rupture names both an end and a beginning: the moment when an existing order gives way and something new becomes possible. In Latin America, that double movement has been shaped by conquest, dictatorship, and the ongoing violence of extractivism – but also by cultural forms that have made catastrophe generative, turning a constitutive disjuncture into creative force.

Working from the in-between place of Latin American thought and artistic practice, this volume gathers essays in three parts. Ruptures of Time addresses catastrophe, memory, and history, from the aesthetics of ruins to the Colonialocene as a frame for the climate crisis. Ruptures of the Body turns to exhaustion, rubble, and performative dissidence, reading bodies and territories as sites where violence is inscribed and resisted. Other Beginnings explores Indigenous futures, technodiversity, and critical posthumanisms.

Bringing together scholars from Latin America, Europe, and North America, Ruptures asks what emancipatory force rupture retains when its language has been claimed by authoritarian spectacle – offering resources for Latin American studies, cultural theory, political ecology, and postcolonial studies.