How might a Latin American cultural critique of energy reconceive the relevance of cultural history and aesthetics considering the energy regimes that underwrite it? This special section explores various modes of examining, looking at, and interpreting the intersections between energy and sociocultural practices in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela. The essay builds on Marxist ecological critique, Latin American cultural studies, and energy humanities scholarship to question the conventions and beliefs that influence our relationship with various material sources of energetic power found in Latin America—a region historically transformed by the social, racial, ethnic, and gendered legacies of colonialism and (neo)extractivism. From coal and petroleum to hydropower and lithium, “Energy Matters” charts the contrapuntal dynamics that extend from the dirty world of fossil fuel extraction to the green future posed by mining and renewable energies. The piece examines how commodification obscures labor and nature, detaching goods from their origins and conditions of production. It proposes repositioning Latin America from the periphery to the center of energy discussions, contending that the region is key to understanding the global energy supply chain and the sociocultural construction, representation, and mediation of energy sources as crucial components of planetary, social, and economic systems.

Preface to “Energy Matters” (Imre Szeman) // Energy Matters: Latin America and the Cultural Critique of Energy (Gianfranco Selgas; Manuel Silva-Ferrer) // Energy and Aesthetics of Landscape in Latin America: On the Art of Carolina Caycedo and Jeison Sierra (Gabriel Rudas Burgos) // Petropoetry as Edaphology: Crude Materials and Subsoil Energies in Venezuelan Poetry (Gina Saraceni) // Lithium and the Cinematic Temporalities of Argentina’s Energy Transition (Paul R. Merchant) // Infrastructures of the Anthropocene: A Fictional Ethnography of a Lithium Atom (raúl rodríguez freire) // Flooded Lives: Amazonian Visual Culture and the Ruins of Hydropower in Brazil (Jamille Pinheiro Dias)