Editorial: South Atlantic Ecocriticism.

“Subaltern environmentalisms” has emerged as a compelling new research area of the ecological humanities in the last decade. Connected to the rise of environmental justice studies, ecofeminism, post- and decolonialism, indigenous studies, degrowth discourse and anti-capitalist ecologies, it constitutes an attempt to reconfigure the maps of environmental discourse, re-locating their pivot from the “North(s)” to the “South(s)” of the world. Converging on the “abyssal divides” imposed by colonialism in its various historical and cultural forms, the projects within this growing paradigm promote the reintegration of non-dominant epistemologies and visions with awareness that, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos has written, “a massive epistemicide has been under way for the past five centuries, whereby an immense wealth of cognitive experiences has been wasted” (74). The Transatlantic regions of Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, and Lusophone Africa belong to those “Souths,” and while they are certainly major sites of “epistemicide”, they are nevertheless still vibrant with cognitive wealth.