This article provides a reading of Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974), widely regarded as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. We focus on his first substantial literary work, Leyendas de Guatemala [Legends of Guatemala] (Asturias [1930] 1995)—a text considered by some critics as the first instance of “magic realism”—to consider the problem of the literary representation of race and space. Asturias’s early works, we contend, are especially fruitful sites for exploring the complex interrelations of space, race, nation, and territory. Reading his Leyendas, which aesthetically represent the origins of Guatemala, we analyze the failure of his project. This is a productive failure, illuminating Asturias’s commitment to addressing the race–space couplet and reaffirming its tragic relevance for Guatemala, and our world, today. For, we conclude, the problem is not Asturias, but the liberal nation form itself.

This collaborative project draws from research carried out by Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares in the oil-and-mining frontier in the Ecuadorian Amazon—one of the most biodiverse and mineral-rich regions on earth, currently under pressure from the dramatic expansion of large-scale extraction activities. At the heart of forest law is a series of landmark legal cases that bring the forest to court and plead for the rights of nature. One particularly paradigmatic trial has recently been won by the indigenous people of Sarayuku based on their cosmology of the living forest. Forest Law is a synchronized video projection shot with two cameras, a photo-text assemblage unfolding the background to these cases, and an artist book. Taken together, the collection of personal testimonies and factual evidence presented here exposes the multiple dimensions of the tropical forest as a physical, legal, and cosmological entity. Forest law has been realized in a close reading of Serres (1995) The Natural Contract. The text also makes reference to Stengers’s (1995) “Cosmopolitical Proposal” and draws from it a theory for an aesthetic engagement with the rainforest.