This conversation between member of the editorial board Amanda Smith (University of California Santa Cruz) and guest-editor Patrícia Vieira (University of Coimbra) expands on the critical and conceptual coordinates framing the newly published special issue “The Amazon River Basin: Extractivism, Aesthetics, and Indigenous Perspectives” (32.3).

Rachel Price, member of the editorial board of JLACS; the magazine’s executive editor, Isis Sadek; the guest editor of the dossier “Material Turn in Cuban Studies”, María A. Cabrera Arús; and two of the authors, Jacqueline Loss and Michael Bustamante, discussed the highlights of this special issue on Cuban material culture (Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies vol. 30, no. 2). What are the implications of the recent shift towards material culture in Cuban studies? Could material culture studies help fill some of the analytical gaps produced by the lack of access to some archives? The debate revolved around the…