Asymmetric Ecologies in Europe and South America around 1800 (Culture & Conflict, 21)

This volume proposes new ways of understanding the historical semantics of the relationship between humans and nature in South America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The authors in this volume use the notion of asymmetry to discuss the representations of and forms of knowledge about nature circulating in, and about, colonial and postcolonial South America. They argue that the production of knowledge about the American natural space widened the power gap between the Europeans colonizers and the local population. This gap, therefore, rests on what we call 'asymmetric ecologies': Eurocentric epistemic orders excluded forms of indigenous, mestizo, and Creole knowledge about nature. By looking at literary as well as non-literary sources, such as natural histories, travel narratives, encyclopaedias or medical writing, the essays in this volume trace the origins of new theoretical paradigms (ecocriticism, biopolitics, transarea studies, etc.), and examine the regional cultural, identity, and epistemic conflicts that undercut the Eurocentric narrative of enlightened modernity. -- Publisher description

Culture and conflict inevitably go hand in hand. The very idea of culture is marked by the notion of difference and by the creative, fraught interaction between conflicting concepts and values. The same can be said of all key ideas in the study of culture, such as identity and diversity, memory and trauma, the translation of cultures and globalization, dislocation and emplacement, mediation and exclusion. This series publishes theoretically informed original scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural studies as well as media, visual, and film studies. It fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue on the multiple ways in which conflict supports and constrains the production of meaning, on how conflict is represented, how it relates to the past and projects the present, and how it frames scholarship within the humanities.

Editors:
Isabel Capeloa Gil, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal; Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK, Catherine Nesci, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

Editorial Board:
Arjun Appadurai, New York University,
Claudia Benthien, Universität Hamburg,
Elisabeth Bronfen, Universität Zürich,
Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, Santa Barbara,
Joyce Goggin, Universiteit van Amsterdam,
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University,
Ansgar Nünning, Universität Gießen,
Naomi Segal, University of London, Birkbeck College,
Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Universidade Estadual de Campinas,
António Sousa Ribeiro, Universidade de Coimbra,
Roberto Vecchi, Universita di Bologna,
Samuel Weber, Northwestern University,
Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania,
Christoph Wulf, FU Berlin,
Longxi Zhang, City University of Hong Kong

Contents 5 Asymmetric Ecologies in Europe and South America around 1800: Introduction 9 I Epistemic Asymmetries 21 Humboldt and Epistemological Colonialism: Alexandra Wulf’s The Invention of Nature 21 Climate, Man, and Culture in Eighteenth- Century Spain: From Feijoo (1728) to Masdeu (1783) 43 Andrés Cavo Franco’s Historia de México (1797): Hydrology, Regeneration, and the Superiority of Nature 59 Narrative, Writing about “Indians,” and Creole Epistemes in the Historias Naturales by Three Jesuits Banished from America (1767) 73 II Asymmetric Identities 93 Race and Reform in Late Colonial Santo Domingo 93 The Asymmetries of American Ingenium: Echoes of the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo 121 III Asymmetries in Governmentality and Economy 145 Between Agriculture and Culture: The Role of Nature in Jovellanos’s Memoria para el arreglo de la policía de los espectáculos y diversiones públicas and Informe de Ley Agraria 145 Andean Metallic Abundance in Republican Times: Mariano de Rivero and his Civic Endeavor 163 The Spanish Enlightenment and the Comprehension of the New World: Botany, Medicine, and the Search for New Remedies for the Old Empire 189 IV Asymmetric Taxonomies 215 The New World of Noah’s Ark 215 Hierarchy and Continuity: The Order of the Natural World in Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man and Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature 241 V Asymmetries in Human-Environment Relations 255 Lima 1746: Configurations of Catastrophe and Asymmetric Ecologies 255 Island Texts and Archipelagic Writing: Alexander von Humboldt’s Isle de Cube: Antilles en général 285 Transatlantic Approaches to Nature: Humboldt and his Environmental Concerns 299 List of Contributors 325 Name Index 329