Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon (American Tropics Towards a Literary Geography LUP)

The diverse approaches to the Amazon collected in this book focus on __stories__ of intimate, quotidian, interpersonal experiences (as opposed to those that take place between companies and nations) that, in turn, have resisted or else have been ignored by larger historical designs. This is why we propose a __literary__ geography of the Amazon. In this space made out of __historias__, we will show the always already crafted, and hence political, ways in which this region has been represented in more “scientific”, often nationalizing histories. This includes, of course, understanding the “gigantic” discourses on Amazonia as rooted––if rarely discussed––in different quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The intimate interactions between one human being and another, or between men and animals, plants, or the natural space more generally as we see it, are not, as one might expect, comforting. Instead they are often disquieting, uncanny, or downright violent. This book argues that the Amazon’s “gigantism” lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness that inhabits its archive of __historias__ in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts. Cover Contents List of Figures A Note on Translations 1. Introduction. Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon 2. The Jungle Like a Sunday at Home: Rafael Uribe Uribe, Miguel Triana, and the Nationalization of the Amazon 3. Hildebrando Fuentes’s Peruvian Amazon: National Integration and Capital in the Jungle 4. Contested Frontiers: Territory and Power in Euclides da Cunha’s Amazonian Texts 5. ‘Splendid testemunhos’: Documenting Atrocities, Bodies, and Desire in Roger Casement’s Black Diaries 6. A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Cauchero of the Amazonian Rubber Groves 7. Endless Stories: Perspectivism and Narrative Form in Native Amazonian Literature 8. Malarial Philosophy: The Modernista Amazonia of Mário de Andrade 9. The Politics of Vegetating in Arturo Burga Freitas’s Mal de gente 10. Filming Modernity in the Tropics: The Amazon, Walt Disney, and the Antecedents of Modernization Theory 11. The Western ‘Baptism’ of Yurupary: Reception and Rewritings of an Amazonian Foundational Myth 12. Photography, Inoperative Ethnography, Naturalism: On Sharon Lockhart’s Amazon Project 13. Nostalgia and Mourning in Milton Hatoum’s Órfãos do Eldorado Editors and Contributors Index Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon analyzes the ways in which the Amazon has been represented in twentieth century cultural production. With contributions by scholars working in Latin America, the US and Europe, Intimate Frontiers reads against the grain commonly held notions about the region - its gigantism, its richness, its exceptionality, among other - choosing to approach these rather from quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The multinational, pluriethnic corpus of texts critically examined here, explores a wide range of cultural artifacts including travelogues, diaries, and novels about the rubber boom genocide, as well as indigenous oral histories, documentary films, and photography about the region. The different voices gathered in this book show that the richness of the Amazon lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness of its histories/stories in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts The articles compiled in this book discuss different aspects of the cultures and literatures of the Amazon, focusing not on its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but on the richness that inhabits its diverse archive of oral histories, images, songs, material culture, and texts. The articles compiled in this text discuss different aspects of the cultures and literatures of the Amazon, focusing not on its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but on the richness that inhabits its diverse archive of oral histories, images, songs, material culture, and texts A collection of multinational scholarly contributions on various cultural aspects of the Amazon region in the 20th century