Zeballos’s Canon: Literary and Geographic Notes in the Boletín del Instituto Geográfico Argentino

• In Event: Geographical Discourses and Territorial Representations in Latin American Writing

Abstract

In an 1897 piece in the Boletín del Instituto Geográfico Argentino, Estanislao Zeballos—statesman and founder of the Instituto Geográfico Argentino—lists a series of texts relevant to the Argentina of his moment. The surprisingly lengthy article, titled “Apuntaciones para la bibliografía argentina,” illustrates the fin-de-siècle impulse to catalogue all writing essential to constructing a national identity. Zeballos begins with eleven pages of numbered entries but then transitions to provocative and extensive annotations, which I aim to analyze in this paper; some are scathing reviews while others are singular praise. In constructing this veritable Argentine canon, Zeballos exposes several important trends essential to understanding the ways in which geography and literature intersect on the path to national consolidation in Latin America. In this talk, I will show that he portrays foreign naturalists as not only invaluable but as undervalued for their contributions to Argentine epistemology. This portrayal, I demonstrate, feeds into his esteem for literary writing—what I call “geographical discourse”—as the undeniable register for the discipline of geography. For Zeballos, words trump maps, while the poetry of the streets emerges from years of knowledge layered to create what he describes as the “leyenda de geografía”. I read this leyenda through Frank Lestringant’s theory of bricolage, which suggests that all cartography is a melding of known and unknown, of layers and lapses. Ultimately, I unpack Zeballos’s annotated bibliography to better understand the implications behind his pardoning of textual errors, especially as related to his demand for cartographic precision.

Author

• Aarti S Madan, Worcester Polytechnic Institute