Amazonian Landscapes in the Times of Rubber

• In Event: Precarious Landscapes of Latin/o American Literature

Abstract

Since the time it first appeared in Western discourses, Amazonia has been represented as a site of imperial desire and expansion. The texts produced by colonial agents or naturalist explorers built an idea of the region as an abundant, excessive, and fecund territory waiting to be exploited and consumed. These images were achieved, in part, by the representation of Amazonia through landscape images, which, as W.J.T Mitchell explains, are codified aesthetic and political representations where spaces are symbolically apprehended. In the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century the idea of Amazonia as a consumable place materialized with the extraction of rubber. In the literature produced around this period, however, the representation of the region through open and extended landscapes radically changed: literature opted to represent Amazonia as a closed, collapsing, and inapprehensible space. This essay studies this shift in the production of literary landscapes in the texts of naturalists, intellectuals, and novelists associated with the rubber boom, including De la Condamine, Bates, da Cunha, and Rivera. Through the analysis of their representation of Amazonian space, I argue that the crisis of landscape as a form of depiction responds to the violence of the rubber system and enables a critique of foreign domination over the region. What is ultimately at stake in this analysis is the way in which literature engages with nature and its precarious equilibrium at the face of consumption and exploitation.

Author

• Camilo Jaramillo Castrillón, University of California/Berkeley