Amazonian Cartographies: Mapping Novels and the Production of Space in Twentieth-Century Latin America

[摘要] The decline of the first Amazonian Rubber Boom in 1912 was only the beginning of Amazonia’s emergence as an important literary territory. This dissertation explores how Latin American intellectuals throughout the twentieth century grapple in their novels with the ways that extractive processes at different historical moments surveyed, transformed, and devastated Amazonia and how their resulting literary cartographies have intervened in Amazonian spaces. Scholars have recently begun to consider the representation of Amazonia across Latin American fiction, addressing the void in literary criticism on this region commonly relegated to anthropological, biological, and geographical studies. However, the role that literature has played in shaping Amazonia has not received sufficient attention.My research focuses on authors from Amazonian countries whose work writes against processes such as state mapping, geographic curriculum, railroad construction, and extractivism that have codified Amazonia for integration into cultural and economic projects. I examine how their novels try to account for geographic experiences elided for the sake of those projects as well as how their efforts to design what they see as more faithful literary ;;maps” often produce other problematic omissions. I engage the problem of the translation of space from observation to representation—literary and otherwise—and I theorize how these representations work to create Amazonia in their image. The first chapter unpacks La vorágine (1924) as a response to José Eustasio Rivera’s participation in the Colombian-Venezuelan border commission from 1921-1922. Chapter 2 departs from Rómulo Gallegos’s 1935 novel Canaima to illustrate the ways that literature, geographic curriculum, and shamanism have overlapped in mapping Guayana. The third chapter shows how the destruction of railroad records presents an opportunity for Brazilian author Márcio Souza in Mad Maria (1980) to reinvent the spaces of American capitalism along the Madeira and Mamoré Rivers. Finally, my last chapter considers the transformation of Iquitos into a shamanic retreat center via César Calvo’s Las tres mitades de Ino Moxo y otros brujos de la Amazonía (1981). Together, these chapters demonstrate the complex interplay between various modes of spatial representation and the crucial role played by literature in negotiating and producing Amazonian spaces.

[发布机构] Johns Hopkins University

[效力级别] literature and linguistics

[关键词] Language;literature and linguistics;novel;Amazon;mapping;space;ecocriticism;shamanism;Jose Eustasio Rivera;Romulo Gallegos;Marcio Souza;Cesar Calvo;Colombia;Venezuela;Brazil;Peru;Spanish