Amanda M. Smith
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781800348417
- eISBN:
- 9781800852457
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781800348417.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom explores the role played by literature written during the century following the Amazon rubber boom (1850-1920) in imagining a new fate for ...
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Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom explores the role played by literature written during the century following the Amazon rubber boom (1850-1920) in imagining a new fate for the river basin beyond the destructive practices of resource extraction. It problematizes well-intentioned literary projects to map the region otherwise by charting their impact in framing contemporary struggles against the division and commodification of Amazonia. Authors José Eustasio Rivera, Rómulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, César Calvo, and Márcio Souza deliberately described the Amazonian regions of their respective countries in contrast to state and corporate projections, and the acceptance of their Amazonian novels in the Latin American literary canon has given power to their geographic representations. Smith reveals how authors sometimes mapped imperfectly, misrepresenting cultural geographies, erasing lived realities, and speaking for unacknowledged sources. Navigating Amazonia across its real and fictional landscapes, this book seeks to identify where literary configurations of the region have shaped geopolitics. This spatial reexamination of influential twentieth-century novels suggests that even literary works implicated in the ongoing repurposing of the rubber fields of the past can also plot pathways out of the cycles of extractivism.Less
Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom explores the role played by literature written during the century following the Amazon rubber boom (1850-1920) in imagining a new fate for the river basin beyond the destructive practices of resource extraction. It problematizes well-intentioned literary projects to map the region otherwise by charting their impact in framing contemporary struggles against the division and commodification of Amazonia. Authors José Eustasio Rivera, Rómulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, César Calvo, and Márcio Souza deliberately described the Amazonian regions of their respective countries in contrast to state and corporate projections, and the acceptance of their Amazonian novels in the Latin American literary canon has given power to their geographic representations. Smith reveals how authors sometimes mapped imperfectly, misrepresenting cultural geographies, erasing lived realities, and speaking for unacknowledged sources. Navigating Amazonia across its real and fictional landscapes, this book seeks to identify where literary configurations of the region have shaped geopolitics. This spatial reexamination of influential twentieth-century novels suggests that even literary works implicated in the ongoing repurposing of the rubber fields of the past can also plot pathways out of the cycles of extractivism.
