Nancy P. Appelbaum
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469627441
- eISBN:
- 9781469627465
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469627441.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
The nineteenth century was an era of breathtakingly ambitious geographic expeditions across the Americas. The seminal Chorographic Commission of Colombia, which began in 1850 and lasted about a ...
More
The nineteenth century was an era of breathtakingly ambitious geographic expeditions across the Americas. The seminal Chorographic Commission of Colombia, which began in 1850 and lasted about a decade, was one of Latin America's most extensive. The commission's mandate was to define and map the young republic and its resources with an eye toward modernization. In this history of the commission, Nancy P. Appelbaum focuses on the geographers' fieldwork practices and visual production as the men traversed the mountains, savannahs, and forests of more than thirty provinces in order to delineate the country's territorial and racial composition. Their assumptions and methods, Appelbaum argues, contributed to a long-lasting national imaginary. What jumps out of the commission's array of reports, maps, sketches, and paintings is a portentous tension between the marked differences that appeared before the eyes of the geographers in the field and the visions of sameness to which they aspired. The commissioners and their patrons believed that a prosperous republic required a unified and racially homogeneous population, but the commission's maps and images paradoxically emphasized diversity and helped create a "country of regions." By privileging the whiter inhabitants of the cool Andean highlands over those of the boiling tropical lowlands, the commission left a lasting but problematic legacy for today's Colombians.Less
The nineteenth century was an era of breathtakingly ambitious geographic expeditions across the Americas. The seminal Chorographic Commission of Colombia, which began in 1850 and lasted about a decade, was one of Latin America's most extensive. The commission's mandate was to define and map the young republic and its resources with an eye toward modernization. In this history of the commission, Nancy P. Appelbaum focuses on the geographers' fieldwork practices and visual production as the men traversed the mountains, savannahs, and forests of more than thirty provinces in order to delineate the country's territorial and racial composition. Their assumptions and methods, Appelbaum argues, contributed to a long-lasting national imaginary. What jumps out of the commission's array of reports, maps, sketches, and paintings is a portentous tension between the marked differences that appeared before the eyes of the geographers in the field and the visions of sameness to which they aspired. The commissioners and their patrons believed that a prosperous republic required a unified and racially homogeneous population, but the commission's maps and images paradoxically emphasized diversity and helped create a "country of regions." By privileging the whiter inhabitants of the cool Andean highlands over those of the boiling tropical lowlands, the commission left a lasting but problematic legacy for today's Colombians.
Nancy P. Appelbaum
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469627441
- eISBN:
- 9781469627465
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469627441.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
The Chorographic Commission traversed the country then known as New Granada in the 1850s, led by Italian cartographer Agustín Codazzi. The introduction explains the sources and scholarship that ...
More
The Chorographic Commission traversed the country then known as New Granada in the 1850s, led by Italian cartographer Agustín Codazzi. The introduction explains the sources and scholarship that inform this study, which examines the commission’s maps and illustrations jointly as an integrated body of visual culture. The introduction places the commission in a tumultuous historical context of liberal revolutions, civil wars, partisan divisions, and constitutional revisions. The tenuous young republic lacked both infrastructure and a clearly defined territory. The introduction lays out the importance of race, region, and gender. The book’s central paradox is introduced: Codazzi and the other commissioners, like most of their contemporaries, assumed that a prosperous and harmonious republic required a homogeneous population and a unified national territory. Yet they encountered and depicted not homogeneity but “heterogeneity,” not unity but fragmentation, not pure European ancestry but mixture and variety. Mapping the Country of Regions is an effort to resolve this apparent dissonance, or rather, to understand how these nineteenth-century intellectuals tried to resolve it. They did so by organizing diversity into regional spaces and human types, and by arguing that the nation was in the process of unifying through the emergence of a national race of Granadinos.Less
The Chorographic Commission traversed the country then known as New Granada in the 1850s, led by Italian cartographer Agustín Codazzi. The introduction explains the sources and scholarship that inform this study, which examines the commission’s maps and illustrations jointly as an integrated body of visual culture. The introduction places the commission in a tumultuous historical context of liberal revolutions, civil wars, partisan divisions, and constitutional revisions. The tenuous young republic lacked both infrastructure and a clearly defined territory. The introduction lays out the importance of race, region, and gender. The book’s central paradox is introduced: Codazzi and the other commissioners, like most of their contemporaries, assumed that a prosperous and harmonious republic required a homogeneous population and a unified national territory. Yet they encountered and depicted not homogeneity but “heterogeneity,” not unity but fragmentation, not pure European ancestry but mixture and variety. Mapping the Country of Regions is an effort to resolve this apparent dissonance, or rather, to understand how these nineteenth-century intellectuals tried to resolve it. They did so by organizing diversity into regional spaces and human types, and by arguing that the nation was in the process of unifying through the emergence of a national race of Granadinos.
