Eyes on Amazonia - by Jessica Carey-Webb

About the Book

A critical exploration of how rubber boom-era Amazonia has been represented throughout history

Book Synopsis

The Amazon extends across nine countries, encompasses forty percent of South America, and hosts four European languages and more than three hundred Indigenous languages and cultures. Eyes on Amazonia is a fascinating exploration of how Latin American, European, and US intellectuals imagined and represented the Amazon region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This multifaceted study, which draws on a range of literary and nonliterary texts and visual sources, examines the complex ways that race, gender, mobility, empire, modernity, and personal identity have indelibly shaped how the region was and is seen. In doing so, the book argues that representations of the Amazon as a region in need of the civilizing influence of colonialism and modernization served to legitimize and justify imperial control.

Eyes on Amazonia operates in cultural geography, ecocriticism, and visual cultural analysis. The diverse and intriguing documents and images examined in this book capture the modernizing project of this region at a crucial juncture in its long history: the early twentieth-century rubber boom.

Review Quotes

"It is no coincidence that the title of Eyes on Amazonia harkens back to Mary Louise Pratt's groundbreaking study on travel writing. This richly researched and beautifully written book illuminates how travelers inscribed empire onto the Amazon River basin through a multilingual corpus that includes works by Henri and Octavie Coudreau, Teddy Roosevelt, Cândido Rondon, Euclides da Cunha, Mário de Andrade, Theodore Koch-Grünberg, and Richard Evans Schultes. With fresh considerations of the intersections of race, gender, nationality, and coloniality, the analysis insightfully probes the relationship between imperialism and individual positionality that worked in tandem to create a global vision of the region as an extractive zone."
--Amanda M. Smith, author of Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom

About the Author

Jessica Carey-Webb is an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico.