Filming Modernity in the Tropics: The Amazon, Walt Disney, and the Antecedents of Modernization Theory

Through an analysis of the documentary film The Amazon Awakens (1944) this essay posits the use of the tenets of modernization theory in the film’s representation of the Amazon as a way to invent it as a region ripe for development as long as the necessary technological and financial resources become available. In contrast to earlier “civilizing missions” that characterized the heyday of colonialism and neo-colonialism when imperial powers emphasized the need to inculcate “backward” peoples with the rudiments of modern culture and civilization, The Amazon Awakens portrays a society poised to take immediate advantage of the technology and capital the US is eager to provide. To be sure, the Amazon had to be “awakened,” and had to throw off old habits and attitudes, but the film portrays the region’s inhabitants as predisposed to do precisely that. Finally, Weinstein focuses on the elements that the movie decides to include (local industry) and exclude (ecology and indigenous rights), to argue these decisions are systematic and serve to advance and enhance a narrative of Amazonian (natural and human) history that is coherent with the film’s modernization discourse.

Nostalgia and Mourning in Milton Hatoum’s Órfãos do Eldorado

This essay explores the long-term implications of sexualized representations of El Dorado. Rogers discusses how Brazilian novelist Milton Hatoum’s Órfãos do Eldorado (Orphans of Eldorado, 2008) contrasts the colonial European depiction of Amazonia as a virgin land of promise with the present exploitation of the region. Her article shows how Hatoum uses the deflowering of Amazonian women as a metaphor for the destruction of an ostensibly virgin territory. The novelist, Rogers argues, employs an ironic nostalgia for the promises of El Dorado as an aesthetic stance in order to debunk the myth of Amazonia as an untouched site of riches. The novel, thus, re-inscribes the search for the utopian city of gold into contemporary literature by displacing the concept of an untapped wilderness of riches onto the virginal bodies of Amazonian women. Hatoum uses the ravaged indigenous female as a metaphor for the increasing urbanization and commodification of the wilderness. Yet rather than exhibiting an uncomplicated nostalgia for a previous historical time, Rogers argues, Orphans of Eldorado conveys a nostalgia for what is now known to be an illusion.

The Western ‘Baptism’ of Yurupary: Reception and Rewritings of an Amazonian Foundational Myth

The myth of the Yurupary [yërëparí] is the foundational story of a patriarchal Amazonian religious system, and was widely spread and highly diversified among the language families of the Tupí-Guaraní, Tukano and Arawak from the Vaupés River in the northeast Amazon. In the midst of both Missionary expansion in the region at the end of the 19th century and capitalist penetration, the Italian jurist, geographer and explorer Ermanno Stradelli published an account of the Yurupary entitled “Leggenda dell’ Jurupary” (1890). In this essay Bolte visibilizes the political, literary and cultural mediations between the myth —inaccessible in its “pure” form— and the reappropriation it suffered by missionaries and local and European travellers during the 19th century. In view of the highly debatable nature of a historical-literary event such as that of a non-Western story being put into writing by European hands, Bolte proposes that we should systematically accept that we have no way of reaching the Yurupary story in its original form, prior to its Westernization. We should also bear in mind that Stradelli’s version is a mere selection of a great variety of episodes from different oral stories, and even different cycles of Amazonian myths.

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Cauchero of the Amazonian Rubber Groves

This essay explores the iconic figure of the "rubber baron," during the rubber boom era (1890-1920) in the Amazon. Portrayed by travelers and fiction writer as Janus-faced, the rubber baron can be both elegant and brutal. Historical names of Rubber Barons all exemplify the double-sided nature of this type of individual. In this essay the author argues that, mirroring personal and cultural attributes of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s notion of the "homem cordial”, the rubber baron evades simple characterizations, which makes him a unique social type and a sinister by-product of colonization in Latin America. Liminal in his ability to suspend his brutality, the rubber baron can become a gentleman and then rapidly return to his original barbaric state. This allows him, for example, to traffic between the Amazonian rainforest and Paris with ease, until all his wealth is wasted and he is then forced to return to his rubber estate, once again, to re-build his fortune. Finally, the essay posits that the ambiguous character epitomizes the rubber industry. By wearing different masks the rubber baron conceals from the "civilized world" the horrors of slavery, rape, torture, and mass murder that were perpetrated in Amazonia's hellish gardens of rubber.

‘Splendid testemunhos’: Documenting Atrocities, Bodies, and Desire in Roger Casement’s Black Diaries

This essay performs an analysis of the highly controversial and rarely studied personal diaries of this Irish diplomat and traveler. Within the Black Diaries it is possible to find the description of bodies in intense suffering, of dismemberments, torture, and death, alongside descriptions of beautiful near-perfect bodies that provide the narrator with moments of intense pleasure. These are, to a certain extent, the same bodies; bodies of indigenous peoples living in the Casa Arana’s reign of terror. Reconciling the simultaneity of bodily pain and pleasure in this writing is one of the centers of Uriarte’s analysis, which links the Black Diaries to the more traditional utopian discourse about Amazonia of which the myths of El Dorado ––and the violence the promise of untapped, virginal riches provoked––are a significant part.

Contested Frontiers: Territory and Power in Euclides da Cunha’s Amazonian Texts

This essay explores the political and discursive mechanisms Brazilian writer Da Cunha employs to build a historical past for Brazil in the Amazon, while simultaneously discrediting Bolivia and Peru’s territorial demands on the Acre region in Amazonia. Building his argument on boundary-making history, cartographical data, and nationalistic feelings, Torres argues that Da Cunha crafts a compelling case for Brazil’s rightful purchase of Acre and expansion of its frontiers in two ways. Firstly, Da Cunha identifies the value of the Amazon, whether as a political, economic, or even symbolic capital that can be utilized to lay the grounds for a diplomatic defense, and therefore lawfulness of their territorial claims. Secondly, Torres goes on to argue that Da Cunha is aware of the decisive nature of his mission for the mapping of a terrain visited only by local Indians and Peruvian rubber tappers. This consciousness leads him to compose a history for Brazil in the Amazon with the intention of nationalizing the territory; in other words, to turn an abstract and alien place into one concrete narrative in which the uprooted nation is reunited and homogenized under a common and shared identity.

Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon

The introduction to the book explains the theoretical and historical arguments that articulate the book. Thus, the introduction is composed of four parts that seek to establish lines of reading the different contributions received. We argue that it is necessary to adopt a new perspective to read the Amazon region, in which local, minimal stories / histories are the focus of the analysis. This is one of the connotations that intimacy adopts in our book. The introduction, in fact, explains at length how these different meanings of the intimate (the local, the popular, the homely, the quotidian, and forms of friendship and of sexual intimacies) are presented in the articles reunited in the volume.

The Politics of Vegetating in Arturo Burga Freitas’s Mal de gente

This essay examines the persistent trope of ‘tropical degeneration’ in Arturo Burga Freitas’s Mal de gente (1943). Set in the Peruvian Amazon, the novel is the story of a young European, Edmund Rice, who, like a number of protagonists of the contemporaneous Spanish American novela de la selva, travels to the region for the purposes of work and ends up settling permanently in the jungle. The natural world depicted in Burga Freitas’s book is a zone of exploitation, characterised by the European plundering of tropical products, chiefly rubber. Yet countering this assessment of nature is the native Amazonian view of the jungle as an animate force, capable of enchanting outsiders and reducing them to a kind of vegetable state. This article explores how the idea of ‘going native’ is redefined and redeployed in Mal de gente to counter discourses of nature as an economic resource. Drawing on the work of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, among others, this essay shows that, far from being a negative condition, the ‘degeneration’ of Burga Frieta’s protagonist is a corrective to the over-exploitation of the Amazon and a recognition of the profound interconnectedness of man and the natural world.

Photography, Inoperative Ethnography, Naturalism: On Sharon Lockhart’s Amazon Project

This essay aims to examine the photographic work carried out by American artist Sharon Lockhart over the course of two anthropological expeditions to the Brazilian Amazon in the 1990s. This work is comprised of two sets of photographs, taken among rural communities of the Aripuaná River and the Apeú-Salvador Island respectively, and a short film shot in the Manaus Opera House. By focusing primarily on the group of photographs titled Interview Locations/ Family Photographs —pictures of empty “interview locations” produced right after the interaction with local informants, and family pictures belonging to the interviewees— the author explores Lockhart’s photography as an original intervention into the historic imaginary that constructed the Amazon as a purely natural space destined to either await or resist cultural and civilizing inscriptions.

Malarial Philosophy: The Modernista Amazonia of Mário de Andrade

This article studies the region’s sanitary conditions as portrayed in scientist Carlos Chagas’ account as a way to better understand writer Mário de Andrade’s 1927 chronicles, published posthumously as O turista aprendiz (The Apprentice Tourist), in which -quite originally- he understands malaria as a vehicle for creativity. The authors read Chagas’ medical perspective as a way of better approaching the kind of operations that Mário de Andrade performs, and which undermine the discourse of science that sees malaria as an endemic problem to be solved. The authors distinguish the way in which Mário and Brazilian modernismo approached the Amazon from previous canonical descriptions, mainly the highly influential one of Euclides da Cunha. In his playful descriptions of the region and its inhabitants, Mário de Andrade sees malaria as a different form of relating to space and knowledge, as a state of mind prone to contemplation and productive immobility.