Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon analyzes the ways in which the Amazon has been represented in twentieth century cultural production. With contributions by scholars working in Latin America, the US and Europe, Intimate Frontiers reads against the grain commonly held notions about the region -its gigantism, its richness, its exceptionality, among other- choosing to approach these rather from quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The multinational, pluriethnic corpus of texts critically examined here, explores a wide range of cultural artifacts including travelogues, diaries, and novels about the rubber boom genocide, as well as indigenous oral histories, documentary films, and photography about the region. The different voices gathered in this book show that the richness of the Amazon lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness of its histories/stories in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts.

This book studies how the rhetoric of travel introduces different conceptualizations of space and time in scenarios of war during the last decades of the 19th century, in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. By examining accounts of war and travel in the context of the consolidation of state apparatuses in these countries, Uriarte underlines the essential role that war (in connection to empire and capital) has played in the Latin American process of modernization and state formation. In this book, the analysis of British and Latin American travel narratives proves particularly productive in reading the ways in which national spaces are reconfigured, reimagined, and reappropriated by the state apparatus. War turns out to be a central instrument not just for making possible this logic of appropriation, but also for bringing temporal notions such as modernization and progress to spaces that were described - albeit problematically - as being outside of history. The book argues that wars waged against "deserts" (as Patagonia, the sertao, Paraguay, and the Uruguayan countryside were described and imagined) were in fact means of generating empty spaces, real voids that were the condition for new foundations. The study of travel writing is an essential tool for understanding the transformations of space brought by war, and for analyzing in detail the forms and connotations of movement in connection to violence. Uriarte pays particular attention to the effects that witnessing war had on the traveler's identity and on the relation that is established with the oikos or point of departure of their own voyage. Written at the intersection of literary analysis, critical geography, political science, and history, this book will be of interest to those studying Latin American literature, Travel Writing, and neocolonialism and Empire writing.

From the cabinets of wonder of the Renaissance to the souvenir collections of today, selecting, accumulating, and organizing objects are practices that are central to our notions of who we are and what we value. Collecting, both private and institutional, has been instrumental in the consolidation of modern notions of the individual and of the nation, and numerous studies have discussed its complex political, social, economic, anthropological, and psychological implications. However, studies of collecting as practiced in colonized cultures are few, since the role of these cultures has usually been understood as that of purveyors of objects for the metropolitan collector. Collecting from the Margins: Material Culture in a Latin American Context seeks to counter the historical understanding of collecting that posits the metropolis as collecting subject and the colonial or postcolonial society as supplier of collectible objects by asking instead how collecting has been practiced and understood in Latin America. Has collecting been viewed or portrayed differently in a Latin American context? Does the act of collecting, when viewed from a Latin American perspective, unsettle the way we have become accustomed to think about it? What differences, if any, arise in the activity of collecting in colonized or previously colonial societies? Spanning the period after the independence wars until the 1980s, this collection of ten essays addresses a broad range of examples of collecting practices in Latin America. Collecting during the nineteenth century is addressed in discussions of the creation of the first national museums of Argentina and Colombia in the post-independence period, as well as in analyses of the private collections of modernistas such as Enrique Gomez Carrillo, Ruben Dario, Jose Asuncion Silva, and Delmira Agustini at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The practice of collecting in the twentieth century is discussed in analyses of the self-described revolutionary practices of Oswald de Andrade, Augusto de Campos and the films of Ruy Guerra, as well as the polemical collections of Pablo Neruda, and the unsettling collections portrayed in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

From the cabinets of wonder of the Renaissance to the souvenir collections of today, selecting, accumulating, and organizing objects are practices that are central to our notions of who we are and what we value. Collecting, both private and institutional, has been instrumental in the consolidation of modern notions of the individual and of the nation, and numerous studies have discussed its complex political, social, economic, anthropological, and psychological implications. However, studies of collecting as practiced in colonized cultures are few, since the role of these cultures has usually been understood as that of purveyors of objects for the metropolitan collector. Collecting from the Margins: Material Culture in a Latin American Context seeks to counter the historical understanding of collecting that posits the metropolis as collecting subject and the colonial or postcolonial society as supplier of collectible objects by asking instead how collecting has been practiced and understood in Latin America. Has collecting been viewed or portrayed differently in a Latin American context? Does the act of collecting, when viewed from a Latin American perspective, unsettle the way we have become accustomed to think about it? What differences, if any, arise in the activity of collecting in colonized or previously colonial societies? Spanning the period after the independence wars until the 1980s, this collection of ten essays addresses a broad range of examples of collecting practices in Latin America. Collecting during the nineteenth century is addressed in discussions of the creation of the first national museums of Argentina and Colombia in the post-independence period, as well as in analyses of the private collections of modernistas such as Enrique Gomez Carrillo, Ruben Dario, Jose Asuncion Silva, and Delmira Agustini at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The practice of collecting in the twentieth century is discussed in analyses of the self-described revolutionary practices of Oswald de Andrade, Augusto de Campos and the films of Ruy Guerra, as well as the polemical collections of Pablo Neruda, and the unsettling collections portrayed in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Latin American Literature in Transition 1870-1930 examines how the circulation of goods, people, and ideas permeated every aspect of the continent's cultural production at the end of the nineteenth century. It analyzes the ways in which rapidly transforming technological and labour conditions contributed to forging new intellectual networks, exploring innovative forms of knowledge, and reimagining the material and immaterial worlds. This volume shows the new directions in turn-of-the-century scholarship that developed over the last two decades by investigating how the experience of capitalism produced an array of works that deal with primitive accumulation, transnational crossings, and an emerging technological and material reality in diverse geographies and a variety of cultural forms. Essays provide a novel understanding of the period as they discuss the ways in which particular commodities, intellectual networks, popular uprisings, materialities, and non-metropolitan locations redefined cultural production at a time when the place of Latin America in global affairs was significantly transformed.

This book studies how the rhetoric of travel introduces different conceptualizations of space and time in scenarios of war during the last decades of the 19th century, in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. By examining accounts of war and travel in the context of the consolidation of state apparatuses in these countries, Uriarte underlines the essential role that war (in connection to empire and capital) has played in the Latin American process of modernization and state formation. In this book, the analysis of British and Latin American travel narratives proves particularly productive in reading the ways in which national spaces are reconfigured, reimagined, and reappropriated by the state apparatus. War turns out to be a central instrument not just for making possible this logic of appropriation, but also for bringing temporal notions such as modernization and progress to spaces that were described - albeit problematically - as being outside of history. The book argues that wars waged against "deserts" (as Patagonia, the sertao, Paraguay, and the Uruguayan countryside were described and imagined) were in fact means of generating empty spaces, real voids that were the condition for new foundations. The study of travel writing is an essential tool for understanding the transformations of space brought by war, and for analyzing in detail the forms and connotations of movement in connection to violence. Uriarte pays particular attention to the effects that witnessing war had on the traveler's identity and on the relation that is established with the oikos or point of departure of their own voyage. Written at the intersection of literary analysis, critical geography, political science, and history, this book will be of interest to those studying Latin American literature, Travel Writing, and neocolonialism and Empire writing.

Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon analyzes the ways in which the Amazon has been represented in twentieth century cultural production. With contributions by scholars working in Latin America, the US and Europe, Intimate Frontiers reads against the grain commonly held notions about the region -its gigantism, its richness, its exceptionality, among other- choosing to approach these rather from quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The multinational, pluriethnic corpus of texts critically examined here, explores a wide range of cultural artifacts including travelogues, diaries, and novels about the rubber boom genocide, as well as indigenous oral histories, documentary films, and photography about the region. The different voices gathered in this book show that the richness of the Amazon lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness of its histories/stories in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts.