Eyes on Amazonia: Transnational Perspectives on the Rubber Boom Frontier

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: Transnational Perspectives on the Rubber Boom Frontier is a fascinating exploration how Latin American, European, and US intellectuals imagined and represented the Amazon region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This multi-faceted study, which draws on a range of literary and non-literary texts and visual sources, examines the complex ways that race, gender, representation, 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 backward region in need of the civilizing influence of colonialism and modernization served to legitimize and justify imperial control. Eyes on Amazoniaoperates in cultural geography, ecocriticism, and visual cultural analysis. The diverse and fascinating documents and images examined in Eyes on Amazonia capture the modernizing project of this region at a crucial juncture in its long history: the early twentieth century rubber boom.