Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire

Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire PDF Author: Felix Driver
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226164721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This volume of 11 illustrated essays from a wide range of disciplines explores images of the tropical world - paintings, maps, botanical drawings, diagrams, texts and photographs - produced by European and American travellers over the past three centuries.

Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire

Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire PDF Author: Felix Driver
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226164721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume of 11 illustrated essays from a wide range of disciplines explores images of the tropical world - paintings, maps, botanical drawings, diagrams, texts and photographs - produced by European and American travellers over the past three centuries.

Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire

Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire PDF Author: Felix Driver
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226164705
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The contrast between the temperate and the tropical is one of the most enduring themes in the history of the Western geographical imagination. Caught between the demands of experience and representation, documentation and fantasy, travelers in the tropics have often treated tropical nature as a foil to the temperate, to all that is civilized, modest, and enlightened. Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire explores images of the tropical world—maps, paintings, botanical drawings, photographs, diagrams, and texts—produced by European and American travelers over the past three centuries. Bringing together a group of distinguished contributors from disciplines across the arts and humanities, this volume contains eleven beautifully illustrated essays—arranged in three sections devoted to voyages, mappings, and sites—that consider the ways that tropical places were encountered, experienced, and represented in visual form. Covering a wide range of tropical sites in the Pacific, South Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the book will appeal to a broad readership: scholars of postcolonial studies, art history, literature, imperial history, history of science, geography, and anthropology.

The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies

The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies PDF Author: Peter Howard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136220607
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 513

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Book Description
Landscape is a vital, synergistic concept which opens up ways of thinking about many of the problems which beset our contemporary world, such as climate change, social alienation, environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity and destruction of heritage. As a concept, landscape does not respect disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, many academic disciplines have found the concept so important, it has been used as a qualifier that delineates whole sub-disciplines: landscape ecology, landscape planning, landscape archaeology, and so forth. In other cases, landscape studies progress under a broader banner, such as heritage studies or cultural geography. Yet it does not always mean the same thing in all of these contexts. The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies offers the first comprehensive attempt to explore research directions into the many uses and meanings of ‘landscape’. The Companion contains thirty-nine original contributions from leading scholars within the field, which have been divided into four parts: Experiencing Landscape; Landscape Culture and Heritage; Landscape, Society and Justice; and Design and Planning for Landscape. Topics covered range from phenomenological approaches to landscape, to the consideration of landscape as a repository of human culture; from ideas of identity and belonging, to issues of power and hegemony; and from discussions of participatory planning and design to the call for new imaginaries in a time of global and environmental crisis. Each contribution explores the future development of different conceptual and theoretical approaches, as well as recent empirical contributions to knowledge and understanding. Collectively, they encourage dialogue across disciplinary barriers and reflection upon the implications of research findings for local, national and international policy in relation to landscape. This Companion provides up-to-date critical reviews of state of the art perspectives across this multifaceted field, embracing disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, cultural studies, geography, landscape planning, landscape architecture, countryside management, forestry, heritage studies, ecology, and fine art. It serves as an invaluable point of reference for scholars, researchers and graduate students alike, engaging in the field of landscape studies.

Banana Cowboys

Banana Cowboys PDF Author: James W. Martin
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826359426
Category : Banana trade
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Introduction: ways of living, ways of knowing -- From scramblers for fruit to banana empire, 1870-1930 -- Tropical vexations -- Corporate welfarism meets the tropics -- Wandering foci of infection -- Becoming banana cowboys -- Serving science on the side -- Conclusion

New Orleans in the Atlantic World

New Orleans in the Atlantic World PDF Author: William Boelhower
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317988442
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The thematic project ‘New Orleans in the Atlantic World’ was planned immediately after hurricane Katrina and focuses on what meteorologists have always known: the city’s identity and destiny belong to the broader Caribbean and Atlantic worlds as perhaps no other American city does. Balanced precariously between land and sea, the city’s geohistory has always interwoven diverse cultures, languages, peoples, and economies. Only with the rise of the new Atlantic Studies matrix, however, have scholars been able to fully appreciate this complex history from a multi-disciplinary, multilingual and multi-scaled perspectivism. In this book, historians, geographers, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars bring to light the atlanticist vocation of New Orleans, and in doing so they also help to define the new field of Atlantic Studies. This book was published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

Trading Environments

Trading Environments PDF Author: Gordon M. Winder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317391624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This volume examines dynamic interactions between the calculative and speculative practices of commerce and the fruitfulness, variability, materiality, liveliness and risks of nature. It does so in diverse environments caught up in new trading relationships forged on and through frontiers for agriculture, forestry, mining and fishing. Historical resource frontiers are understood in terms of commercial knowledge systems organized as projects to transform landscapes and environments. The book asks: how were environments traded, and with what environmental and landscape consequences? How have environments been engineered, standardized and transformed within past trading systems? What have been the successes and failures of economic knowledge in dealing with resource production in complex environments? It considers cases from northern Europe, North and South America, Central Africa and New Zealand in the period between 1750 and 1990, and the contributors reflect on the effects of transnational commodity chains, competing economic knowledge systems, environmental ignorance and learning, and resource exploitation. In each case they identify tensions, blind spots, and environmental learning that plagued commercial projects on frontiers.

American Tropics

American Tropics PDF Author: Megan Raby
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469635615
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, Megan Raby details how ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research. From these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American "tropical biologists" developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity. Considering U.S. biological fieldwork from the era of the Spanish-American War through the anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this study combines the history of science, environmental history, and the history of U.S.–Caribbean and Latin American relations. In doing so, Raby sheds new light on the origins of contemporary scientific and environmentalist thought and brings to the forefront a surprisingly neglected history of twentieth-century U.S. science and empire.

Images of the Tropics

Images of the Tropics PDF Author: Susie Protschky
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004253602
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Images of the Tropics critically examines Dutch colonial culture in the Netherlands Indies through the prism of landscape art. Susie Protschky contends that visual representations of nature and landscape were core elements of how Europeans understood the tropics, justified their territorial claims in the region, and understood their place both in imperial Europe and in colonized Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her book thus makes a significant contribution to studies of empire, art and environment, as well as to histories of Indonesia and Europe. Surveying a rich visual culture developed over a period of some 350 years of Dutch colonial engagement with Indonesia Susie Protschky demonstrates how views of the archipelago’s environment were far from simple topographical souvenirs. Rather, this book reveals how images of the tropics visually articulated colonial attempts to legitimize and historicize what were in fact continually changing and contested claims to Dutch territorial sovereignty in the Indies. Further, colonial images of nature were routinely inflected with diverse cultural preoccupations, among them the constitution of gender, class and racial boundaries in Indies society; the tenor of sexual mores in the tropics; and the political role of religion in the archipelago. Landscape art thus indexed colonial views on a range of pressing social and political concerns.

Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture

Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture PDF Author: Justin D. Edwards
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317425774
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Tropical Gothic examines Gothic within a specific geographical area of ‘the South’ of the Americas. In so doing, we structure the book around geographical coordinates (from North to South) and move between various national traditions of the gothic (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, etc) alongside regional manifestations of the Gothic (the US south and the Caribbean) as well as transnational movements of the Gothic within the Americas. The reflections on national traditions of the Gothic in this volume add to the critical body of literature on specific languages or particular nations, such as Scottish Gothic, American Gothic, Canadian Gothic, German Gothic, Kiwi Gothic, etc. This is significant because, while the Southern Gothic in the US has been thoroughly explored, there is a gap in the critical literature about the Gothic in the larger context of region of ‘the South’ in the Americas. This volume does not pretend to be a comprehensive examination of tropical Gothic in the Americas; rather, it pinpoints a variety of locations where this form of the Gothic emerges. In so doing, the transnational interventions of the Gothic in this book read the flows of Gothic forms across borders and geographical regions to tease out the complexities of Gothic cultural production within cultural and linguistic translations. Tropical Gothic includes, but is by no means limited to, a reflection on a region where European colonial powers fought intensively against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources. In other cases, the vast populations of African slaves were transported, endowing these regions with a cultural inheritance that all the nations involved are still trying to comprehend. The volume reflects on how these histories influence the Gothic in this region.

Visual Voyages

Visual Voyages PDF Author: Daniela Bleichmar
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300224028
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
An unprecedented visual exploration of the intertwined histories of art and science, of the old world and the new From the voyages of Christopher Columbus to those of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, the depiction of the natural world played a central role in shaping how people on both sides of the Atlantic understood and imaged the region we now know as Latin America. Nature provided incentives for exploration, commodities for trade, specimens for scientific investigation, and manifestations of divine forces. It also yielded a rich trove of representations, created both by natives to the region and visitors, which are the subject of this lushly illustrated book. Author Daniela Bleichmar shows that these images were not only works of art but also instruments for the production of knowledge, with scientific, social, and political repercussions. Early depictions of Latin American nature introduced European audiences to native medicines and religious practices. By the 17th century, revelatory accounts of tobacco, chocolate, and cochineal reshaped science, trade, and empire around the globe. In the 18th and 19th centuries, collections and scientific expeditions produced both patriotic and imperial visions of Latin America. Through an interdisciplinary examination of more than 150 maps, illustrated manuscripts, still lifes, and landscape paintings spanning four hundred years, Visual Voyages establishes Latin America as a critical site for scientific and artistic exploration, affirming that region's transformation and the transformation of Europe as vitally connected histories.