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A Geography of Hard Times
This fascinating glimpse into South America's past focuses on the works of four European voyagers who came to South America and left a legacy of travel writing in their wake: José Celestino Mutis, a Spanish botanist and doctor; Alexander von Humboldt, a German geographer; Maria Graham, a British historian; and Flora Tristán, a French feminist and labor activist whose father was Peruvian. Each took on his or her voyage as a personal endeavor, and collectively their travels covered the Andes from its northern traces in Venezuela to the southern heights of Chile and Arequipa. Their writing contributed to the construction of a complex map of the Andes in which many levels of physical and social geography may be read. By analyzing the travelers' narratives, illustrations, and maps, Ángela Pérez-Mejía unravels the rich complexities of the colonial travel experience, explores its impact on both the object of description and the traveler's subjectivity, and the collective readership seeking a discourse of nationhood.
Crafting a Republic for the World
In the wake of independence, Spanish American leaders perceived the colonial past as looming over their present. Crafting a Republic for the World examines how the vibrant postcolonial public sphere in Colombia invented narratives of the Spanish “colonial legacy.” Those supposed legacies included a lack of effective geographic knowledge, blockages to a circulatory political economy, existing patterns of land tenure, entrenched inequalities, and ignorance among popular sectors. At times collaboratively, and at times combatively, Colombian leaders tackled these “colonial” legacies to forge a republic in a hostile world of monarchies and empires. The highly partisan, yet uniformly repub...
A Gringa in Bogotá
To many foreigners, Colombia is a nightmare of drugs and violence. Yet normal life goes on there, and, in Bogotá, it's even possible to forget that war still ravages the countryside. This paradox of perceptions—outsiders' fears versus insiders' realities—drew June Carolyn Erlick back to Bogotá for a year's stay in 2005. She wanted to understand how the city she first came to love in 1975 has made such strides toward building a peaceful civil society in the midst of ongoing violence. The complex reality she found comes to life in this compelling memoir. Erlick creates her portrait of Bogotá through a series of vivid vignettes that cover many aspects of city life. As an experienced jour...
The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing
Travel writing has always been intimately linked with the construction of American identity. Occupying the space between fact and fiction, it exposes cultural fault lines and reveals the changing desires and anxieties of both the traveller and the reading public. These specially-commissioned essays trace the journeys taken by writers from the pre-revolutionary period right up to the present. They examine a wide range of responses to the problems posed by landscapes found both at home and abroad, from the Mississippi and the Southwest to Europe and the Holy Land. Throughout, the contributors focus on the role played by travel writing in the definition and formulation of national identity, and consider the experiences of minority writers as well as canonical authors. This Companion forms an invaluable guide for students approaching this new, important and exciting subject for the first time.
Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America
This book takes a new approach to travel writing about Latin America by examining ‘domestic’ journey narratives that have been produced by travellers from the continent itself and largely in Spanish. Historically, travel writing about Latin America has been written primarily from the perspective of the foreign, often European, traveller. As such, and following the large influx of military, scientific, and leisure travellers in the region since its colonisation, much of this foreign travel writing has depicted the continent in predominantly exoticist and/or imperialist terms. Lindsay explores how Latin American travellers have conceived and constructed narratives about travel at home and ...
Buccaneers and Privateers
In the late seventeenth century, Spain dominated the Caribbean and Central and South America, establishing colonies, mining gold and silver, and gathering riches from Asia for transportation back to Europe. Seeking to disrupt Spain's nearly unchecked empire-building and siphon off some of their wealth, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British adventurers--both legitimate and illegitimate--led numerous expeditions into the Caribbean and the Pacific. Many voyagers wrote accounts of their exploits, captivating readers with their tales of exotic places, shocking hardships and cruelties, and daring engagements with national enemies. Widely distributed and read, buccaneering and privateering narratives contributed significantly to England's imaginative, literary rendering of the Americas in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and they provided a venue for public dialogue about sea rovers and their position within empire. This book takes as its subject the literary and rhetorical construction of voyagers and their histories, and by extension, the representation of English imperialism in popular sea-voyage narratives of the period.
Scripted Geographies
This study offers the first book-length exploration of travel narratives by nineteenth-century Spanish authors. Focusing on texts produced during a crucial period in the development of Spain's modern consciousness at the close of its imperial age, Scripted Geographies shows how writers' strategies of travel representation reflected and participated in this process of cultural transformation. The first two chapters, devoted to travel within Europe, explore constructions of Spain's sometimes problematic encounter with Western society and traditions. The final chapters shift to orientalist travel, allowing reflection on how Spanish renderings of the non-Western other intersect with patterns found in the better-known corpus of orientalist literature produced in then-ascendant imperial powers like Britain and France. These textual constructions of cultural difference reflect at a profound level their authors' preoccupations and hopes for Spain, as well as their strong awareness of both the powers and dangers inherent in the process of representing real world experience via language. Professor of Spanish at the University of Vermont.
Darwin in Atlantic Cultures
This collection is an interdisciplinary edited volume that examines the circulation of Darwinian ideas in the Atlantic space as they impacted systems of Western thought and culture. Specifically, the book explores the influence of the principle tenets of Darwinism -- such as the theory of evolution, the ape-man theory of human origins, and the principle of sexual selection -- on established transatlantic intellectual traditions and cultural practices. In doing so, it pays particular attention to how Darwinism reconfigured discourses on race, gender, and sexuality in a transnational context. Covering the period from the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) to 1933, when the Nazis (Nati...
Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies
Between 1810 and 1825, 7,000 English, Scottish and Irish mercenaries sailed to Gran Colombia to fight against Spanish colonial rule under the rebel forces of Simón Bolívar. Their motives were mixed. Some travelled for money, others travelled for honour. Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies explores the lives of these men – their encounters with other soldiers, indigenous people, local women and slaves – as recounted in documents that fall outside the usual remit of military, political and economic historians. Matthew Brown considers the social and cultural aspects of the presence of these ‘foreigners’, and shows how they were an essential part of the revolution which eventually gave South America its freedom. Using archival research from England, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia, Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies clearly shows the active role that these mercenaries, informal outriders of the British Empire, played in the creation of Latin America as we know it today.
Mapping Latin America
For many, a map is nothing more than a tool used to determine the location or distribution of something—a country, a city, or a natural resource. But maps reveal much more: to really read a map means to examine what it shows and what it doesn’t, and to ask who made it, why, and for whom. The contributors to this new volume ask these sorts of questions about maps of Latin America, and in doing so illuminate the ways cartography has helped to shape this region from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. In Mapping Latin America,Jordana Dym and Karl Offen bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to examine and interpret more than five centuries of Latin American maps.Individual chapte...
