Picturing Tropical Nature (Picturing History)

Stepan, Nancy Leys

ISBN 10: 1861890842 / ISBN 13: 9781861890849

Published by Reaktion Books, 2001

About this Item

In this work, Nancy Stepan explores the ways in which the Tropics, in particular tropical nature, places, animals and people, were imagined and presented in European culture from the 19th century on. Series: Picturing History. Num Pages: 256 pages, 89 illustrations. BIC Classification: 1KLC; 1KLS; 3JH; 3JJ; AGN; HBTB; JFC; RGBL; WN. Category: (G) General (US: Trade); (P) Professional & Scholarly; (UP) Postgraduate; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 240 x 165. Weight in Grams: 773. 2001. First Edition. hardcover. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # 9781861890849

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Picturing Tropical Nature (Picturing History)
• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1861890842
• ISBN 13: 9781861890849
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Whether as sublime landscape, malignant wilderness, or a site for environmental conflicts and eco-tourism, tropical nature is to a great extent an American and European imaginative construct, conveyed in literature, travel writing, drawings, paintings, photographs, and diagrams. These images are central to Nancy Leys Stepan's view that a critical examination of the "tropicalization of nature" can remedy some of the most persistent misrepresentations of the region and its peoples.Picturing Tropical Nature reflects on the work of several nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists and artists, including Alexander von Humboldt, Alfred Russel Wallace, Louis Agassiz, Sir Patrick Manson, and Margaret Mee. Their careers illuminate several aspects of science and art in the making of tropical pictures; the commercial and cultural boom in things tropical in the modern period; photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races; anti-tropicalism and its role in an emerging environmentalist sensibility; and visual depictions of disease in the new tropical medicine. Essential to Stepan's analysis are the responses to European projections of artists, scientists, and intellectuals living in tropical regions. She examines the long-standing Brazilian fantasy of the tropics as a racial democracy, and offers an evaluation of the impact of tropical plants and European conceptions of the jungle on the anti-mimetic, modernist aesthetics of the brilliant landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx. In a fascinating inquiry into the aesthetic and political, Stepan demonstrates the conflicts over meaning that have shaped the emergence of the tropics, and in doing so questions the nature of representation itself.

About the Author

Nancy Leys Stepan is Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. She is the author of Eradication, "The Hour of Eugenics": Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America and Picturing Tropical Nature, all from Cornell.