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Book Review
| Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire. Edited by Felix Driver and Luciana Martins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xii + 279 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. $25.00.
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| Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire is an excellent volume of eleven essays that makes a lasting contribution to the history and geography of the tropics. Editors Felix Driver and Luciana Martins characterize the volume as "an opportunity to reconsider (historical) approaches to the visual inventory of tropical travel and the variety of interpretative strategies it allows" (p. 8). It centers on how European and American travelers experienced tropical places in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how those tropical images were shaped by historical geographies within and beyond the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. |
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Although at first glance the individual essays seem disjointed, the editors tie them together nicely in their introductory essay, identifying three main themes that weave coherence throughout the volume: voyages, mappings, and sites. "Voyages" centers on the role of European traveling artists and scientists in representing the tropics. Three essays succeed admirably in answering the following question: How do traveling and being in the tropics affect one's knowledge of the tropics? Claudio Greppi's "On the Spot" highlights traveling artist William Hodges, whose voyages to India influenced Alexander von Humboldt's tropical visions. Michael Dettelbach's essay "Stimulations of Travel" explores Humboldt's discourse on the tropics that entangles an Enlightenment culture of sensibility to tropical landscapes. "The Struggle for Luxuriance" by Martins and Driver focuses on naturalist William Burchell's efforts to assemble visual representations and scientific evidence of a luxuriant nature during his travels to Africa and Brazil. |
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In "Mappings," three essays consider how the diversity of the tropical landscape has been mapped in terms of comparison and circulation, and in terms of scientific knowledge and enlightenment. Peter Hulme's "Dominica and Tahiti" narrates how these two islands became comparably similar tropical worlds "in between savage life and civilization life," thanks to the increasing circulation of English travelers and scientific artifacts in the eighteenth century (p. 85). Starr Douglas and Felix Driver's "Imagining the Tropical Colony" examines how naturalist Henry Smeathman's sketches of termite colonies in Sierra Leone provided a picturesque and, at the same time, topographic map of tropical nature. D. Graham Burnett's biographical account of the American lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury's "Sea of Fire" shows how Maury's scientific plotting of sperm whale migration also mapped the tropical waters in terms of their oceanic and atmospheric circulation. |
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In "Sites," three essays present how geographical regions and sites "become articulated with particular concerns about the aspects of tropicality" (p. 19). David Arnold's "Envisioning the Tropics" expertly considers naturalist Joseph Hooker's contribution to understanding the tropics, particularly the inclusion of the Himalaya as a region that was not "in the tropics and yet paradoxically possessed vegetation of a 'tropical character'" (p. 139). In "Eyeing Samoa," Leonard Bell "questions ... the complexities of contested occupation of space" by analyzing a series of impressive photographs of Samoa by European photographers (p. 171). "Returning Fears" by Rod Edmond repositions leprosy and metropolitan Europe within the discourse of "tropical medicine" and tropicality. The volume closes with "Tropic and Tropicality" by Denis Cosgrove, an insightful essay discussing the historicity of the terms tropical and tropicality. |
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This volume expands the debate on tropicality (and to some extent, Orientalism) by using a perspective that questions the role of the embodied experience of European and American travelers in the creation of visual representations of the tropical world. Much would have been gained by constructs of the tropics. For example, Japanese depictions of the South Seas and Micronesia as a tropical world in Mark Peattie's Nan'Yo: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945 (Hawaii, 1989) could have been included to illustrate Eastern visions of the tropics. |
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These essays bring to the debate elegant and insightful writings and high quality visual materials that illustrate the unevenness of tropical knowledge. Several are suitable for use in introductory courses, while the entire volume is more appropriate for graduate level. This volume should be a mandatory companion to Nancy Stepan's Picturing Tropical Nature (Cornell, 2001) and David Arnold's The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford: 1996) for those interested in tropicality and visualizations of the tropics in terms of the picturesque and the pathogenic. |
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Renata Marson Teixeira de Andrade-Downs lectures on the environmental history of Latin America and the Caribbean at the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California at Berkeley and is currently preparing a manuscript on the subject of culture, nature, and power in northeast Brazil since colonial times. |
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