Mapping the Amazon: Territory, Identity, and Modernity in the Literatures of Peru and Brazil (1900-1930)

Abstract

My dissertation proposes a comprehensive study of the politics of representing the Amazonian territory in literature and culture. Using the context of the Amazonian rubber boom (1879-1912) and its aftermaths in Peru and Brazil, my research evaluates how the Amazon Basin became the focus of political and sentimental debates, triggering discussions to rethink national identity, ethnicity, sovereignty, and modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Traditionally portrayed as an exotic, primeval land, geographically isolated, and with endless natural resources waiting exploitation by a higher civilizing order, its presence continually frustrated colonizers and investigators who failed to reduce it to a set of manageable meanings. Despite the many books written about the region since its encounter in the sixteenth century to nowadays, the Amazon resists demands to be modern and construed by an imported Western rational. Like the Pampa in Argentina and the Backlands in Brazil, Brazil and Peru's Amazon is a tropical body that calls institutional authority into question.