Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire

Edited by Felix Driver and Luciana Martins

Cloth $70.00 ISBN: 9780226164717 Published October 2005

Paper $30.00 ISBN: 9780226164724 Published October 2005

E-book $7.00 to $30.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226164700 Published November 2010

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.

Review Quotes
Contents

“Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire is wonderfully informative and methodologically inspiring. The deep but ambiguous connections between travel, knowledge, art, and geography are revealed with a remarkable combination of focused scholarship and broad conceptual sweep. This book is a vindication of the cross-disciplinary imagination.”—Nicholas Thomas, Goldsmiths College, University of London

“Richly evidenced and subtly argued, Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire consists of strikingly original case studies powerfully framed with an introduction and afterword which navigate broader questions of the multiple connotations of the tropical in the Western imperial imagination. This collection amply sustains its claim to take the full range of visual evidence seriously. Maps, paintings, engravings, botanical illustrations, and photographs: each category receives close and imaginative readings, in which politics and poetics are held in a fruitful balance.”—Tim Barringer, Yale University

“How did Europeans come to conceive of the tropics as a distinct physical environment imbued with contradictory meanings? The answers offered in this richly informative collection of essays are notable for their nuanced appreciation of the way direct experience was mediated by cultural expectations. With contributions that range from the Caribbean to India to the South Pacific and that examine the role of botany, medicine, and other scientific disciplines in modern conceptions of the tropics, this book adds a great deal to our understanding of the interplay between European expansion and geographical knowledge.”—Dane Kennedy, George Washington University

“It has been a commonplace of postcolonial studies to assume that the gaze of imperial travelers controls the views of exotic people and places by using European templates of landscape, heroism, and beauty, and forcing them to fit. Here is a book which shows from a number of different angles how the tropics shaped the vision of its visitors, rather than simply yielding to it. This set of essays pursues a revisionist line in postcolonial thinking pioneered by anthropologists such as Nick Thomas, Johannes Fabian, and Chris Pinney. Like their pioneering work, it shows us that the objects of imperial eyes could return look for look, and unsettle what has too often been assumed to be a predetermined encounter between subject and object.”—Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt University

"This collection of essays . . . embraces history, geography, literary studies, and art history, and explores the multiple and often contradictory meanings imparted to the tropics in the 18th and 19th centuries and shows how the indigenous peoples contributed to, and sometimes subverted, the imperial notion."

"An exemplarily interdisciplinary volume, the book incorportes historical, literary critical, geogrpahical, scientific, philosophical, and art historical perspectives to compose a thick description of tropical histories and fantasies and their imbrication in European representation. . . . The collection itself combines exotic oddities . . . with thought-provoking research that demonstrates as well as argues how the tropical encounter instantiated and revised binary modes of thinking about the globe."—Vanessa Smith, American Historical Review

"This volume explores some of the diverse ways in which constantly shifting ideas and experiences of the tropics shaped Europeans’ sense of themselves....The collection ranges very widely, both geographically and chronologically, taking the reader from the Himalayas to the Caribbean and from the eighteenth century to the twentieth."—Jim Endersby, Isis

"Tropical Visions is a rare accomplishment—an interdisciplinary anthology whose essays are tightly bound by a consistent theme, yet offer a creative vision in each chapter. This combination of masterful writing and careful editing make Tropical Visions easy to read despite the depth and diversity of its ideas. Tropical Visions is highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of exploration, cartography, science, art, literature, geography — and, of course, the tropical world."—Richard Francaviglia, Society for the History of Discoveries

"It is hard to do justicve to this collection of essays in a short review, but reading it will be time well spent for students of colonial history. Though tightly focused thematically, the essays touch on a very wide range of disciplines and amply demonstrate the dense and varied network of associations that constituted discourses about the tropics."

"Its solid research, abundant illustrations, and affordable price are a model for edited collections. Its readability and the importance of the subject will make this book extremely useful in upper level and graduate courses on the culture, science, or geography, of imperialism. Tropical Visions should be widely read by specialists in these fields, who will find much to fascinate and delight them."

"Although the density of detail . . . might daunt casual readers, it is hard to imagine a better short collection for scholars interested in these themes."

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Views and Visions of the Tropical World
Felix Driver and Luciana Martins
Voyages
2. "On the Spot": Traveling Artists and the Iconographic Inventory of the World, 1769-1859
Claudio Greppi
3. The Stimulations of Travel: Humboldt's Physiological Construction of the Tropics
Michael Dettelbach
4. "The Struggle for Luxuriance": William Burchell Collects Tropical Nature
Luciana Martins and Felix Driver
Mappings
5. Dominica and Tahiti: Tropical Islands Compared
Peter Hulme
6. Imagining the Tropical Colony: Henry Smeathman and the Termites of Sierra Leone
Starr Douglas and Felix Driver
7. Matthew Fontaine Maury's "Sea of Fire": Hydrography, Biogeography, and Providence in the Tropics
D. Graham Burnett
Sites
8. Envisioning the Tropics: Joseph Hooker in India and the Himalayas, 1848-1850
David Arnold
9. Eyeing Samoa: People, Places, and Spaces in Photographs in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Leonard Bell
10. Returning Fears: Tropical Disease and the Metropolis
Rod Edmond
Afterword
11. Tropic and Tropicality
Denis Cosgrove
Notes
Select Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu

Art: European Art

Biological Sciences: Tropical Biology and Conservation

History: British History | Discoveries and Exploration

History of Science

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