Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire
Edited by Felix Driver and Luciana Martins
(University of Chicago Press, 2005)
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Augustus Earle Watercolour 203 x 338 mm |
Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire is devoted to an exploration of images of the tropical world produced by European travellers over the last three centuries. The idea of the tropics as a distinct assemblage of natural and human relations has taken diverse forms in different geographical and intellectual contexts. The contrast between the temperate and the tropical is part of an enduring imaginative geography; tropicality has often served as a foil to the temperate – to all that is civilised, modest, enlightened.
This book brings together a distinguished group of authors from a variety of fields - notably art history, postcolonial studies, literature, cultural geography and the history of science - to address the visualisation of the ‘tropical' within a variety of aesthetic, scientific and political projects.
The book also provides an opportunity to re-appraise the dominant model of representation which has inspired much recent work on imaginative geographies. Taken as a whole, the essays advocate a discriminating view of European visions of the tropical world, in which the experience of disorientation, uncertainty and novelty has its place. The contributors highlight the multiple practices through which the tropics were known, practical and bodily as well as intellectual and discursive. And they encourage greater attention to the ways in which European conceptions of the tropics may have been shaped by interactions with indigenous peoples and places.
Introduction
1. Felix Driver & Luciana Martins Views and Visions of the Tropical World
Voyages
2. Claudio Greppi ‘On the Spot': Travelling Artists and the Iconographic Inventory of the World, 1769-1859
3. Michael Dettelbach The Stimulations of Travel: Humboldt's Physiological Construction of the Tropics
4. Luciana Martins & Felix Driver ‘The Struggle for Luxuriance': William J. Burchell Collects Tropical Nature
Mappings
5. Peter Hulme Dominica and Tahiti: Tropical Islands Compared
6. Starr Douglas & Felix Driver Imagining the Tropical Colony: Henry Smeathman and the Termites of Sierra Leone
7. D. Graham Burnett Matthew Fontaine Maury's ‘Sea of Fire': Hydrography, Biogeography and Providence in the Tropics
Sites
8. David Arnold Envisioning the Tropics: Joseph Hooker in India and the Himalayas , 1848-50
9. Leonard Bell Eyeing Samoa: People, Places and Spaces in Photographs in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
10. Rod Edmond Returning Fears: Tropical Disease and the Metropolis
Afterword
11. Denis Cosgrove Tropic and Tropicality
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