Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom(8 American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography)

An analysis of the political and ecological consequences of charting the Amazon River basin in narrative fiction, Mapping the Amazon examines how widely read novels from twentieth-century South America attempted to map the region for readers. Authors such as José Eustasio Rivera, Rómulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, César Calvo, Márcio Souza, and Mário de Andrade travelled to the Amazonian regions of their respective countries and encountered firsthand a forest divided and despoiled by the spatial logic of extractivism. Writing against that logic, they fill their novels with geographic, human, and ecological realities omitted from official accounts of the region. Though the plots unfold after the height of the Amazon rubber boom (1850–1920), the authors construct landscapes marked by that first large-scale exploitation of Amazonian biodiversity. The material practices of rubber extraction resurface in the stories told about the removal of other plants, seeds, and minerals from the forest as well as its conversion into farmland. Smith places the counter-discursive impulses of each novel in dialogue with various modernizing projects that carve Amazonia into cultural and economic spaces: border commissions, extractive infrastructure, school geography manuals, Indigenous education programs, and touristic propaganda. Even the “novel maps” studied, however, have blind spots, and Mapping the Amazon considers the legacy of such unintentional omissions today.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Reading Maps with La vorágine: Cartographic Illusion on the Río Negro 2. Sensing Like a Shaman, Seeing Like a State: Guayana according to Rómulo Gallegos 3. The Upper Marañón, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and the Nobel Laureate 4. Extractivism in Iquitos: From Rubber to Ayahuasca Literature 5. The Remains of Modern(ista) Export Routes along the Madeira and the Mamoré Conclusions Acknowledgments Bibliography

About the Author :
Amanda M. Smith is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Review :
‘Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography After the Rubber Boom navigates the complexity of Amazonian literature with intelligence and deftness. With theoretical sophistication and an ethical commitment to contextualizing her material historically and geographically, Amanda Smith has produced lucid new readings of José Eustasio Rivera, Rómulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, César Calvo, and Márcio Souza. The final discussion is a beautiful, unexpectedly affirming conclusion to a book full of sharp critical insights.’ Jennifer L. French, Williams College ‘The breadth and depth of literary analysis in this book is truly remarkable… [Mapping the Amazon] is a book about the darker side of literary creativity. On one level, it is a definitive study of the literary Amazon—a fine synopsis of the region’s evocative literature. However, at another level it is truly subversive. By exposing the inner workings of the novel maps, Mapping the Amazon emerges as a scathing critique, not only of exploitative capitalism but also of literature-as-exploitation.’ Richard Francaviglia, Journal of Latin American Geography ‘Smith’s investigation focuses rigorously on the aesthetic complexities of these texts to demonstrate how, in a way even the authors themselves sometimes do not suspect, new ways arise of understanding their power of eco-criticism... Smith’s contribution is this call, like few today, to awaken new energies in the literary and cultural criticism about the Amazon precisely because she has her feet grounded in the harsh history of the region, while her eyes are focused on different future possibilities for the region.’ Felipe Martínez-Pinzón, ReVista