Ranging from the immediate aftermath of the Spanish-American Wars of Independence (1810-1826) to the early twentieth century (1925), the volume's essays cover a wide variety of genres and forms of cultural production, from Jos Hernndez's epic poem Martn Fierro to prose fiction, painting and photography, and the personal albums compiled by Spanish-American women. Individually and collectively, the essays engage with scientific writing as both a discourse of power and a source of potentially significant, even revelatory information about human and nonhuman nature. Changes in the Landscape enables readers to more fully understand the transition from colonial regimes to the ecocidal extractivism of the export boom (1870-1930) by drawing out and analyzing some of the cognitive resources and rhetorical strategies that were available to imagine, protest, or enact new norms and expectations regarding the relations between human and nonhuman life, be it the life of wildflowers, waterfalls, or Cuba's Cinaga de Zapata.
Changes in the Landscape: Humans and Nature in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Ranging from the immediate aftermath of the Spanish-American Wars of Independence (1810-1826) to the early twentieth century (1925), the volume's essays cover a wide variety of genres and forms of cultural production, from Jos Hernndez's epic poem Martn Fierro to prose fiction, painting and photography, and the personal albums compiled by Spanish-American women. Individually and collectively, the essays engage with scientific writing as both a discourse of power and a source of potentially significant, even revelatory information about human and nonhuman nature. Changes in the Landscape enables readers to more fully understand the transition from colonial regimes to the ecocidal extractivism of the export boom (1870-1930) by drawing out and analyzing some of the cognitive resources and rhetorical strategies that were available to imagine, protest, or enact new norms and expectations regarding the relations between human and nonhuman life, be it the life of wildflowers, waterfalls, or Cuba's Cinaga de Zapata.