Textual Forests

The Representation of Landscape in Latin American Narratives

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20077523
AutoresMaria Mercedes Ortiz Rodriguez (autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Páginas63-74
Fecha de publicación2011-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoCHAPTER
RevistaGeocritical Explorations (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialPalgrave Macmillan US (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230337930_5
OpenAlexW3004041801
ISBN9780230337930
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas5

In Latin America, transnational and multicultural spaces like the Amazon rainforest have been portrayed by politicians, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and writers as inner frontiers, as spaces of otherness. They constitute what Mary Louis Pratt has defined as "contact zones": places of colonial encounters in which people who were geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish among themselves relations based on coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.1 Rainforests have been seen in the dominant imaginaries on the one hand as the wilderness, and on the other hand as economic and symbolic repositories that offer wealth and hope to the nation. According to the central powers and the economic and political elites, these inner frontiers should be conquered and "civilized," totally ignoring the lives and rights of their Amerindian populations in order to extract from them their "unlimited" riches that should redeem Latin America from its poverty

Amazon rainforest · Ethnology · Geography · Inequality · Latin Americans · Multiculturalism · Order (exchange) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Rainforest · Sociology · Wilderness · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Ecology · Law