Space in the Tropics

In this imaginative work, Peter Redfield crosses the boundaries of anthropology, geography, history, and philosophy. He focuses on the two most significant efforts to develop French Guiana: the penal colony where prisoners were kept from 1852 to 1946, and the European space center, which, dominated by the French, originated in the 1960s and still operates today. Redfield assesses these two schemes for colonial development and argues that "modern categories of nature and technology can only be understood in relation to each other" and that "neither can be adequately understood without recourse to spatial terms" (p. 25). According to Redfield, the officials who set in motion the penal colony and the space center took advantage of French Guiana's remote location and political subjection. They transformed the colony's natural landscape while introducing new forms of metropolitan authority and expertise. Space in the Tropics addresses the ways in which colonizers used technologies to impose modernity upon marginal spaces. It also examines the transformation of expertise as it shifted from metropolis to periphery

Aeronautics · Biology · Geography · Meteorology · Space (punctuation) · Tropics · African history and culture studies · Canadian Identity and History · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Computer Science · Ecology · Engineering · History