Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire
Felix Driver and Luciana Martins
Abstract
The contrast between the temperate and the tropical is one of the most enduring themes in the history of the Western geographical imagination. Caught between the demands of experience and representation, documentation and fantasy, travelers in the tropics have often treated tropical nature as a foil to the temperate, to all that is civilized, modest, and enlightened. This book explores images of the tropical world—maps, paintings, botanical drawings, photographs, diagrams, and texts—produced by European and American travelers over the past three centuries. This book contains eleven chapters—ar ... More
The contrast between the temperate and the tropical is one of the most enduring themes in the history of the Western geographical imagination. Caught between the demands of experience and representation, documentation and fantasy, travelers in the tropics have often treated tropical nature as a foil to the temperate, to all that is civilized, modest, and enlightened. This book explores images of the tropical world—maps, paintings, botanical drawings, photographs, diagrams, and texts—produced by European and American travelers over the past three centuries. This book contains eleven chapters—arranged in three sections devoted to voyages, mappings, and sites—that consider the ways that tropical places were encountered, experienced, and represented in visual form. The book covers a wide range of tropical sites in the Pacific, South Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
Keywords:
temperate zones,
tropical zones,
voyages,
mapping,
Western geographical imagination,
civilization,
enlightenment
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2005 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226164717 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: March 2013 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226164700.001.0001 |
