Imagining the Amazon: European Colonialism & the Making of Modern-Day Amazonia

Kluge Fellow Anna Browne Ribeiro describes European accounts of travel in Amazonia, depicting a savage and wondrous place. Over the centuries, travel writing fed into Enlightenment thought and vice versa, never losing its fantastical qualities, until Amazonia was transformed into a modern global icon: the relict, sparsely populated virgin forest of a bygone era. Ribeiro examines how, in spite of archaeological evidence that counters this narrative, the language of colonialism shaped, and continues to shape, how the Amazon and Amazonian peoples are depicted, conceptualized, and most importantly, managed.
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