Picturing Tropical Nature (review)

Latin America drew the attention of figures as diverse as Jeremy Bentham, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, H. Rider Haggard, and Herbert Spencer (to name only a few), and functioned as an important part of Britain's informal empire (receiving about ten percent of Britain's exports, a portion second within the empire only to India). Yet for many Victorianists it remains a lost world, overshadowed in imperial history by Africa, India, and Britain's settler colonies. Even the new transatlantic paradigms, for all their attention to the "Americas," continue to confine that much-discussed zone largely to Canada, the United States, and the English-speaking Caribbean. Rare is the Victorianist conversant with the main outlines of Britain's dealings with Latin America; rarer still one who knows them intimately.

In this lucid and well-researched study, Nancy Leys Stepan, an expert on both Latin America and the history of race, helps correct this imbalance by analyzing the range of visual practices through which South American nature was represented in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Organizing her study around depictions of tropical nature, diseases, and races, Stepan convincingly argues that the entire Victorian understanding of the tropical was profoundly shaped by sophisticated visual strategies and genres, and that South America, more than any other region, functioned as the site of tropical nature par excellence. From engravings of Victoria regia, the giant water plant discovered in the Amazon, to lavishly illustrated hummingbirds and orchids, to photographic depictions of hybrid racial types and patients suffering from tropical diseases, to the use of diagrams, charts, and plans more generally, the Victorians relied on visual media to establish an authoritative, supposedly objective view of the tropics. Stepan argues that the meanings inscribed in these images were not fixed, nor did they represent an objective reality, but rather they were subject to shifting historical forces and changes in the implied conventions of particular media. As media changed, say from steel engravings to daguerreotypes to photographs, so did the meanings they carried. Citing Simon Schama, she reminds us that nature is always culture before it is nature, thus making a sophisticated understanding of cultural forms a prerequisite for grasping what nature signifies at any particular moment. While Stepan states that the pictures in her book are not mere illustrations but its very argument, she supports her overall thesis through sensitive close readings of those pictures, displaying both a wide command of visual forms and a willingness to explore them in depth. Although many of the interpretive moves, particularly with regard to anthropological photography, draw on well-known work by Alan Sekula, Elizabeth Edwards, and Melissa Banta, Stepan's application of them to a relatively unknown archive makes for compelling reading.

After an introduction and a chapter on Alfred Russell Wallace's anti-Romanticism, Stepan turns to two chapters on representations of race. The first discusses the naturalist Louis Agassiz's mid-1860s trip to Brazil, which he undertook partly in an effort to amass a photographic archive illustrating the perils of racial hybridity. Agassiz turned to the new technology of photography to support his thesis, driven by polygenesis, that sexual unions between peoples of different races were likely to be infertile. Since Brazil's population derived from three apparently distinct stocks (Africans, Europeans, and the indigenous), it seemed the perfect laboratory for such an effort. But Agassiz never published his photographs, perhaps because, as Stepan theorizes, they failed to provide the required ocular proof of his claim. Turning to a discussion of freehand drawings contained in a little- known manuscript diary by young William James, who accompanied Agassiz on the journey, Stepan nicely points up the contrast between the supposedly objective lens of photography and the subjective craft of drawing. James's sensitive, individualized portraits of Brazilian subjects suggest not only the emergence of a profound interest in personal psychology that would undermine the very assumptions of fixed racial...