Present Trajectories in Amazonian Studies: Intimate Frontiers

Felipe Martínez-Pinzón and Javier Uriarte. Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon. Liverpool, England: Liverpool UP, 2019. 275 pp. ISBN 978-1-78694-183-1

The book Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon, compiled by Juan Felipe Martínez Pinzón and Javier Uriarte, is a crucial work on Amazonian history and literature. Published in 2019, in the midst of a global environmental crisis, this book emerges at a critical moment in which the Amazonian territory takes on particular relevance both for its biological diversity and for being a space where myriad native and non-native peoples coexist. Intimate Frontiers offers a detailed look at the Amazon archive through a compilation of articles dealing with texts from diverse Amazonian origins and different historical periods. From an oikographic perspective, the essays collected in this book propose an image of the Amazon as an inhabited space in contrast to two metaphors traditionally linked to this territory: uninhabitable Green Hell and utopian El Dorado. Although organized in chronological order, three thematic lines run through the book's structure: territorial disputes over the region, forms of transculturation, and domestic and intimate Amazonian experiences.

First, the book examines how the Amazon has been territorially perceived, represented, and mapped by different nations. These analyses continue Mary Louise Pratt's tradition by looking at how this territory's history emerges from gazes and descriptions from metropolitan or foreign audiences. The first three essays in the book unpack how authors from Colombia, Perú, and Brazil have represented and mapped the Amazonian territory for the sake of national interests and claims. In his essay, Felipe Martínez-Pinzón compares how early twentieth-century Colombian writers Miguel Triana and Rafael Uribe Uribe's texts serve different political projects that seek to integrate the Amazonian territory and its inhabitants within Colombian national borders. Similarly, Cristobal Cardemil-Krause analyzes how Peruvian writer Hildebrando Fuentes omits reports of the violence caused by rubber extraction in his Amazonian writings, seeking the central Peruvian government's support of modernizing projects in Loreto.

From there, Cynthia Torres uses the emblematic case of Euclides da Cunha to examine the narrative mechanisms through which metropolitan Brazil justified its governance of Acre. Torres argues that da Cunha, like the Brazilian state, questioned Peruvian government's presence in the Amazon, arguing against its rubber industry, while, due to the historical cessions of territory to Brazil, he mediated in favor of Bolivia's authority over this territory. Finally, through an analysis of Disney's documentary The Amazon Awakens (1944), Barbara Weinstein unveils an interventionist rhetoric that appeals to the figure of the "good neighbor" and presents the Amazonian people's interests as aligned with those of the global North, lacking only foreign intervention to achieve modernization. These studies offer new perspectives on the modalities used by several nations in the Amazon to (re)claim the Amazon as a national space.

By inquiring about the literature stemming from transculturation between European and Native American narratives, some essays in this collection answer to a tradition that includes Ángel Rama and Ana Pizarro. In her article, Charlotte Rogers looks at Órphãos do Eldorado (2008) by Brazilian Manuel Hatoum rewrites mythical Amazonian narratives in conjunction with the European myth of El Dorado. Rogers highlights Hatoum's uses both traditions to question and reimagine the hybrid history of Amazonian modernity. Similarly, Rick Bolte analyzes the translation and reception of Yuruparí, arguing that this indigenous narrative acquires the form of a legend by virtue of translation, first into Italian and then into Spanish. By exploring the intersections between a Native American narrative form and western gender expectations, Bolte questions the character of Yuruparí as a legend and as a foundational literary text in Colombia. Likewise, Lucía Sá departs from the theoretical frame of perspectivism, developed by the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, to revisit the Penón myths compiled by Theodor Koch-Grundberg. S...