Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (review)

Over the last decade or so, scholars have shown increasing interest in the construction of the tropics as an imaginative space. Through the works of David Arnold and Nancy Stepan, to name but two of many authors, we have come to see the tropics as playing a role very similar to that of the "Orient" in the making of modern Western identities. Just as the East was instrumental in Europe's self-definition, so the tropics served as the counterpoint to the temperate climates of Europe and North America. It was the exuberant, untamed Other of the restrained and cultivated lands to the North, a region of bewildering fecundity, but also of pestilence, darkness, and decay. And just as the historiography of Orientalism has been progressively refined, historians and literary scholars have begun to acknowledge the diversity of tropical visions and the extent to which the tropics could resist attempts to bring it to order, both conceptually and practically.

This collection of essays articulates and extends some of the recent insights of those geographers, historians, and literary scholars who have made significant contributions to scholarship on tropicality in recent years, not least that of one the editors, Felix Driver, whose Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (2001) sets the tone for much of this book. To varying degrees, the essays develop a revisionist trend in postcolonial studies, which has brought out nuances in relationships between colonizers and colonized and which has recognized the diverse and often fractured nature of colonial discourse. Above all, the essays stress the unsettling nature of tropical experience and the fact that images of the tropics were just as often the result of transactions and exchanges as they were simple projections of Western assumptions. [End Page 175-]

These conceptual issues are helpfully set out in the introduction by Driver and Luciana Martins, which makes a useful analytical distinction between tropical visions and views of the tropics. These contrasting modalities represent, for the editors, the difference between an analytical way of seeing (the 'view'), typified by cartography, and a more subjective and possibly transformative experience of nature (the 'vision'), in which the spectator becomes an active participant. The utility of this distinction becomes evident when reading the contributions, many of which explore the sensibility that we have come to associate with that great figurehead of Romantic science, Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt is a central figure in this volume because he represents a new way of seeing that influentially combined analysis and experience. Humboldt typified—although it would be going too far to say that he originated—a different way of experiencing the tropics, in which the human body became an important instrument of record. Through Humboldt's accounts of tropical nature—which inspired countless naturalists, not least Charles Darwin—readers came to know not only objective facts about the tropics but what it actually felt like to be in them. Indeed, it was at precisely this time that direct knowledge of the tropics came to be considered more authoritative than armchair speculation, although many scientists still explored the tropics vicariously through the works of Humboldt and his fellow explorers.

The first section of the volume,"Voyages," concentrates most closely on the world of Humboldtian science. Claudio Greppi examines the work of landscape painters such as William Hodges, which Humboldt admired for its amalgam of a scientific perspective with more emotional responses to the Orient. Hodges's depictions of the effects of light, for instance, were fundamentally different from those of previous landscape painters and betray his debts to the meteorologists, surveyors, and astronomers with whom he associated on expeditions. Michael Dettelbach's essay concentrates on the new sensibility evoked in Humboldt's Personal Narrative (1814) of his expedition to the Andes, showing the centrality of a physiological discourse that united the animal and plant kingdoms, both of which appeared to be susceptible to the same environmental stimuli. This personalised...