Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism

Abstract

I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint these essays in this form. I would also like to take this occasion to acknowledge in print my obligation to friends and colleagues who have been responsible-whether they like it or not-for the course that my work has taken over the past decade:

En ‘Tierra de Caimanes’: imaginarios geográficos, literatura ilustrada y tropicalidad del río Orinoco en las obras de Jules Crevaux (1883) y Jean Chaffanjon (1889)

“…Esta gesta fue tan popular que fue escogida por Jules Verne (1828-1905) para la serie Viajes Extraordinarios, un corpus que contó con 62 volúmenes, en los que pretendía "reunir todos los conocimientos geográficos, geológicos, físicos, astronómicos, acumulados por la ciencia moderna, y rehacer, en la forma atractiva y pintoresca [...], la historia del universo" 82 . Verne, quien era miembro de la Société de Géographie de París, tuvo acceso a los recuentos de los viajes al Orinoco en boletines y presentaciones públicas, y a los fascículos y novelas publicados, e incluso se comunicó con Chaffanjon por medio de su editorial Hetzel para novelar el viaje a las fuentes del Orinoco 83 . Si bien Verne se preocupó por usar fuentes académicas, como La Nouvelle Géographie Universelle (1893), de Élisée Reclus 84 , tenía claro que su misión era la comunicación sencilla y entretenida de sucesos al público general para promover la geografía, por lo que adaptó la trama del viaje a las fuentes del Orinoco para su propia novela, Le Superbe Orénoque (1898).…”

Lions Attacking a Dromedary: The Verreaux brothers, imperial taxidermy, and postmortem bodily rights

“…First placed in a local jail where he was a spectacle for townspeople and later moved to Kroeber's anthropology museum where he lived, worked, and was studied by Kroeber (and his assistant, Thomas Waterman) as a museum specimen and curiosity, the nameless man known as Ishi was publicly labeled the “last wild indian in California” (Starn, 2004). The trope of the vanishing, dying, and last “Indian” is a colonial construct that situates Indigenous and Native American peoples as temporally stagnant, incapable of meeting the demands of European “civilization”, and “naturally” prone to extinction due to their supposed “inferior” status (White, 1978). When Ishi died a painful death of tuberculosis at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco, California, Kroeber had his brain autopsied and curated at the Smithsonian, the institution that kept the brain in their Wet Collections for decades without notifying the public (Scheper‐Hughes, 2001, p. 12; Starn, 2004, p. 23, 130, 158, 170).…”

Vernacular Settlement Planning on the Kahayan Riverbank: A Shadow of Non-existent Planning Policies on Political Road Disruption in The City of Palangka Raya, Indonesia

“…Referring to the Cambridge dictionary, the word tropical is the climate of a tropical place. Based on its etymology, the tropic comes from the word tropikos, tropos which in classical Greek means turn in English: turn, change direction [28]. Based on the ancient Greek language, Koine means way or manner in English: way, direction.…”

“…So the translation in classical Latin is a metaphor or figure of speech. All of these understandings are embodied in early English literature tropes [28]. Thus the word tropicality -tropical+ity comes from the word trope means a representative meaning, gets the addition -ity, which comes from medieval French -ité, from Latin -itat-, -itas, from -i-(adjective stem vowel) + -tat-, -tas -ity, similar to the Greek -tēt-, -tēs -ity means level or quality.…”