ArgumentThe spread of Darwinian ideas by the late nineteenth century in Argentina transformed the intellectual elites' notion of progress and civilization. While before Darwin, union, harmony, and assimilation were the ideas most commonly associated with the civilizatory process; variation, struggle, and divergence dominated the post-Darwin discussion. More importantly, unlike in Europe, in Argentina the theory not only triggered interest in the process of speciation, but also its relationship with extinction. Extinction became the benchmark of progress, and the sign of success (...) for the nation. If the country was civilizing itself, the “natural” elimination of inferior individuals, unfit for the struggle for existence, had to be proved and displayed. The origin of modernity was here associated with the existence of evolutionary waste that revealed the work of natural selection on behalf of national improvement. (shrink)

As one of the most widely read genres of literature, travel writing plays a crucial role in forming popular images and understandings of foreign places and foreign peoples. This essay examines the dominant images of rainforests and rainforest peoples portrayed in accounts of travels in tropical America published in National Geographic. Special attention is paid to the issues of how particular representations are privileged in this magazine's travel accounts and how these representations relate to questions of authority and power. The (...) analysis shows that the prevailing representations of the tropical forests and tropical forest-dwellers in the travel accounts of National Geographic rely on historically changing, but equally categorical distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, and ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. (shrink)

ArgumentI argue through an analysis of spectacle that the relationship between wildlife documentary films’ entertainment and educational mandates is complex and co-constitutive. Accuracy-based criticism of wildlife films reveals assumptions of a deficit model of science communication and positions spectacle as an external commercial pressure influencing the genre. Using thePlanet Earth(2006) series as a case study, I describe spectacle's prominence within the recent blue-chip renaissance in wildlife film, resulting from technological innovations and twenty-first-century consumer and broadcast market contexts. I connect spectacle (...) in contemporary wildlife films to its relevant precursors within natural history, situating spectacle as a central feature of natural history display designed to inspire awe and wonder in audiences. I show that contemporary documentary spectacle is best understood as an opportunity for affective knowing rather than a constraint on accuracy; as a result, spectacle contributes to the virtuous inter-reinforcement of entertainment and education at work in blue-chip wildlife films. (shrink)

Architecture, landscape architecture and urban design are seldom merely benign aesthetic propositions. With its victory in the Spanish-American War (1898), the United States unexpectedly found itself in possession of an empire. Within a volcanic climate of patriotic fervour, Washington’s new imperial status galvanized interest in improving the city in a manner commensurate with its enlarged role. On the strength of his work at the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), celebrated architect Daniel Hudson Burnham took the lead in Washington’s transformation (1901–2) and (...) urban design became his medium for imperialist expression. This potent mechanism’s deployment would not be confined to the imperial hearth. The United States soon set its sights on modernizing, that is ‘Americanizing’, Manila, the antique capital of its newly-acquired Philippine colony, and similarly charged Burnham with the task (1904). Overtly emulating the British Raj in India, he was also to design a wholly new summer capital there. This essay canvasses Burnham’s work at the American and Philippine capitals, along with his vicarious hand in the design of a new model American town in the Panama Canal Zone, considering it through the lens of imperialism. The location and imperial purpose of these projects also reminds us that – at least from an antipodean perspective – in the early 20th century, Great Britain held no monopoly on empire. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of Cannibal Metaphysics and the use of indigenous alter-anthropologies that offer the possibility to think thought otherwise than the dominant frameworks of Western modernity. It traces the use of cannibalism across thinking and making, exploring the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and his imaginative spatial and material practices that establish relational ecologies between humans and nonhumans. Ecology is foregrounded as a necessary precondition for thought’s possibility. The concept of ‘Nature’ is (...) contested as a foundational concept to enable modes of imaginative worlding to emerge that significantly challenge Western intellectual frameworks, depriving them of their universality and therefore transforming knowledge. “Cannibal alterity” is mapped as a political act of transgression where values are devoured in order to subvert their meanings, unsettle their cultural dominance and oppressive force, to transform their negative and destructive power into new creative and productive forms. (shrink)

From May to November 1931, the Exposition coloniale internationale was held in Paris. Publicized as a trip around the world in a single day, it was designed to stimulate investments and general enthusiasm for the colonies. Along with exotic temporary pavilions representing the various colonies, model villages inhabited by colonial natives, and pavilions representing commercial product brands and other colonial powers, the exposition included a zoo and an aquarium featuring animals from the colonies. Installing a large aquarium had been a (...) costly and difficult process, and construction was plagued by many delays and problems. But when the aquarium finally opened a few months into the exposition, it quickly became a favorite of the public. With the double mission to provide a living synthesis of the products of the warm waters of the French empire and give visitors a sense of the diversity, beauty, and economic resources of their colonial possessions, the aquarium functioned as a panorama that presented a striking visual metaphor for the empire. This article follows the aquarium during the exposition and in the years that followed. We explore its place in the history of aquaria in general and pay particular attention to its role in the exposition and within the French colonial context of the 1930s and onward. Here, both the scientists in charge of the site and the aquatic animals living in its tanks and terrariums provide a window into the relationship of marine biology, public education, consumerism, and colonialism at mid-twentieth century. (shrink)

This article examines the way in which the British press reported on typhoons that affected Hong Kong during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Typhoons were a significant element in the narration of the British Empire, featuring frequently in British accounts of their involvements in the Far East, where Hong Kong was its only colony. I suggest that these accounts need to be considered alongside the consolidation of the ‘tropics’ as a region in British perceptions, and in doing so, this (...) article opens discussions of the study of tropicality to the consideration not just of climate, but also of the significance of singular weather events. This article argues that the cultural representations of typhoons in the British press were a tool of ‘othering’. In particular, there were two significant shifts around the 1880s in these reports. First, the term ‘typhoon’ became tied to these types of storms that affected Hong Kong. Second, the stories that were told about typhoon events emphasized British heroism and colonial management. Both these shifts in reporting stripped away the weather wisdom that British sailors had earlier identified in the local population. (shrink)

In the first half of the twentieth century the attention of American and European researchers was drawn to the area of ‘extreme physiology’, partly because of expeditions to the north and south poles, and to high altitude, but also by global conflicts which were fought for the first time with aircraft, and involved conflict in non-temperate zones, deserts, and at the freezing Eastern front. In an attempt to help white Euro-Americans survive in extreme environments, physiologists, anthropologists, and explorers studied indigenous (...) people’s bodies, cultures, and technologies. This paper will sketch an outline of the science of white survival in three ‘extreme’ environments: the Antarctic and Arctic; high-altitude; and the Australian desert, with a particular focus on the ways in which indigenous populations were studied, or in some cases ignored, by Western biomedical scientists—despite their crucial and systematic contributions to the success of experiments and expeditions. Particularly focusing on altitude, and on blood in both its symbolic and literal sense, the article shows how assumptions about race, indigeneity, civilisation, and evolution shaped the ways White Westerners understood their own bodies as well as those of the people they encountered in cold, high and hot places on the earth. Despite new discoveries in physiology and evolutionary science, old racialised assumptions were maintained, especially those that figured the temperate body as civilised and the tropical body as primitive; and in at least one case it will be shown that these racialised assumptions significantly altered, if not retarded, the science of respiratory physiology. (shrink)