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Visual Cultures of Travel and Exploration in Latin America (Level 6)

Overview

Module description

Focusing on Latin America, this module investigates visual cultures of travel and exploration, raising questions about the history of modern visual technologies within and beyond Europe, mappings, travelogues, and the re-thinking of the imperial archive.

Paying particular attention to the Euro-American exploration of Latin America from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, we consider key questions about the role of visual artefacts in the making of imaginative geographies. Across this period, European and US travellers left their impressions in a variety of records, from visual images in sketches, paintings, charts, photography and film to written ones, in diaries, letters and travel accounts.

Primary materials to be studied include those produced by Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, Maria Graham, Guido Boggiani, Hiram Bingham, Alexander Hamilton Rice and Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others.

In examining this extensive visual archive of travel, we explore locally distinctive histories of visual practice while remaining attentive to their connections with the world at large. This module draws upon work in cultural and historical geography, art history, history of science, literary criticism and anthropology.

Recommended reading

  • J. Crary, ‘Modernizing Vision’, in Vision and Visuality, edited by H. Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 29-50.
  • M. Dettelbach, ‘The face of nature: precise measurement, mapping and sensibility in the work of Alexander von Humboldt’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 30:4 (1999), 473-504.
  • F. Driver and L. Martins, ‘John Septimus Roe and the Art of Navigation, c.1815-1830’, History Workshop Journal 54 (2002), 144-161.
  • F. Driver and L. Martins (eds.), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
  • A. Godlewska, ‘From Enlightenment vision to modern science? Humboldt’s visual thinking’, in D. Livingstone and C. Withers (eds.), Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 236-275.
  • M. Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Vision and Visuality, edited by H. Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 2-23.
  • N. Leask, ‘Alexander von Humboldt and the Romantic Imagination of America: The Impossibility of Personal Narrative’, in Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing 1770-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 243-298.
  • K. Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879 (Washington DC: Smithsonian, 1989).
  • L. Martins, ‘Mapping Tropical Waters’ in D Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 148-168.
  • L. Martins, ‘The art of tropical travel, 1768-1830’, in M. Ogborn and C. Withers (eds.), Georgian geographies: essays on space, place and landscape in the eighteenth century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).
  • L. Martins, Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
  • C. McEwan, L. A. Borrero and A. Prieto (eds.), Patagonia: natural history, prehistory and ethnography at the uttermost end of the earth (London: British Museum, 1997).
  • D. Poole, Vision, race and modernity: a visual economy of the Andean image world (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
  • D. Poole, ‘Landscape and the Imperial Subject: U.S. Images of the Andes, 1859-1930’, in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations, edited by G. M. Joseph, C. C. Legrand, R. D. Salvatore (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 105-138.
  • M. L Pratt, Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).
  • M. Taussig, ‘The Right to Be Lazy’, in My Cocaine Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 197-215.
  • A. Wilton and T. Barringer, American sublime: landscape painting in the United States 1820-1880 (London: Tate Publishing, 2002).