A Short Prelude - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 12

ition is so different from most of the genre that, like Os Sertões , it becomes something
else entirely, genius in many ways. We can perhaps understand his Amazon prose on its
own, but it seems to me that there is no possible means of assessing Amazonia's impact
on his own thought and life, and his broader impact on “nation and narration,” without
having more context, without understanding what it was about his times, Amazonia, and
his active role in it that made him much more than a literary figure. And indeed, his life
was a desperate tragedy that also relates to his Amazon times.
The topic is organized to provide some of the early biographical context for his work,
but most writers cover this period and discuss da Cunha, Os Sertões , and his circle in
great detail for the period 1897-1903, which is not my purpose. 26 The biographical ma-
terial—parts I and V—brackets the materials on the scramble and most of da Cunha's
writing (parts II, III, and IV), a world that opened up for him in 1904 and ended, along
with his life, in 1909.
That time in the Amazon is remote to us, but it was an extraordinary moment in trop-
ical history when the machinery of industrial revolution, its transport systems, and thou-
sands of innovations for daily life were dependent on tropical latex, scratched out from
distant trees and processed by debt peons and slaves over a smoky fire. What transpired
in those Amazonian selvas was momentous—an expression of planetary economics and
imperial ambition, as well as everyday practices of nation formation, of political ima-
ginationandpossibility,anditrevealshowglobalprocessestransformedandweretrans-
formed by the aspirations that stretched from royal palaces to the humblest tapper hov-
els.