Everyday Forms of Empire - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 334

colonial practices in concrete, discursive, and politically powerful ways, ways that re-
inforced the Brazilian presence on the ground, as architects of civilization rather than
“builders of ruins.”
Tropicalism and Orientalism
The tropics themselves are a set of material facts—they are places on the planet at par-
ticular latitudes and inhabited by a complex biota that includes people. Ideas about the
tropics are not in themselves necessarily tropicality or tropicalism, any more than ideas
about the Orient are simply Orientalism. Rather, tropicality questions revolve around
systemsofthoughtwhereideasofnature,humannature,history,culture,andcivilization
areplayedoutinthecreationofimages,institutions,sciences,anddiscoursesthatshaped
and continue to shape the logics of colonial enterprises, modern development, and even
today's environmental strategies. Tropicality is about “essences” and “others,” and also
aboutnatureandplace.Theseideasinformandstructuretheideologiesthatunderpinned
tropicalism—the suite of imperial practices engaging the region.
Recent and increasing use of the term tropicality in colonial studies reflects a con-
ceptual borrowing from cultural critic Edward Said's “Orientalism.” Tropicality asserts
a kind of tropical “Orient” as an embodiment of forms of essentialism: the “beingness”
of existing in the tropics as in a particular biogeographic and cultural space, but it is un-
derstood less as “place” than as the imaginative terrain whose hold on explanatory sci-
ences,arts,andculturesaffectedthemannerinwhichenterprisesandpoliticalendeavors
were carried forward in tropical worlds—the essences as translated into ideologies used
to justify micro as well as macro politics of power in imperial practices.
Orientalism emphasized the “Known World” and focused on the decadent and the
exotic as outcomes of the slow ruin of former civilizations, a world of excessive and
depraved sexuality of all kinds, a place that was more or less running down, picking
through the rubble of its various collapsed empires, Islam, and despotic states. In con-
trast, the New World tropics were seen as the “last unfinished page of Genesis.” The
question for the Orient remained one of culture, Islam, and history, where the European
presence would be liberational . In the tropics, pagan, wild, and emergent, the colonial
project would be civilizational . In addition, questions of nature are much more salient.
As historian of science David Arnold has observed, tropicality engages the pervasive
“alienness” of tropical landscapes as biotically distinctive for Northern Europeans and
decisivelyecologicallyforeigntothetemperatezone.This“Arnoldian”framingweights
nature as at least as powerful, and as much an actor in the “colonial” question, as the
agents and the subjects of colonialism themselves.
The tropics and their inhabitants were not unknown to Europe by any means: the
Mediterranean world had benefited from trading circuits that extended into the tropical