Everyday Forms of Empire - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 335

realms of Africa and Asia, returning with the slaves, spices, medicines, dyes, jewels, an-
imals, perfumes,andincenses thathaddefinedelite statusandconsumption sincebefore
the Roman Empire. The torrid zones also figured in ancient medicinal and social the-
ories of the environment and nature's impact on humankind: the humidity and the heat
were seen as enhancing nature's creative power such that classification systems could
not entirely account for the endless spontaneous generation that occurred there. 4 Travel-
ers' accounts, natural history, and natural philosophy all positioned the tropics in myth
andscience asaworldofmonstrous wonders,dangerous,sensual, andfecund; thetrans-
fer of mythical terrain (the land of the Amazon) and medieval imaginaries to the New
World was part of the “Fantastic Geography” of the Age of Exploration.
Paradise and Pestilence, Edens and Evil Latitudes
Northern tropicality and tropicalisms invoked an imagined Tropics where man and
naturewereinprimal,proteanstates,outsideofhistory,a“prehistory”ofaplace sem fei,
sem rei. sem lei —without creed, king, or law, basically a scrim on which imaginaries,
virtues, vices, and dreams of new societies could be projected. This perception framed
the tropics, and especially Amazonia, as inchoate space, terra incognita as imagined on
the first maps, a world ripe for physical and scientific exploration and as terra nullius ,
a land without rulers or rules, a tabula rasa for the practical application of great social
and economic experiments. Tropicalism is complex in part because of the diversity of
empires, imperial ambitions, divergent methods of claiming, and cultural matrices that
engaged the equatorial zone, and how interventions were structured in light of “white”
and “black” legends about the tropics and their inhabitants.
The “white legend” oftropicality isanEdenic, discourse: tropical exuberance, abund-
ance, free and innocent sexuality and lots of it, pleasant climate, biosocial harmony,
beauty: “nature never sackt,” in the words of Walter Raleigh. Derived initially from
RenaissancetravelerslikeJeandeLéry,theprelapsarianstreakoflostEdenrunsthrough
theNewWorldtropicalcanonfromcontacttothepresentday. 5 Itspeoplearecharmingly
ingenuous, “well formed,” noble savages, the result of adapting to an opulent and gen-
erous nature, far from the meddling and corrupting insertions of the state. This noble
model, historically most associated with de Léry, Raleigh, and later Rousseau and Con-
dorcet, infused the critiques of the European absolutist states of the eighteenth century
and exalted less hierarchical, less repressed, secular social formations, not to mention
a more unlaced sexuality. The subtext involves an uplifting “natural” morality, part of
an anticlerical as well as political critique of European polities. It is not accidental that
so many of the early “literary” utopias are located in the tropics, 6 since they take their
inspiration from the Age of Exploration and its early anthropologies that contrasted so
profoundly with Northern European cultures and seemed to offer up endless sociopolit-