The diverse approaches to the Amazon collected in this book focus on stories of intimate, quotidian, interpersonal experiences (as opposed to those that take place between companies and nations) that, in turn, have resisted or else have been ignored by larger historical designs. This is why we propose a literary geography of the Amazon. In this space made out of historias, we will show the always already crafted, and hence political, ways in which this region has been represented in more “scientific”, often nationalizing histories. This includes, of course, understanding the “gigantic” discour ... More

The diverse approaches to the Amazon collected in this book focus on stories of intimate, quotidian, interpersonal experiences (as opposed to those that take place between companies and nations) that, in turn, have resisted or else have been ignored by larger historical designs. This is why we propose a literary geography of the Amazon. In this space made out of historias, we will show the always already crafted, and hence political, ways in which this region has been represented in more “scientific”, often nationalizing histories. This includes, of course, understanding the “gigantic” discourses on Amazonia as rooted––if rarely discussed––in different quotidian, everyday experiences of a more intimate nature. The intimate interactions between one human being and another, or between men and animals, plants, or the natural space more generally as we see it, are not, as one might expect, comforting. Instead they are often disquieting, uncanny, or downright violent. This book argues that the Amazon’s “gigantism” lays not in its natural resources or opportunities for economic exploit, but in the richness that inhabits its archive of historias in the form of songs, oral histories, images, material culture, and texts.