Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- A Note on Translations
- 1 Introduction: Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon
- 2 The Jungle Like a Sunday at Home: Rafael Uribe Uribe, Miguel Triana, and the Nationalization of the Amazon
- 3 Hildebrando Fuentes’s Peruvian Amazon: National Integration and Capital in the Jungle
- 4 Contested Frontiers: Territory and Power in Euclides da Cunha’s Amazonian Texts
- 5 ‘Splendid testemunhos’: Documenting Atrocities, Bodies, and Desire in Roger Casement’s Black Diaries
- 6 A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Cauchero of the Amazonian Rubber Groves
- 7 Endless Stories: Perspectivism and Narrative Form in Native Amazonian Literature
- 8 Malarial Philosophy: The Modernista Amazonia of Mário de Andrade
- 9 The Politics of Vegetating in Arturo Burga Freitas’s Mal de gente
- 10 Filming Modernity in the Tropics: The Amazon, Walt Disney, and the Antecedents of Modernization Theory
- 11 The ‘Western Baptism’ of Yurupary: Reception and Rewriting of an Amazonian Foundational Myth
- 12 Photography, Inoperative Ethnography, Naturalism: On Sharon Lockhart’s Amazon Project
- 13 Nostalgia and Mourning in Milton Hatoum’s Órfãos do Eldorado
- Editors and Contributors
- Index
4 - Contested Frontiers: Territory and Power in Euclides da Cunha’s Amazonian Texts
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- A Note on Translations
- 1 Introduction: Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon
- 2 The Jungle Like a Sunday at Home: Rafael Uribe Uribe, Miguel Triana, and the Nationalization of the Amazon
- 3 Hildebrando Fuentes’s Peruvian Amazon: National Integration and Capital in the Jungle
- 4 Contested Frontiers: Territory and Power in Euclides da Cunha’s Amazonian Texts
- 5 ‘Splendid testemunhos’: Documenting Atrocities, Bodies, and Desire in Roger Casement’s Black Diaries
- 6 A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Cauchero of the Amazonian Rubber Groves
- 7 Endless Stories: Perspectivism and Narrative Form in Native Amazonian Literature
- 8 Malarial Philosophy: The Modernista Amazonia of Mário de Andrade
- 9 The Politics of Vegetating in Arturo Burga Freitas’s Mal de gente
- 10 Filming Modernity in the Tropics: The Amazon, Walt Disney, and the Antecedents of Modernization Theory
- 11 The ‘Western Baptism’ of Yurupary: Reception and Rewriting of an Amazonian Foundational Myth
- 12 Photography, Inoperative Ethnography, Naturalism: On Sharon Lockhart’s Amazon Project
- 13 Nostalgia and Mourning in Milton Hatoum’s Órfãos do Eldorado
- Editors and Contributors
- Index
Summary
Mas se audaz estrangeiro algum dia
Nossos brios de novo ofender
Lutaremos com a mesma energia
Sem recuar, sem cair, sem temer
E ergueremos, então, destas zonas
Um tal canto vibrante e viril
Que será como a voz do Amazonas
Ecoando por todo o Brasil
But if one day a daring foreigner
Our pride again offends
We will fight with the same vigor
Without retreating, without falling, without fear
And then we will cry out, from these regions
A vibrant and energetic song
That will be as the voice of the Amazon
Echoing all over Brazil
“Hymno do Acre” [Acrean Anthem],
Francisco Mangabeira (1903)
In one of the first reviews of Euclides da Cunha's posthumous À margem da história (1909), Arthur Guimarães de Araújo Jorge, a poet, diplomat, and regular contributor to the Revista Americana, praises the work as an exceptional piece that confirmed the talent Euclides exhibited in Os sertões (1902), and lamented that it was “fatally doomed” to the public's indifference. Euclides's unique style and impressions of Brazil's most acute problems went unnoticed by the local intellectual class used to commenting on a narrow range of topics and genres. “Não se galhardeiam idéas no reino do palavreado” [Ideas are not blatantly exhibited in the realm of idle talk], observed Araújo, explaining this unenthusiastic reception. Warmer recognition came later, with literary critic Péricles Moraes's essay reviewing major contributions to an Amazonian corpus in 1935, commending Euclides's original vision of the territory and aesthetics as a reference for everything that was thereafter “thought and written about such a portentous region”.
Euclides's fascination with the Amazon began in the backlands. After the success of Os sertões, he aimed to undertake a similar project in the northern region of Acre, inspired by both a vision of science as a path for the country's development and his desire to further his role as an intellectual after the success of his saga on Canudos. The political scenario could have not been more auspicious. After a long-lasting conflict over the allocation of contested lands in Acre (1899–1903), Brazil and Bolivia resolved their disagreement with the signing of the treaty of Petrópolis (1903). Promptly Peru opposed the settlement, arguing that Bolivia had yielded lands that did not belong to her.
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- Information
- Intimate FrontiersA Literary Geography of the Amazon, pp. 67 - 87Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2019