Picturing Tropical Nature - Couverture souple

Stepan, Nancy Leys

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1861891466 ISBN 13 : 9781861891464

Editeur : Reaktion Books, 2002

Synopsis

Whether considered a sublime landscape, malignant wilderness, or the endangered site of environmental conflicts, the tropics are, Picturing Tropical Nature argues, largely a construct of American and European imaginations.

Nancy Leys Stephan asserts that images of the tropics conveyed through drawings, paintings, photographs, literature, and travel writings are central to what Stepan calls the "tropicalization of nature," or the often harmful misrepresentation of the tropics and its peoples. She here examines several aspects of such tropicalization as they emerge through the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists and artists, including Alexander von Humboldt, Alfred Russel Wallace, Louis Agassiz, Sir Patrick Manson, and Margaret Mee. From the earliest photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races to depictions of disease in new tropical medicines, Picturing Tropical Nature offers new insight into the convergence of the tropics with European and American science and art.

"A brilliant and provocative book . . . the kind of book that carries forward a field in a single stride . . . undoubtedly the finest account of 'tropicality' we have."--Social History of Medicine

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Nancy Leys Stepan is professor of history at Columbia University. Her previous books include "The Hour of Eugenics" Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Reaktion Books
• Date d'édition: 2002
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1861891466
• ISBN 13: 9781861891464
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 288
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible