American Tropics

I’ve had a particularly productive month in the London area as a visiting research fellow at University of London’s Institute for the Study of the Americas . Neatly bisecting my four weeks in England was the University of Essex-sponsored conference, “American Tropics: Toward a Literary Geography." Given my current research on representations of the body in Latin American literature of the 1920s and 30s, and also an investigation into contemporary Amazonian theater, I particularly enjoyed new perspectives of the American Tropics seen/scene from London.

At the very well organized conference, of the ideal size and duration for getting to know people (about 70-80 participants over parts of four days), I met fellow Latin Americanists as well as colleagues in fields related to my own but outside my specialty: anthropology, geography, the US South, the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean. And among the many general concepts I learned figure the following:

The names, titles, and a rough idea of the creative styles of Wilson Harris (Guyana) and Elizabeth Nunez and Harold Sonny Ladoo (Trinidad), important contemporary writers of the Anglophone Caribbean;

Of the successful and prize-winning efforts of the Saramakas of Suriname to map their ancestral lands in order to protect them from logging interests;

Very useful general ideas about place, space, map and body, and the interplay between language and landscape;

That the emplacement of New Orleans as a city of the Americas (and not just an American city) is an ongoing critical endeavor among several disciplines and with much enthusiasm;

That James Fenimore Cooper wrote a high-seas novel in which the Florida Keys play a particularly symbolic role regarding the liminality of gender roles;

That Guantánamo Bay has a long history of use as a detention center; and the US-Cuban history of the legal ambiguities on which the Bush administration relied for purposes of acting outside the law;

That the University of Essex holds a first-class collection of Latin American art, mostly on display in its library;

Details and examples regarding the historical process of musical and marketing styles presenting São Paulo, Salvador, and the general Brazilian imaginary to the world;

That there is a rich vein of literature pertaining to the border dispute in the region of Amazonia shared by Colombia and Peru, but that residents of the area relate more closely to each other across the border than they do to the faraway Andean capitals of Lima and Bogotá;

That the practice and spirit of shamanic kanaima remain extant not only in areas of Amazonia but also in comics and online gaming phenomena;

Of the importance of the five directions quincunx in the Mesoamerican conception of thinking about place in the world, and of the vitality behind the blue-green color associated with the center;

That with regard to the three tropical zones in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the American tropics (or neotropics) host the longest continual stretch of land (along with the greatest biodiversity and river system on the planet); and that the mouths of the Amazon lie almost exactly along the equator.

I state these, unabashedly, as facts I have learned or added to already built contexts: let no one forget that learning is, and always should be, a lifelong process, for everybody’s benefit. And I state them without giving the names of the presenters who illuminated me, to protect the innocent, although I am willing to provide them to a courteous inquirer. Beyond the limits of the conference, I add the following incomplete list of further concepts I learned:

That I am most grateful for contacts established with colleagues at my host institute along with the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, independent scholars, and colleagues met at the conference;

That the Institute for the Study of the Americas sponsors the excellent series through Palgrave Macmillan, “Studies of the Americas” , along with the editorial offices of Journal of Latin American Studies;

That the British Library, which has an outstanding Latin American collection, will be hosting an exhibition in 2010 on the bicentennial of the independence of the Spanish American republics ;

That the London area can experience an almost tropical climate for a few weeks in late June and early July;

That historian Charles Boxer (1904-2000) and statesman George Canning (1770-1827) are important and intriguing figures in the history of Latin American studies in Britain; the latter’s house in posh Belgravia now hosts a very nice public library on all things Latin American along with frequent concerts and lectures sponsored in conjunction with Latin American embassies;

That the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Kings College (where Boxer, above, once held the Camões Chair) was the first of its kind in the UK and continues to be unique in many ways;

Of the existence of Peepal Tree Press and its first-rate selection of titles by Caribbean and Caribbean-diaspora writers;

That the British Museum , which houses an impressive pre-Hispanic Mexican collection, will be sponsoring the September 2009-January 2010 exhibition “Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler” congregating artifacts from prominent museums in the Americas as well as Europe; it is to be the first such exhibition based on the life of the Aztecs’ “last elected ruler”;

That the Kew Gardens display narrative posted underneath its rubber tree specimen rather blithely states that the tree became widely planted throughout Asia by the turn of the 20th century, without mentioning the involvement of Kew Gardens in the cultivation of the seeds stolen by Henry Wickham from Amazonas state, in what has recently been labeled one of the original acts of biopiracy, for propagation in the British colonies of Asia.

That I heard as much Portuguese as Spanish spoken on the streets of London, with both languages represented amply in non-European as well as European variants.

To avoid continuing on too long, I’ll stop here, and heartily thank my family, for their key emotional support for this opportunity, and my employer, the University of Tulsa, for its fundamental financial support in helping me fulfill the research fellowship.