SPAN 597 Envisioning Nature on the Commodity Frontier

This course reflects on attempts to conceptualize and visualize what we commonly call “nature” in areas of the world subject to the intense extraction of natural resources—whether this be the mining of minerals, commercial agriculture, or the harvesting of substances such as rubber. Our geographical focus will be on Latin America, though we will also occasionally consider other places as points of comparison, and we will read theoretical and historical works that take a comparative or global outlook. (Note that the course title borrows the concept of the “commodity frontier” from Jason W. Moore, whose “world-ecology” framework will be among the theoretical perspectives we consider.) Throughout the semester we will oscillate between two historical moments marked by waves of extractivism that put pressure on ideas about nature and related practices of representation: the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries, and the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Our questions will include: Why does capitalism seem to go through cycles when the “gifts of nature” play an especially pivotal role in the world-economy? How do such cycles spur—or how are they spurred by—new strategies and technologies for visualizing nature? What are the historical links between imperialism, colonialism, and extractivism? Are there ways to re-conceive the often negative consignment of women, Indigenous, and Black subjects to the realm of nature (and indeed, how have many women, Indigenous, and Black thinkers and artists already done so)? Our so-called primary texts will begin with selections from the voluminous writings that emerged from the Latin American travels of the German geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose conception of nature had an immense influence on subsequent scientists, writers, and artists. Throughout the rest of the semester we will examine geographical writings, fiction, painting, photography, films, other artwork, and maps by Latin American creators and others who had occasion to reflect on the “natural” world and resources they discovered in the region. Our path will be guided by several key visual concepts and categories, including Humboldt’s notion of the “physiognomy” of nature; landscape; chorography; mapping; and perspectivism and other Indigenous modes of envisioning alterity.