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E-book Decolonial Ecologies : The Reinvention of Natural History in Latin American Art

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Penilaian

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A white gallery wall is marked out at intervals to a length of twenty-five feet. Stretching out above, black capital letters stamp out the phrase “el cocodrilo de Humboldt no es el cocodrilo de Hegel” (Humboldt’s crocodile is not Hegel’s). Near the end on the left, a crocodile’s eye appears on a monitor; at the right, another shows its tail. José Alejandro Restrepo’s installation comments on a disagreement between two towering European figures whose influential writings on Latin America have significantly shaped the region’s place in world history. For Hegel, whose theory of world history excluded both America and Africa as lands without a past, America’s animals showed “the same inferiority” as its human inhabitants. Although its lions, tigers and crocodiles were similar to their Old World equivalents, they were “in every respect smaller, weaker, and less powerful.”1 This quotation from Hegel is reproduced on the gallery wall, alongside another from Humboldt that criticizes Hegel’s “ignorance” and asserts that the “poor weak crocodiles” he has dismissed measure no fewer than twenty-five feet in length.2 Both Hegel’s sneering description of the continent’s feeble crocodiles and Humboldt’s impassioned exaggeration of their size fade into irrelevance as the real crocodile, manifestly absent, fixes the viewer in a stare and closes its eye in a wink. Restrepo’s El cocodrilo de Humboldt no es el cocodrilo de Hegel (1994) draws ironic attention to the frequent mistakes and misrepresentations present in European narratives about Latin America as well as to their enduring power. Hegel was expounding on the views of the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, whose descriptions of the inferiority of nature in the New World gave rise to theories of degeneracy that were to be widely adopted for decades to come. Other texts and images produced by Europeans and their descendents since 1492 have depicted Latin America as a lost paradise, a source of unimaginable riches, and a land of barbarism or exoticism. As a scientist of the Enlightenment, Humboldt dedicated much energy to correcting misconceptions through patient empirical observation and measurement; however, his work continued to be deeply influenced by the assumptions of previous travellers to the continent and by Romantic conceptions of peoples, landscapes, and the unity of nature.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

902 PAG d

Penerbit

London : Open Book Publishers., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

298 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781800649750

Klasifikasi

902

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Miscellany of History

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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