As we’ve been discussing, the long-distance relations that make landscapes are not limited to species introductions (indeed far from it). In our next session, we’ll be examining practices that bring geographically separate places together such as the circulation of images of tropical paradise and comparisons between climatically similar forests. How do processes such as “eyeing” and “comparing” help us to understand landscape-making?

 The readings also ask us to consider the importance of biomes. How is it that temperate and tropical landscapes have emerged in relation to different ‘global’ projects? Are these distinct modes of ‘ecological globalization’? In our earlier sessions, we discussed how Crosby’s work on “Neo-Europes” sits in contrast to scholarship on plantations and empire in the tropics. How can we hone our attention to such differences?

One big question linked to all of this is: How are material landscapes, aesthetic projects, and conceptual categories co-produced?

The readings:

Part 1: Tropical imaginaries

Krista Thompson, 2007, An Eye for the Tropics, Duke University Press. We will be discussing the Introduction and Chapter 1.  

This text raises crucial questions about how aesthetics, representation, and imaginations of tropicality matter to the ways people engage landscapes. As the blurb puts it, “Thompson describes how representations created to project an image to the outside world altered everyday life on the islands. Hoteliers imported tropical plants to make the islands look more like the images. Many prominent tourist-oriented spaces, including hotels and famous beaches, became off-limits to the islands’ black populations, who were encouraged to act like the disciplined, loyal colonial subjects depicted in the pictures.” How is transnational aesthetic work a landscape-making force?

For further reading in this vein:

Although we will not be discussing it, we also recommend:
Ian Gregory Strachan (2003) Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. Univ of Virginia Press. Chapter 3 “Paradise is Plantation?” is another exceptionally useful text for thinking through tropical landscape aesthetics. 

 Part 2: Temperate comparisons 

While the tropics were pulled into one set of representational projects, temperate places were pulled into other forms of comparison. We can see one set of these in an environmental history of Chilean forests and tree plantations.

We’ll be reading:

Thomas Klubock (2014) La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory. Duke University Press.
We will be discussing the Introduction, followed by 78-79, followed by Chapter 4. 

This text shows how both economic and landscape comparisons with the U.S. and U.S. international aid were integral to the remaking of Chilean forests. Not quite “creatures of empire,” non-native trees in Chile take us into yet another story of ecological globalization.  

Just for reference, our other meeting this month will be October 26 from 15-17 Danish time.