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Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, edited by Felix Driver and Luciana Martins; pp. xii + 279. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005, $65.00, $25.00 paper, £42.99, £16.00 paper.
Over the last decade or so, scholars have shown increasing interest in the construction of the tropics as an imaginative space. Through the works of David Arnold and Nancy Stepan, to name but two of many authors, we have come to see the tropics as playing a role very similar to that of the "Orient" in the making of modern Western identities. Just as the East was instrumental in Europe's self-definition, so the tropics served as the counter-point to the temperate climates of Europe and North America. It was the exuberant, untamed Other of the restrained and cultivated lands to the North, a region of bewildering fecundity, but also of pestilence, darkness, and decay. And just as the historiography of Orientalism has been progressively refined, historians and literary scholars have begun to acknowledge the diversity of tropical visions and the extent to which the tropics could resist attempts to bring it to order, both conceptually and practically.
This collection of essays articulates and extends some of the recent insights of those geographers, historians, and literary scholars who have made significant contributions to scholarship on tropicality in recent years, not least that of one the editors, Felix Driver, whose Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (2001) sets the tone for much of this book. To varying degrees, the essays develop a revisionist trend in postcolonial studies, which has brought out nuances in relationships between colonizers and colonized and which has recognized the diverse and often fractured nature of colonial discourse. Above all, the essays stress the unsettling nature of tropical experience and...