of Latin America. In particular, she focuses on the historical development, environmental representation, and sustainable future of the Brazilian Amazon.
Carey-Webb applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Eyes on Amazonia: Transnational Perspectives on the Rubber Boom Frontier, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Eyes on Amazonia: Transnational Perspectives on the Rubber Boom Frontier delves into one of the key characters in the book, the Brazilian modernist Mário de Andrade. It explains his complicated relationship to his own racial identity and some of the aspects of the Brazilian modernist movement, a conflicted movement itself which sought to synthesize a European avant-garde with a national identity rooted in uniquely Brazilian cultural aspects (such as indigeneity, environment, colonial history, etc.). This page presents Andrade’s Amazonian travel narrative, The Apprentice Tourist, describing his approach toward Amazonian culture which subscribes to some aspects of a modernist ethos, but also deviates in his signature sardonic and playful style.Learn more about Eyes on Amazonia at the Vanderbilt University Press website.
Page 99 gives a decent summary of the work as a whole. While the book examines a multitude of different international explorers who went to the Amazon to document their findings primarily during the first rubber boom (1875-1912), this page and chapter instead examine the legacies of the rubber boom from Andrade’s perspective written in 1927-28. Andrade is one of the most famous Brazilian authors of all time whose journey in the Amazon is somewhat underexamined, and the page is thus representative of the book as it examines both central and peripheral explorers of the Amazon. Page 99 also mentions other topics that are of importance to the book including racial and personal identity, portrayals of indigeneity by non-Indigenous people, and the travel narrative form. Page 99 situates Andrades’ travel narrative within an international framework and the various cultural movements occurring globally, however it does not address the environmental implications of his work, a central aspect of the book overall.
Eyes on Amazonia addresses exploratory missions (from French, Brazilian, North American, German, and Colombian perspectives) that mapped, photographed, and wrote about their visions for the future of Indigenous people and the environment. The book offers five comparative case studies of traveler’s representations of Amazonia from diverse source materials, in multiple languages, by explorers from different countries of origin, and with wide-ranging views of the region and its peoples. While sharing histories of their own experiences, these travel writers all traverse territories under extreme economic and environmental exploitation at varying moments of emerging national authority. Their depictions demonstrate the unequal power dynamics within the Amazonian “contact zone.” As travelers in the Amazon region, the authors in Eyes on Amazonia project futuristic ideas onto a space that is foreign to them, and, in turn, they write highly racialized visions of their surroundings.
--Marshal Zeringue
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