Cosmic Maps, Geography of Plants, and the Argentine Grand Tour

RICARDO CICERCHIA

Connecting Continents: Britain and Latin America

Rodopi, Amsterdam-New York

Lugar: Amsterdam-New York ; Año: 2009;

Enlightenment travelers can be distinguished from their Renaissance forbearers principally through their conviction that travel served to strengthen structures of knowledge and power. This intellectual climate sparked a particular kind of inquiry, which emphasized detailed information and a tightly constructed referential system of sources. The specification of geographies, ethnographies, and classificatory regimes became a fundamental objective of all travel chronicles. As a result, the place of the marvelous in travel texts receded. More than any other cultural form of that time, narratives of exploration underlined the capriciousness of circumstance and the forcefulness of a reinvigorated scientific project. Within the context of the growing individuation of social relations and the desire for global hegemony, travel and its narrativization signaled the emergence of a new relationship between subject and object. It also reflected a romantic nostalgia for something the eighteenth century had lost: the humanist touch. For these nineteenth-century travelers, the Enlightenment had strayed too far from the innocence and wonder of the Renaissance era. Traveling and accounts of travel form an essential chapter in the construction of modernity. Travel literature not only fostered new sciences, but also reaffirmed the supremacy of national identity, becoming in the process a fundamental mechanism for cultural domination. A cultural history of travel discourse therefore helps illuminate the relationship between modern European subjectivity and its medieval and classical past, from and against which modernity has defined itself.