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Along the Banks of the Amazon: Ethnicity and Crosscultural Imaging in Jules Verne's La Jangada

2008; Vanderbilt University; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15695/amqst.v5i1.112

1553-4316

Rudyard J. Alcocer,

Alexander von Humboldt Studies

This article focuses primarily on Jules Verne’s novel La Jangada (1881) within an evaluative and interdisciplinary postcolonial framework that emphasizes the novel’s relevance to scholars concerned with issues of ideology and visual culture in colonial Latin America. The postcolonial focus is implicated in the process of rendering visible the novel’s ideological agenda – one that addresses the role of the non-Westerner (Amazonian tribes, to be specific) in modernization. It is also foregrounded in relation to other works by Sue and Bernardin that describe Latin American “worlds” unknown to European readers and in the discussion of Léon Benett’s illustrations in relation to the text. These illustrations, in particular, are suggestive of the need to consider the novel’s text-image rapport as a way of understanding cross-cultural and inter-ethnic relations that have survived well beyond the time of La Jangada’s publication.