Imagining Amazonia Cartographically1

Abstract

Science and fantasy have co-constructed the region as a place where the search for legendary treasures is tautologically justified by their indisputable position on the map. Europeans filled voids in their cartographic archive of the river basin with images of unclaimed riches, and today Amazonia designates a quintessential “extractive zone,” that is, a biodiverse region reduced “to capitalist resource conversion” by colonial and neocolonial tools and technologies. The chapter explores how well-known Amazonian novels – works by José Eustasio Rivera, Rómulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, César Calvo, Márcio Souza, Milton Hatoum, and Marie Arana – engage with maps and mapping to challenge the very precepts that authorize cartographic claims to the region and its resources. It concludes by reflecting on recent Indigenous efforts to counter-map nearly 300 years of cartographic myopia in imagining the significance of the Amazon region.