The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America by Javier Uriarte

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America by Javier Uriarte Elizabeth Chant Uriarte, Javier. The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America. New York and London: Routledge, 2020. 306 pp. Javier Uriarte's The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America represents an innovative contribution to the well-established field of nineteenth-century Latin American literary studies. Via an analysis of works by four authors—Sir Richard Francis Burton, William Henry Hudson, Francisco "Perito" Moreno, and Euclides da Cunha—and working across the national contexts of Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, Uriarte brings these texts and milieus into an insightful dialogue that illuminates how the multifaceted notion of the desert was constructed and interpreted through travel writing in response to the conflicts that waged in each country during the post-independence period. Uriarte's Introduction underscores the importance of understanding the desert as a created space, highlighting the singular role of war in this process across these four nations. Notably, he observes that the trope of the desert as an "elemental void" (Uriarte Introduction) was maintained by both foreign travelers and Latin American politicians alike in the nineteenth century, thus rationalizing The Desertmakers' selection of texts from across languages and borders in order to properly examine the construction of said space. By focusing on travel narratives, The Desertmakers is able to emphasize the particularly unique approach to travel writing that the situation of war provides, especially the "violent spatial reconfigurations" that it imposes (Uriarte Introduction). As such, the three concerns of the book's subtitle, "travel, war, and the state", are shown to be interdependent in the fabrication and maintenance of the desert primarily as a psychological [End Page 303] milieu. Here, war is defined as "the necessary instrument of desertification", paving the way for state mapping and railways to "do the work of expansion" (Uriarte Introduction). Thus Uriarte elucidates the intertwining of the imagined desert with the tangible outputs of capital expansion and state consolidation in nineteenth-century Latin America, a concern of all four authors examined in this study, as they both abhor and encourage the incursions of capitalist modernity into the countryside. Chapter One examines British expeditioner Sir Richard Francis Burton's (1812-90) Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay (1870). Focusing on one of this experienced traveler's less studied texts, Uriarte traces the image of the ruin in Burton's narrative, identifying it as one of the first accounts to feature a vision of South America as a ruin prior to an act of destruction, in this case the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70). While Uriarte's reading of Burton's transformation from "witness" to "adventurer" in his later writings is shrewd, this chapter's insights into the construction and understanding of Paraguayan space are particularly discerning (Uriarte ch. 1). Uriarte notes how the territory is "blurry and appropriable" in the text and argues that "Paraguay is evidence of the perverse logic of the warlike gaze that can see only the desert that war itself has created" (Uriarte ch. 1), making reference to the apparatus that supported state incursions into the desert and thus worked to create new kinds of voids. The second chapter of The Desertmakers assesses the Anglo-Argentine naturalist William Henry Hudson's (1845-1922) The Purple Land (1885), a semiautobiographical novel featuring the violence and conflict that marred Uruguay in the 1860s and 70s as its backdrop. Uriarte centers his reading around the issue of Great Britain's informal empire in the region, charting how the fictional Anglo-Argentine narrator Richard Lamb's journey gradually yields a critique of imperial endeavors. The "positive valuation of nature" (Uriarte, ch. 3) that underpins Lamb's perspective and has informed much of the scholarship on Hudson's writing is therefore connected by Uriarte to Hudson's own observations of state oppression and violence. Further, Hudson's criticism of the British Empire is interpreted by Uriarte as a potential explanation for his absence from the English literary canon, especially since the desert encountered here is a marginal territory far from the British imperial center. Chapter Three reads Argentine naturalist and statesman Francisco "Perito...