Picturing Tropical Nature

by Nancy Leys Stepan

Whether considered a sublime landscape, malignant wilderness, or the endangered site of environmental conflicts, the tropics are, Picturing Tropical Nature argues, largely a construct of American and European imaginations. 

Nancy Leys Stephan asserts that images of the tropics conveyed through drawings, paintings, photographs, literature, and travel writings are central to what Stepan calls the “tropicalization of nature,” or the often harmful misrepresentation of the tropics and its peoples. She here examines several aspects of such tropicalization as they emerge through the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists and artists, including Alexander von Humboldt, Alfred Russel Wallace, Louis Agassiz, Sir Patrick Manson, and Margaret Mee. From the earliest photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races to depictions of disease in new tropical medicines, Picturing Tropical Nature offers new insight into the convergence of the tropics with European and American science and art. 

“A brilliant and provocative book . . . the kind of book that carries forward a field in a single stride . . . undoubtedly the finest account of ‘tropicality’ we have.”— Social History of Medicine

Genres: History

288 pages, Paperback

First published February 24, 2001

Reviews

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stepan analyzes the way various people from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have depicted the tropics through their writing, art, and photography. The book engages particularly with how others, primarily from an outsider’s point of view, judged the land and people there. Although these representations of nature vary greatly and some may not necessarily be accurate, requiring people to examine them cautiously, they still draw people to study them nonetheless .