Description
Book SynopsisComing to prominence during the tropical booms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Putumayo has long been a site of mass immigration and exile, of subjugation and insurgency, and of violence. By way of a study of literature of and on the Putumayo by Latin American as well as US and European writers, Colombia’s Forgotten Frontier explores the history and enduring significance of this Amazonian border zone, which has been visited both physically and imaginatively by figures such as Roger Casement, José Eustasio Rivera, and William Burroughs. Travel writing, testimony, diaries, letters, journalism, oral history, songs, photographs, and ‘pulp’ fiction are all considered alongside more conventional forms such as the novel. Whilst geographically peripheral, the Putumayo has played a central role in Colombia and beyond, both historically and, crucial to this study, culturally, producing a literature of extreme experience, marginality, and conflict.
Trade ReviewColombia’s Forgotten Frontier is a well-researched and readable book that constitutes an important addition to the literary and historical scholarship not only on the Colombian Putumayo, but also on the broader Amazon region. * Journal of Latin American Studies, Volume 46 *
Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on translations
- Introduction, Colombia’s forgotten frontier
- 1. Geographies of violence: war correspondence, 1990–2012
- 2. Green mansions to green hell: travel writing, 1874–1907
- 3. No-man’s land: testimonial literature of the rubber boom
- 4. ‘Exotic strangers’: the native body in text and image, 1911 and 1969
- 5. Frontier fictions: La novela de la selva, 1924 and 1933
- 6. The frontline: war writing, 1933
- 7. ‘Fragments of things’: the aesthetics of yagé
- 8. Oil and blood: pulp fiction of the 21st century
- Bibliography
- Index
