About

Rivers are fundamental to the existence of Amazonian populations, playing a central role in the way indigenous and riverside communities feed, travel and trade. The imagery of these communities is determined by close contact with rivers, which are often equated with giant snakes, considered a source of life in local cosmologies. At the same time, the rivers, now used as communication and transport routes or for the construction of hydroelectric power stations, represent a key element in development projects and the insertion of the Amazon into international markets. In this colloquium, we analyse the relevance of these modernisation processes on Amazonian river systems and the implications that the current management and appropriation of these aquatic territories is having on the lives of indigenous and riverside communities in the region.

Speakers
Javier Uriarte is a professor of Latin-American literature at Stony Brook University in the United States. His research areas are travel literature, Latin-American territorial imagination, processes of state consolidation in the region and environmental humanities. He is the author of de The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America (Routledge, 2020) and co-organiser of Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon (Liverpool UP, 2019).

Juan-Carlos Galeano was born in the Amazonian region of Colombia. He is a writer, professor and documentarian, author of several poetry books, translations, and of the books Folktales of the Amazon. He is a professor of Amazon cultures and poetry at the State University of Florida, in the United States.

Victoria Saramago is joint professor of Hispanic and Portuguese-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America (Northwestern University Press, 2021). Her research interests include, among others, environmental humanities and studies of energy and electricity.

Activity within the project ECO Animals and Plants in Cultural Productions about the Amazon River Basin