Travels to the center of the periphery: reading the texts of Osvaldo Cruz and Euclides da Cunha about the Amazon between 1905 and 1913

Marcia Caetano Langfeldt (1)

1 CREPAL - CREPAL - Centre de recherches sur les pays lusophones - EA 3421

This seminar will focus on the texts written by Brazilian bacteriologist Osvaldo Cruz about his travels in the Amazon in the early twentieth century. Brazilian government sponsored several scientific trips to the country’s interior at the time, with the main interest to incorporate these areas into the larger national project. This had begun during the Brazilian Empire and continued when Brazil became a republic in 1889. Langfeldt’s presentation will start with a short biography of Osvaldo Cruz and an overview of the missions he conducted in the Amazon. Thereafter she will focus on reading the official reports Cruz contributed to write, comparing them with the texts produced by the Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha, who was in the Amazon at the same period and wrote the classical book about the region, The Amazon: Land without History (1909).

Mots clés: Osvaldo Cruz; Amazon; Euclides da Cunha; Rubber boom

Domaines: Littératures; Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences

Marcia Caetano Langfeldt. Travels to the center of the periphery: reading the texts of Osvaldo Cruz and Euclides da Cunha about the Amazon between 1905 and 1913. Norlanet Open seminar , https://www.norlarnet.uio.no/, Aug 2015, Oslo, Norway. ⟨hal-01494715⟩