Alexander von Humboldts Translantic Personae
Who was Alexander von Humboldt? Was he really a lone genius? Was he another European apologist for colonialism in the Americas or the father of Latin American independence? Was he a roving Romanticist, or did his sensibilities belong to the Enlightenment?
Naturalist, philosopher, historian, and proto-sociologist to name just some of the fields to which he contributed Humboldt is impossible to contain in a single identity or definition. His voluminous writings range across so many different fields of knowledge that his scholarly-scientific personae multiplied even during his lifetime, and they have continued to proliferate since his death in 1859. A household word throughout the nineteenth century, Humboldt was eventually eclipsed by Charles Darwin (whose own travels had been motivated by Humboldts) and disappeared from view for much of the twentieth century, notably in the United States.
The essays in this collection testify to the renewed interest that Alexander von Humboldts multi-faceted work is inspiring in the twenty-first century, especially among cultural and literary historians from both sides of the Atlantic.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.
Vera M. Kutzinski is the Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Director of the Alexander von Humboldt in English (HiE) project at Vanderbilt University, USA. For this project, she is editing (with Ottmar Ette) a series of new English translations of Humboldt writings for Chicago University Press. Kutzinski has written widely on the literatures of the Americas. Her forthcoming book is entitled Modernisms in Motion: Langston Hughes and Translation in the Americas.
Alexander von Humboldts Translantic Personae
Edited by
Vera M. Kutzinski
First published 2012
by Routledge
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2012 Taylor & Francis
This book is a reproduction of Atlantic Studies, volume 7, issue 2, with two articles from Atlantic Studies, volume 6, issue 3. The Publisher requests to those authors who may be citing this book to state, also, the bibliographical details of the special issue on which the book was based.
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ISBN13: 978-0-415-69787-3
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The publisher would like to make readers aware that the chapters in this book may be referred to as articles as they are identical to the articles published in the special issue. The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen in the course of preparing this volume for print.
Contents
Vera M. Kutzinski
Ottmar Ette
(Translated from the German by Vera M. Kutzinski)
John Pizer
Rodolfo Guzmn M.
Marilyn Grace Miller
Fernando Ortiz
(Translated from the Cuban Spanish by Vera M. Kutzinski)
Vera M. Kutzinski
Alexander von Humboldt
(Translated from the German by Vera M. Kutzinski)
Ottmar Ette is Professor of Romance Literatures at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He is the author of award-winning books on Alexander von Humboldt, Jos Mart, and Roland Barthes, and the editor of several new editions of Humboldts writings in German. He is the new series editor for de Gruyters Mimesis: Romance Literatures of the World and has recently brought together a collection of essays for that series, entitled Nanophilologie. Together with Vera M. Kutzinski, he edits the Alexander von Humboldt in English (HiE) series for the University of Chicago Press.
Rodolfo Guzmn M. is Associate Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, USA. His teaching and research interests include narratives and the history of ideas in the Iberian world with special emphasis on the colonial period. His research interests also include Afro-Hispanic poetry and indigenous narratives of the Andean region. He is currently preparing a manuscript on the idea and representation of cities in colonial texts.
Vera M. Kutzinski is the Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Director of the Alexander von Humboldt in English (HiE) project at Vanderbilt University, USA. For this project, she is editing (with Ottmar Ette) a series of new English translations of Humboldt writings for Chicago University Press. Kutzinski has written widely on the literatures of the Americas. Her forthcoming book is entitled Modernisms in Motion: Langston Hughes and Translation in the Americas.
Marilyn Miller is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University, USA. She has published previously on the works of Juan Francisco Manzano in several venues, including the Revista Iberoamericana and Colonial Latin American Review. She is currently at work on a book-length comparative study of the relationships between poetry and slavery in North America and Cuba from the colonial to the contemporary period, entitled The Poetics of Slavery.
Fernando Ortiz Fernndez (July 16, 1881(1881-07-16) April 10, 1969(1969-04-10)) was a Cuban essayist, ethnomusicologist and scholar of Afro-Cuban culture. Ortiz was a prolific polymath dedicated to exploring, recording, and understanding all aspects of indigenous Cuban culture. Ortiz coined the term transculturation, the notion of converging cultures. Disillusioned with politics in the Pseudo-Republic period of Cuban history and having been a member of the Liberal Party, and a Liberal member of its House of Representatives from 1917 to 1922, he became active in the early nationalist civic revival movement. He helped found the journals Revista Bimestre Cubana, Archivos del Folklore Cubano and Estudios Afrocubanos.
John Pizer is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University, USA. His most recent books are Toward a Theory of Radical Origin: Essays on Modern German Thought (1995); Ego-Alter Ego: Double and/as Other in the Age of German Poetic Realism (1998); and The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice (2006).
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt (September 14, 1769 May 6, 1859) was a German naturalist and explorer. Humboldts quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography. Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in Latin America, exploring and describing it for the first time in a manner generally considered to be a modern scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in an enormous set of volumes over 21 years. He was one of the first to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular). Later, his five-volume work,
