Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007
As Jens Andermann argues in this excellent book, the traditional script tends to regard the state as the concrete, inevitable outcome of social and economic processes and, in doing so, it overlooks how an array of visual practices made possible this ‘political metaphysics’. By examining a rich corpus of archival material, which includes catalogues, photographs, maps, personal correspondence, paintings, and journalism, The Optic of the State demonstrates how museums, exhibitions, and the subjugation of the pampa and sertão employed new technologies of seeing that were integral to the consolidation of specific forms of state power. That is, the capture, classification, and display of fragments of nature and otherness constituted a comprehensive effort to establish modernizing projects as the true realizations of a broad, nationalist teleology.
Brendan Lanctot, Hispanic Research Journal
Chapter 1: “Empires of Nature: Museums, Science, and the Politics of Being”
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Reviews
Muriel Berthou Crestey, National Identities 20, 4 (2018).
Eric D. Carter, Journal of Historical Geography 35 (2009).
Adrienne Fast, Wreck : Graduate Journal of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory 2, 1 (2008).
Christine Folch, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 17, 1 (2015).
Luz Horne, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 31, 3 (2007).
Brendan Lanctot, Hispanic Research Journal 10, 4 (2009).
Kathryn Lehman, International Studies 10, 2 (2008).
Kaitlyn McNally-Murphy, Emisférica 7, 1 (2011).
Adriana Novoa, Journal of Latin American Studies 41 (2009).
Marta Penhos, A Contracorriente 5, 3 (2008).
Geraldine Rogers, Iberoamericana 9, 36 (2009).
Rodrigo Salido Mouliné, Not Even Past, September 2021..
Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 20, 2 (2009).
Kristi M. Wilson, Latin American Perspectives 42, 1 (2015).
Jens Andermann 