The Writing of the River: Winding Lines between Science, Power, and Ecology in Euclides da Cunha’s Amazon

[Lectures Series Diversity | Medialities]

Wednesday, 29 April 2026

10:00–12:00 Ciudad de México
13:00–15:00 Buenos Aires / São Paulo
18:00–20:00 Berlin / Köln

Place: Conference Room, Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (IAI), Potsdamer Str. 37, 10785 Berlin
Streaming: https://spk-berlin.webex.com/spk-berlin/j.php?MTID=mde64183aceb3148283b3bc64ec691583

The Writing of the River: Winding Lines between Science, Power, and Ecology in Euclides da Cunha’s Amazon
Lecturer: Carolina Correia dos Santos (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil / Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow at the IAI)

Abstract:

Celebrated for Os sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), a work often described as a “consortium between art and science” and immediately acclaimed upon publication, Euclides da Cunha devoted the final years of his life to writing about the Brazilian Amazon. In these texts, he employs narrative and scientific strategies similar to those developed in Os sertões. At the same time, however, he makes more explicit his reliance on other written sources in order to observe and describe the forest. Whereas Os sertões stages the discovery of Brazilian reality through the experience of war—producing a carefully articulated chain of causes and effects—the Amazonian writings appear more fragmentary and often resemble drafts of an intended final work. Unlike Os sertões, they remain open and unfinished, culminating in the unrealized project of Um paraíso perdido.

These texts are also inseparable from da Cunha’s political engagement in support of the diplomatic actions of Barão do Rio Branco, then head of Brazilian diplomacy, in South America. Invited by the Baron to lead the Brazilian Commission for the Recognition of the Upper Purus, da Cunha traveled to the region to assist in determining the boundaries between Brazil and Peru. From Manaus, he undertook an expedition along the Purus River to identify its source and contribute to the definition of territorial limits based also on patterns of occupation along the riverbanks.

This lecture analyzes da Cunha’s Amazonian texts—especially those later collected in À margem da história (Land Without History)—through the relationship between writing and colonization policy. In light of da Cunha’s enduring impact on Brazilian cultural and intellectual history, the lecture reflects on the longer afterlives of his discourse in the context of the climate crisis and contemporary debates on the Anthropocene.

More information on the lecture series “Diversity / Medialities”.