Euclides da Cunha en la Amazonía: pensar el desplazamiento, controlar los espacios, anunciar la guerra

Abstract

This article studies the representation of the “popular”—understood in a broad sense, as that which is different from the lettered knowledge that seeks to regulate territories—in Euclides da Cunha’s essays on the Amazon, included in his posthumous book À margem da história (1909). Here I argue that the gaze of the “I” in these essays associates the populations and cultures of the region with the “nomad”, changing, and unstable behavior of the rivers. Regarding the relation- ship with the images used to describe the territory and displacement through it, the essay makes clear some continuities between Os sertões (1902), Cunha’s bestknown work, and his essays on the Amazon. Finally, this essay studies the images through which Cunha’s style shows the difficulty that the lettered “eye” has to understand and represent spaces and cultures that are alien to it, while it includes elements of an infrastructural imagination that the official perspective that Cunha (a military engineer) uses to modify nature, in order to make it useful within Brazil’s imperial project in Amazonía.