Homeland and equinoctial landscape

Abstract

This paper analyzes the cultural production of travelers to the equatorial area during the second half of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth. Incorporating the concept of "planetarium consciousness" developed by Marie Louis Pratt, this paper argues that expeditions like that of La Condamine and of Humboldt were instrumental in configuring both how Latin American landscape and Latin American identity itself are represented. Reviewing the historical development of the concept of Landscape, this paper traces its outcome from the tensions between science and aesthetics at the threshold of Romanticism, arguing that these trends still influence our contemporary perception of the equinoctial landscape. In this way, I argue that equinoctiality can be read as an historical process in which a specific idea of nature is articulated, or to use more political terms: equinoctiality constitutes a strategy for appropriating Land through the construction of particular representations of landscape.