The Desertmakers Travel, War, and the State in Latin America

Javier Uriarte, "The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America "
English | ISBN: 1138668923 | 2019 | 306 pages | PDF | 8 MB
This book studies how the rhetoric of travel introduces different conceptualizations of space and time in scenarios of war during the last decades of the 19th century, in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. By examining accounts of war and travel in the context of the consolidation of state apparatuses in these countries, Uriarte underlines the essential role that war (in connection to empire and capital) has played in the Latin American process of modernization and state formation. In this book, the analysis of British and Latin American travel narratives proves particularly productive in reading the ways in which national spaces are reconfigured, reimagined, and reappropriated by the state apparatus. War turns out to be a central instrument not just for making possible this logic of appropriation, but also for bringing temporal notions such as modernization and progress to spaces that were described ― albeit problematically ― as being outside of history. The book argues that wars waged against "deserts" (as Patagonia, the