The Garden State: Conceptualizing Nineteenth-century Latin American Environmental Discourse on Nature/Nation's Transformation

Abstract: Imagining Spanish America as Eden and sublime force, colonial environmental aesthetics inaugurated American disponibilité , figuring environment in the colonial matrix of power as the non-place outside of European time and space. The image of the garden evoked by this aesthetics corresponded to the desired, secular transformation of environment, which delimited the location of a colonial vegetal-human relations of extraction. I contend that in the transition period from colony to republic, cultural, political, and scientific discourse used the image and language of the garden to reestablish claims over territory by shifting from the Edenic to georgic mode. I offer the Garden State as a (neo)imperial environmental aesthetic to lay bare the politics and poetics of place-making and its entanglements—through agriculture and horticulture—as part of a response to the rise of liberal agro-economic policy and the proliferation of the plantation model in the work of naturalists, politicians, Neo-classical, and Romantic writers. By placing ecocriticism, environmental history, and plant studies into conversation with garden theory through this framework, I argue we can better attend to the concentric material and literary gardens and garden-like formations tied to plantation logic and the ordered cultivation and civilization of space and human-vegetal relations in Latin America's nineteenth century.