This presentation will discuss the ways of understanding rivers in early 20th century Amazonia, focusing on the work of two Brazilian canonical writers: Euclides da Cunha and Mário de Andrade, who visited the region in 1904-5 and 1927 respectively. With the goal of engaging an interdisciplinary audience, the presentation will include theoretical discussions that can apply to broader debates on ways of understanding rivers and riverine cultures, and more generally about the human-nature relationships and the role of the state in them. For example, the presentation will include discussions on architectural representation of landscapes, discourses of infrastructure, the conceptualization of movement and displacement, and the way of understanding territoriality from the perspective of the modern state.

The study of these writer’s impressions of the Amazonian rivers will focus on the notion of nuance, that is to say, in the ways these descriptions challenged traditional ways of conceiving of rivers as lines drawn on maps. Thus, the presentation will focus on the moments when these authors emphasize issues of instability, changeability, blurriness and imprecision. The notions of nuance and mixture related to riverine landscapes will thus be central to my argument here. I will show how these ideas are seen as a problem or a source of anxiety and uneasiness for an engineer and stateman such as Euclides Cunha, while they are represented in a more welcoming fashion by Mário de Andrade, a writer who was knowledgeable of Indigenous Amazonian narratives and who makes use of a strongly sensorial and bodily perspective to approach the river.