Renaissance in the Tropics


Book Description

GAVIOTAS, For the recovery of Earth’s skin There is a new start towards the world. One age that Mario Calderon Rivera, outstanding thinker and humanist, called Renaissance in the sense of both the Italian Renaissance as a change of mind of man to himself, and the contemporary one as a change of mind from man towards nature. The Renaissance, led by this brilliant saying of Leonardo da Vinci: "Everything comes from everything, and everything is made out of everything, and everything returns into everything" especially in a round planet. This also comes to be true in Centro "Las Gaviotas" where they achieved, among other things, the reawakening of the Amazon rainforest in the Colombian savannas of Orinoco. There they join the community welfare with the wealth generated by the sustainable use of tropical biodiversity, which, being located in the equatorial zone, has one of the highest rates of biological productivity. Within this context, Mario Calderon, travels through the last 60 years showing the ideas of the human being when he began to reflect on the effects of his action on Earth. They consist of a new attitude towards nature, seeing himself as being part of one system, with it he can coexist without destroying, understanding their connections, i.e. its complexity. Gaviotas age is this way of thinking. The author in honor of Gaviotas and its founder, Paolo Lugari, sets the theoretical foundations of the progress mankind has made in this respect since the last half century. Gaviotas is an example, a path, but at the same time an outpost of a bioculture that makes its way to protect both human life as well as that from others, which ultimately are subjected to the recovery of the vegetable skin of Earth, by the increase in biomass, as this determines the dynamic stability of the composition of the atmosphere of 99%, of nitrogen and oxygen If this composition would be disturbed by the continuing decline in biomass it would make impossible for human life to exist, something much more serious than global warming. Just warming is only a reductionist analysis of the issue. Development is seen now in productive harmony with nature, without undermining the very foundations of civilization. With an extensive knowledge of the authors who have made the ecological thinking trends of our time, Calderón contextualizes Gaviotas in the present world highlighting its conceptual contributions and its innovative achievements, always pointing to a decent lifestyle without denying the modernity.




TROPICAL RENAISSANCE


Book Description

Between 1839 and 1879, some thirty American artists--including Frederic Church, Titian Peale, Norton Bush, James M. Whistler, and Martin Heade--trekked through Central and South America. Manthorne (art history, U. of Illinois) outlines the particular circumstances in the 19th-century US that turned national attention southward. With eight color and 100 bandw illustrations. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




TROPICAL RENAISSANCE PB


Book Description

A study of the artists who traveled, studied, and painted in Latin America, showing examples of their work, and interpreting and commenting on the artists' achievements




TROPICAL RENAISSANCE


Book Description




Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism


Book Description

In Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism, Samantha A. Noël investigates how Black Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and challenged colonial and other white-dominant regimes through tropicalist representation. With depictions of tropical scenery and landscapes situated throughout the African diaspora, performances staged in tropical settings, and bodily expressions of tropicality during Carnival, artists such as Aaron Douglas, Wifredo Lam, Josephine Baker, and Maya Angelou developed what Noël calls “tropical aesthetics”—using art to name and reclaim spaces of Black sovereignty. As a unifying element in the Caribbean modern art movement and the Harlem Renaissance, tropical aesthetics became a way for visual artists and performers to express their sense of belonging to and rootedness in a place. Tropical aesthetics, Noël contends, became central to these artists’ identities and creative processes while enabling them to craft alternative Black diasporic histories. In outlining the centrality of tropical aesthetics in the artistic and cultural practices of Black modernist art, Noël recasts understandings of African diasporic art.




TROPICAL RENAISSANCE


Book Description

Between 1839 and 1879, some thirty American artists--including Frederic Church, Titian Peale, Norton Bush, James M. Whistler, and Martin Heade--trekked through Central and South America. Manthorne (art history, U. of Illinois) outlines the particular circumstances in the 19th-century US that turned national attention southward. With eight color and 100 bandw illustrations. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR




Luxury Arts of the Renaissance


Book Description

Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.




The Tropics And the Traveling Gaze


Book Description

Offers a new interpretation of the history of colonial India and a critical contribution to the understanding of environmental history and the tropical world. Arnold considers the ways in which India’s material environment became increasingly subject to the colonial understanding of landscape and nature, and to the scientific scrutiny of itinerant naturalists.




Current Literature


Book Description




Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human


Book Description

Giants, cannibals and other monsters were a regular feature of Renaissance illustrated maps, inhabiting the Americas alongside other indigenous peoples. In a new approach to views of distant peoples, Surekha Davies analyzes this archive alongside prints, costume books and geographical writing. Using sources from Iberia, France, the German lands, the Low Countries, Italy and England, Davies argues that mapmakers and viewers saw these maps as careful syntheses that enabled viewers to compare different peoples. In an age when scholars, missionaries, native peoples and colonial officials debated whether New World inhabitants could – or should – be converted or enslaved, maps were uniquely suited for assessing the impact of environment on bodies and temperaments. Through innovative interdisciplinary methods connecting the European Renaissance to the Atlantic world, Davies uses new sources and questions to explore science as a visual pursuit, revealing how debates about the relationship between humans and monstrous peoples challenged colonial expansion.