5. Humanity: For the Anthropocene

Braddock, Alan C.

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5. Humanity: For the Anthropocene

Alan C. Braddock

Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was a German scientist and polymath internationally celebrated during the nineteenth century for devising holistic, synthetic methods...

Author

Alan C. Braddock

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00341.6

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23303

Chapter subject tags:EcocriticismEcology in artHumboldt, Alexander von, 1769-1859AnthropoceneHumanity

5. Humanity: For the Anthropocene

humanity, n.
1. a. The quality of being humane (humane adj. 1a); (now) spec. kindness, benevolence.
2. a. In singular and plural. Literary learning or scholarship; secular letters as opposed to theology; esp. the study of ancient Latin and Greek language, literature, and intellectual culture (as grammar, rhetoric, history, and philosophy); classical scholarship. In later singular use, chiefly in Scottish universities: the study of Latin language and literature.
2. b. In plural (usually with the). The branch of learning concerned with human culture; the academic subjects collectively comprising this branch of learning, as history, literature, ancient and modern languages, law, philosophy, art, and music. Hence also in singular: any one of these subjects.
3. a. The condition, quality, or fact of being human; human faculties, attributes, or characteristics collectively; human nature.
4. Human beings collectively; the human race.

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Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was a German scientist and polymath internationally celebrated during the nineteenth century for devising holistic, synthetic methods of studying plant geography, geology, and other environmental phenomena. After a five-year expedition through Spanish colonies in the Americas, from 1799 to 1804, Humboldt eventually published more than thirty scientific volumes. He viewed the Earth as a planetary system functioning according to complex but orderly natural laws detectable through meticulous measurements of temperature, barometric pressure, elevation, and other data. Raised in a wealthy Prussian family and given an elite European education, Humboldt brought an interdisciplinary perspective to science that merged empirical study with a romantic aesthetic sensibility. He cultivated a broad audience by conveying ideas and information in multiple media, including works of art he designed and commissioned to illustrate his publications. Humboldt’s best-known publication is Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, a massive treatise based on lectures he gave at the University of Berlin late in life. Published in five volumes between 1845 and 1862, Cosmos described nature as a beautiful, harmonious whole, comprehensible through science and art. With its promise of a cosmic “sketch” of the “universe,” the title discloses Humboldt’s contradictory mix of humility and grand ambition, partiality and totality. A glimpse of that contradiction also appears in various portraits of Humboldt, including one by Julius Schrader, showing the scientist during his last year of life, seated humbly yet towering over Andean mountain peaks he made famous—a figure of uncertain scale, at once human and something more (fig. 1).1 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Otté, 5 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848–62). Scholarship on Humboldt is vast and uneven. For a usefully detached account, see Nicolaas A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). On Humboldt’s visual strategies, see Rachael Z. DeLue, “Humboldt’s Picture Theory,” American Art 31, no. 2 (2017): 37–40.

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Description: Baron Alexander von Humboldt by Schrader, Julius Friedrich Anton

Fig. 1. Julius Schrader, Baron Alexander von Humboldt, 1859. Oil on canvas, 62 1/2 × 54 3/8 in. (158.8 × 138.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This chapter argues that Humboldt’s nineteenth-century corpus and today’s Anthropocene concept share a common investment in universalizing yet contradictory notions of humanity, which have produced an impasse in current conversations about social justice, climate change, and art. The impasse boils down to a dilemma over seemingly simple but intractable questions: Should we embrace or abandon “humanity” as a universal category? Who are “we” after all? Not unlike Humboldt’s work, the Anthropocene concept is fundamentally unstable because it does two things at once: (1) it masks human difference, and (2) it usefully imagines a human collective. In other words, Humboldt and the Anthropocene are implicated in the same troublesome dialectic.

In Humboldt’s view, “humanity” ostensibly bound together people of various groups and geographic origins within a single species. At the same time, it functioned for him and for many of his European contemporaries as a synonym for “civilization”—a measure of human cultural development revealing different levels of scientific understanding, social progress, aesthetic sophistication, and philanthropic benevolence. In the first volume of Cosmos, for example, Humboldt referred to “savage races, who occupy the very lowest place in the scale of humanity,” but he also asserted the following, including a quotation by his brother Wilhelm (1767–1835), an eminent linguist and diplomat:

Whilst we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation, more highly civilized, more ennobled by mental cultivation than others—but none in themselves nobler than others. All are in like degree designed for freedom; a freedom which in the ruder conditions of society belongs only to the individual, but which in social states enjoying political institutions appertains as a right to the whole body of the community. “If we would indicate an idea which throughout the whole course of history has ever more and more widely extended its empire—or which more than any other, testifies to the much contested and still more decidedly misunderstood perfectibility of the whole human race—it is that of establishing our common humanity—of striving to remove the barriers which prejudice and limited views of every kind have erected amongst men, and to treat all mankind without reference to religion, nation, or colour, as one fraternity, one great community, fitted for the attainment of one object, the unrestrained development of the psychical powers. This is the ultimate and highest aim of society.”2 Humboldt, Cosmos, 1:182, 368, 368; quotation translated from Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java, vol. 3 (Berlin: Druckerei der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1839), 426. For other invocations of “humanity,” see Humboldt, Cosmos, 1:316, 369, 2:xii, 447, 567, 568, 635, 673, 741, 3:78, 5:267, 312.

Humboldt thus proclaimed as intrinsic the equality, freedom, and “common humanity” of all people while simultaneously asserting that some communities had evolved to a higher state of civilization or “mental cultivation.” He attributed such differences not only to the development of “political institutions” but also to uneven diffusion of scientific thought, which he imagined as steadily extending its domain into new areas like an empire, eliminating conflict in the process:

The knowledge of the laws of nature, whether we can trace them in the alternate ebb and flow of the ocean, in the measured path of comets, or in the mutual attractions of multiple stars, alike increases our sense of the calm of nature, whilst the chimera so long cherished by the human mind in its early and intuitive contemplations, the belief in a “discord of the elements,” seems gradually to vanish in proportion as science extends her empire.3 Humboldt, Cosmos, 1:22.

Humboldt’s first-person plural reference to “our sense of the calm of nature” reiterates his universalizing impulse as well as his fundamental belief in the harmony of the cosmos as something unveiled by the “empire” of science. His idealist faith in nature’s underlying harmony or “calm” mirrored his belief in the “common humanity” and “perfectibility” of the “whole human race.” Such a perspective firmly locates Humboldt in a pre-Darwinian moment before the late nineteenth-century emergence of modern ecological thought, which brought a new realism to scientific understanding of conflict, disorder, and discontinuity in nature. For Humboldt, since nature itself was an empire of infinite vastness, science needed to be imperial in scope so as to grasp its fundamental order, as he explained in another passage:

We shall never succeed in exhausting the immeasurable riches of nature; and no generation of men will ever have cause to boast of having comprehended the total aggregation of phenomena. It is only by distributing them into groups, that we have been able, in the case of a few, to discover the empire of certain natural laws, grand and simple as nature itself. The extent of this empire will no doubt increase in proportion as physical sciences are more perfectly developed.4 Humboldt, 1:56. On Humboldt’s pre-Darwinian perspective, see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 137.

It will become clear in the coming pages that Humboldt regarded the “empire” of science as an essentially European institution, progressively comprehending both “humanity” and nature’s empire while benevolently advancing the prospects of non-Europeans. Today such romantic, imperial thinking looks politically problematic amid ongoing conflicts over social justice and accelerating rates of global warming. Yet the universalizing concept of “humanity” has not gone away. It remains uncannily resilient, albeit persistently a matter of debate.

Enter “the Anthropocene,” a term increasingly embraced by twenty-first-century scientists and other scholars to describe a new post-Holocene geological epoch of human making, defined by anthropogenic change on a planetary scale and broadly analogous to Humboldt’s centering of “the human” and “humanity” as a universal species category (Anthropos in Greek). In one prominent articulation of the Anthropocene concept, a group of leading earth scientists (including Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen) observe:

The human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system. . . . We put forward the case for formally recognizing the Anthropocene as a new epoch in Earth history, arguing that the advent of the Industrial Revolution around 1800 provides a logical start date for the new epoch. We then explore recent trends in the evolution of the Anthropocene as humanity proceeds into the twenty-first century, focusing on the profound changes to our relationship with the rest of the living world.5 Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A369 (2011): 842.

Though never explicit, Humboldtian echoes here seem especially noticeable in the universal invocations to “humanity,” the pronoun “our,” and “the global environment” as “system.” That these scientists trace the Anthropocene’s origin to circa 1800 also invites conceptual and historical comparison with Humboldt, whose geological activities directly participated in the Industrial Revolution. Before departing for the Americas, he had studied at the Freiburg School of Mines and served as a government inspector for the Department of Mines in Bayreuth, promoting industrial advancements while developing technical skills that remained useful to him throughout his career. According to historian Patrick Anthony, “Humboldt’s science cannot be fully understood apart from the industrial context in which it first developed.” Just as scholars have argued for an earlier chronology of both Anthropocene and Industrial Revolution by pushing their origins to the beginnings of European colonialism and global capitalism, we might consider Humboldt’s ideas and career as having similarly deep historical foundations. In any case, as I will demonstrate momentarily, both Humboldt and the Anthropocene concept have provoked disagreement of late because their mutual investments in “humanity” mask differences and inequities precisely as they imagine an elusive collective—one arguably much needed now in confronting the twin threats of racism and climate change.6 Patrick Anthony, “Mining as the Working World of Alexander von Humboldt’s Plant Geography and Vertical Cartography,” Isis 69, no. 1 (2018): 53; Ursula Klein, “The Prussian Mining Official Alexander von Humboldt,” Annals of Science 69, no. 1 (January 2012): 27–68. For deeper historical chronologies of the Anthropocene and Industrial Revolution, see Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature, March 12, 2015, 171–80; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2015); and Juan-Carlos Córdoba, “Malthus to Romer: The Colonial Origins of the Industrial Revolution,” MPRA Papers, no. 4466, August 14, 2007. Regarding the urgency of climate change, see David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019).

As a way of visualizing this dilemma over “humanity,” the present chapter focuses on a pictorial allegory of “America” titled Humanitas. Literae. Fruges., conceived by Humboldt in collaboration with the French artist François Gérard (1770–1837) as the frontispiece for the scientist’s publication Atlas géographique et physique du Nouveau Continent (Geographical and Physical Atlas of the New Continent [1814], fig. 2). An image discussed at length by some scholars but entirely ignored by others, it epitomizes the impasse concerning Humboldt and the Anthropocene. The picture imposes Europe’s “empire” of science on the Americas (akin to the Anthropocene’s assimilationist erasure of difference) while also suggesting a more-than-European collective irreducible to mere genocide (akin to the Anthropocene’s species perspective). Not unlike the Anthropocene, Humboldt has strong promoters and detractors, whose arguments often center upon “humanity” and related universal categories. Ironically, scholars persistently and un-self-critically employ unmarked, universalizing pronouns—“we,” “us,” “our”—even in making some of the most forceful decolonial critiques of such discourse. As a result, they do not resolve the dilemma so much as keep its polemics in suspension, suggesting the tenacity of “humanity” as a universal category. As Black Lives Matter and other social justice activists have made abundantly clear in recent years, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) communities still find it necessary to assert their humanity in the face of resurgent White supremacist racism, indicating the concept’s ongoing utility. For example, after the murder of George Floyd (1973–2020) by Minneapolis police officers on May 25, 2020, his brother addressed the U.N. Human Rights Council, saying, “The officers showed no mercy, no humanity.”7 “‘I Am My Brother’s Keeper’, Philonise Floyd Tells UN Rights Body, in Impassioned Plea for Racial Justice,” UN News, June 17, 2020, https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/06/1066542. For other invocations of “humanity,” see Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019), 49, 52, 54, 191, 236; and Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston: Beacon, 2018), x, xi, 27, 29, 56.

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Description: Humanitas. Literae. Fruges. by Gérard, François, Baron;Humboldt, Alexander...

Fig. 2. François Gérard and Alexander von Humboldt, Humanitas. Literae. Fruges. Frontispiece engraved by Barthélemy Roger, 7 7/8 × 6 in. (20 × 15.3 cm). From Alexander von Humboldt, Atlas géographique et physique du Nouveau Continent (Paris: Librairie de Gide, 1814). Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Productive visual engagement with this constellation of issues comes from the contemporary Ecuadoran artist Fabiano Kueva, whose Alexander von Humboldt Archive responds to the German scientist’s legacy with neither simplistic celebration nor outright condemnation but rather a complex sense of historical critique and reconciliation (fig. 3). Later I will discuss in more detail how Kueva, by restaging Humboldt’s travels and compositions—including placing himself in the position of European authority—simultaneously interrogates and acknowledges the entrenched influence of empire with a sense of knowing entanglement. That such an artist would critique and embrace aspects of Humboldt’s legacy underscores the dilemma of “humanity” as a category at once imperial and irresistible in the Anthropocene.

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Description: Atlas Géographique et Physique by Kueva, Fabiano

Fig. 3. Fabiano Kueva, Atlas Géographique et Physique, 2016. Photomontage (photo at right: Alejandro Jaramillo Hoyos, Bogotá). © Archivio Alexander von Humboldt. Courtesy of the artist.

HUMBOLDT AND HUMANITAS

A vague and deeply political concept of “humanity” had figured prominently in Humboldt’s thinking for many years, as indicated by the title caption of his Atlas frontispiece, Humanitas. Literae. Fruges. (see fig. 2). The picture represents Minerva (Athena) and Mercury (Hermes)—ancient Roman gods of wisdom and commerce, respectively—offering peace and support to a defeated Aztec leader who bows before them amid ruins in a landscape with background mountain. Scholars have confirmed this figure’s Aztec appearance by comparing the clothing, architecture, and other details to illustrations in a separate publication by Humboldt on pre-Columbian archaeology. Like many of his European contemporaries, Humboldt understood human cultural forms as rooted in and shaped by their environments. In his archaeological study, he asserted, “The rude monuments of the indigenous tribes of America, and the picturesque views of the mountainous countries which they inhabited” reveal that “the climate, the nature of the soil, the physiognomy of the plants, the view of beautiful or savage nature have great influence on the progress of the arts.” Literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt paraphrases Humboldt by saying, “The more savage the nature, the more savage the culture.”8 Alexander von Humboldt, Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of America, trans. Helen Maria Williams, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1814), 1:39–40, quoted in Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 131. On Aztec identification, see Helga von Kügelgen Kropfinger, “El frontispicio de François Gérard para la obra de viaje de Humboldt y Bonpland,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas—Anuario de Historia de America Latina 20, no. 1 (1983): 575–616, esp. 588. See also Michael Dettelbach, “Global Physics and Aesthetic Empire: Humboldt’s Physical Portrait of the Tropics,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287–89; Peter Mason, The Lives of Images (London: Reaktion, 2001), 140–47; and Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 136–38.

The mountain looming in the background of the Atlas frontispiece represents Mount Chimborazo, a volcano in Ecuador then believed to be the world’s tallest peak. By this time, Chimborazo already functioned as Humboldt’s personal emblem; he had famously climbed it in 1802 with fellow European scientist Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858) and Indigenous assistants, gathering data and reaching an elevation of 19,286 feet (1,263 feet short of the summit). As an emblematic prop in Humboldt’s Atlas frontispiece, Chimborazo fictively merged Ecuador with Aztec Mexico to project a generic vision of “America,” exemplifying Humboldt’s tendency to generalize and mask difference. Indeed, Gérard’s original sketch for the allegorical composition carried the legend “America, raised from its ruins by industry and commerce.” To drive the point home, Gérard depicted shadows receding on the mountain, alluding metaphorically to the dawn of European Enlightenment gradually illuminating the so-called New World, which Humboldt’s Atlas documented with maps, diagrams, and data about plant geography, navigable waterways, potential canals, metallurgy, and other phenomena. While wise Minerva extends an olive branch to the defeated Aztec leader, Mercury provides support with his left arm, suggesting the promise of advancement through trade with Europe. The picture might as well have included Humboldt’s portrait standing alongside Minerva and Mercury, but this would have been redundant since his classically educated viewers could readily interpret the ancient Roman divinities as alluding to his scientific enterprise. By thus summarizing “America”—in image, text, and data—Humboldt located it in the cosmos and promised to redeem its benighted Indigenous culture with universal (European) knowledge. Here we see, in Western classical garb, Humboldt’s “empire” of science in action.9 Regarding Chimborazo’s elevation (6,263.47 meters, or 20,549.44 feet), see “Chimborazo, el volcán de Ecuador más alto que el Everest (si se mide desde el centro de la Tierra),” BBC Mundo, April 7, 2016. For Gérard’s original legend, see Mason, Lives of Images, 142; and Dettelbach, “Global Physics,” 288.

Correspondence with his friend Gérard reveals that Humboldt took an active interest in the Atlas frontispiece conception. In another learned emblematic gesture, he deftly replaced Gérard’s prosaic legend with the more concise caption Humanitas. Literae. Fruges. This caption quotes a letter written by the ancient Roman writer Pliny the Younger (61–112 CE) to an imperial official named Maximus, identifying certain cultural innovations Greece had supposedly bestowed upon its colonies. Editors of Harvard University’s Loeb Classical Library translate the terms Humboldt here quotes as “Civilization,” “Letters,” and “Grain” (that is, “Agriculture”). Other eminent ancient classical writers (also probably known to Humboldt) had used “Humanitas” to signify superior cultivation and philanthropic benevolence, traits understood by educated modern Europeans as indicators of “Civilization.” For example, in the first century BCE, the Roman orator Cicero (106–143) advised his brother, “If the luck of the draw had sent you to govern savage, barbarous tribes in Africa or Spain or Gaul, you would still as a civilized man [humanitatis] be bound to think of their interests and devote yourself to their needs and welfare.” Historians of European Enlightenment culture have noted additional traits pertaining to Humanitas during the modern period, but Humboldt’s Atlas frontispiece clearly emphasized this classical sense of “Civilization” as cultural authority and imperial benevolence. As noted in chapter 2, such ideas also directly informed Kant and Panofsky in their anthropocentric understanding of “humanity.”10 Alexander von Humboldt to François Gérard, Paris, 1815, in Correspondance de François Gérard, peintre d’histoire, avec les artistes et les personnages célèbre de son temps, ed. Henri Gérard (Paris, 1867), 237; Pliny the Younger, Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 72–73; Cicero, Letters to Quintus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), §27, 3031. On “Humanitas” in European Enlightenment discourse, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966; repr. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 107–8; and T. J. Reed, Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 59.

Humboldt published an explanation of the frontispiece and caption that leaves no doubt about their intended meaning. In a special supplementary notice composed for another volume of his corpus, he advertised the engraving with this interpretation: “The frontispiece, engraved after a design by M. Gérard, represents America consoled by Minerva and Mercury about the evils of the conquest. One reads below the picture these words: humanitas, literae, fruges. Pliny the Younger wrote to Maximus, conqueror of Bithynia and governor of the province of Achaia: ‘Remember that the Greeks gave other peoples civilization, letters, and nourishment [la civilisation, les lettres et le froment].’ These same benefits America owes to the old world.”11 Alexander von Humboldt, “Supplément,” in Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent, vol. 4 (Paris: Librairie grecque–latine–allemande, 1817), 328 (my translation).

Acknowledging “evils” associated with colonialism while ascribing these specifically to the Spanish “conquest,” Humboldt predicted the uplift of Indigenous people in America through European “civilization” and other forms of largesse. In doing so, he essentially proposed cultural assimilation as the only available option for them—a prescription less violent than outright genocide but one nonetheless defined in European terms. Such an allegory recalls the ancient Roman classical tradition of depicting defeated enemies surrendering and offering allegiance to conquering emperors, who displayed the virtue of Clemency (Clementia) by benevolently sparing their lives. Humboldt’s Atlas frontispiece, with its New World emphasis, assayed a more recent version of this ancient tradition, exemplified in an engraving by Jan van der Straet (1523–1605) of circa 1600, showing Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) metaphorically awakening a slumbering female personification of “America” (fig. 4). Whereas Straet’s Vespucci stands erect at left with a Christian banner and navigational instrument, Humboldt’s Minerva and Mercury enter at right, embodying “Humanitas,” “Literae,” and “Fruges.” Like Vespucci, though, Minerva and Mercury bring civilization.12 Martin Beckmann, The Column of Marcus Aurelius: The Genesis and Meaning of a Roman Imperial Monument (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 206; Melissa Barden Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 261. On Straet’s “America,” see Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xiv–xxii.

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Description: Allegory of America from New Inventions of Modern Times (Nova Reperta) by Galle,...

Fig. 4. Theodor Galle after Jan van der Straet, Allegory of America, from New Inventions of Modern Times (Nova Reperta), ca. 1600. Engraving, 10 5/8 × 7 7/8 in. (27 × 20 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Humboldt’s reputation since the nineteenth century has oscillated widely, garnering both enthusiastic praise and critical scorn in a seesaw of fortunes, owing in part to the contradictory meanings and perceptions of “humanity” over time. During his life, the broad appeal of Humboldt’s writings and persona made him an international celebrity. His influence touched a generation of thinkers and innovators, including Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), Henry David Thoreau, and Charles Darwin, as well as numerous artists, notably the Hudson River School landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900). Countless towns, streets, and topographic features carry Humboldt’s name. In an early posthumous biography, Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903) praised the scientist’s physical appearance in aptly universal terms, observing, “The first impression produced by Humboldt’s face was that of its thorough humanity.”13 Richard Henry Stoddard, The Life and Travels of Alexander von Humboldt (London: Blackwood, 1860), 308. On Humboldt’s pervasive influence, see Eleanor Harvey, Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Princeton University Press, 2019).

During the late nineteenth century, Humboldt’s reputation faded somewhat with changing scientific paradigms and international anti-German sentiment. By the end of the twentieth century, postcolonial academic scholars approached his work with overt skepticism and critique. Such scholarship asserted Humboldt’s Eurocentric imperialism, frequently citing the Atlas frontispiece as an object lesson. Exemplifying this revisionist view, Anthony Pagden concluded, “Humboldt looked forward to a future in which the European would be able to assist the Amerindian in his slow and painful struggle towards a ‘civilization.’” In the Atlas frontispiece, said Pagden, Humboldt “tried to capture this process” in the “hope that one day the Americans might come to resemble the Europeans,” but “in his own time, as in this illustration, his world and theirs were still wholly incommensurable.”14 Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 8–9. See also Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “How Derivative Was Humboldt? Microcosmic Narratives in Early Modern Spanish America and the (Other) Origins of Humboldt’s Ecological Sensibilities,” in Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 112–29; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 109–40; Mason, Lives of Images, 140–47; and Dettelbach, “Global Physics,” 258–89. On Humboldt’s waning fortunes outside Germany circa 1900, see Harvey, Alexander von Humboldt, 20; and Sandra Nichols, “Why Was Humboldt Forgotten in the United States?,” Geographical Review 96, no. 3 (2006): 399–415.

More recently, Humboldt has enjoyed a renaissance of scholarly and popular celebration, driven partly by the 250th anniversary of his birth in 2019 and by growing public concern about the global environment. One historian has praised the scientist’s “radical approach to nature and humanity,” saying this “makes him an astonishingly relevant figure for the twenty-first century.” Other writers have called Humboldt “a visionary . . . far ahead of his time,” “the father of the environmental movement,” a “proto-ecologist,” and a “proto-environmentalist,” even attributing to him “the invention of nature.” Such claims seem unsurprising in light of today’s planetary crisis of climate change. Humboldt’s holistic ideas about nature arguably foreshadowed aspects of modern ecological thought and environmentalism, although the word “ecology” did not yet exist during his lifetime. Some commentators, searching for a usable past in today’s fractious political climate, also reclaim Humboldt as a progressive because he voiced opposition to slavery and espoused relatively tolerant attitudes about racial difference compared with nineteenth-century advocates of genocide and virulent White supremacists. Despite its popular appeal, this twenty-first-century Humboldt revival suffers from selective amnesia and uncritical hagiography, for it often makes inflated claims about his achievements, recycling his own discourse of “humanity” while sidestepping his Eurocentric investment in “civilization,” and ignoring the Atlas frontispiece.15 Regarding Humboldt’s “radical approach to nature and humanity,” see Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking 2006), 2. On Humboldt as the person who “invented the web of life, the concept of nature as we know it today,” a “visionary . . . far ahead of his time,” and “father of the environmental movement,” see Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 5, 58. On Humboldt as “proto-ecologist,” see Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 39; and as “proto-environmentalist,” see Harvey, Alexander von Humboldt, 21. “Ecology” first appeared as “Oecologie” in Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866), 286–87; see also Worster, Nature’s Economy, 192–204. On Humboldt and slavery, see Harvey, Alexander von Humboldt, 215–53.

AGAINST THE ANTHROPOCENE?

Not unlike revisionist scholars who have emphasized the Eurocentrism of Humboldt’s vision of Humanitas and “civilization,” critics of the Anthropocene concept challenge its universalizing attribution of climate disruption and related inequities to an abstract human agent. This generic species designation, they say, elides asymmetries of power and culpability while diverting attention from violently disproportionate burdens faced by disenfranchised communities. For example, in a short book titled Against the Anthropocene, T. J. Demos argues that “Anthropocene rhetoric—joining images and texts—frequently acts as a mechanism of universalization, albeit complexly mediated and distributed among various agents, which enables the military-state-corporate apparatus to disavow responsibility for the differentiated impacts of climate change, effectively obscuring the accountability behind the mounting eco-catastrophe and inadvertently making us all complicit in its destructive project.” In a related study titled “Indigenous Artists against the Anthropocene,” art historian Jessica Horton cites Demos and the Métis artist-scholar Zoe Todd, asserting, “The specter of human-wide culpability for climate change is produced in ‘white public space’—space in which Indigenous ideas and experiences are appropriated, or obscured, by non-Native practitioners. In fact, the map of climate-related suffering and other environmental injustices follows the well-worn grooves of European colonization.”16 T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Berlin: Sternberg, 2017), 17; Jessica Horton, “Indigenous Artists against the Anthropocene,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 50.

A particularly stern critique of the Anthropocene concept appears in Kathryn Yusoff’s book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018). For Yusoff, “White Geology” designates the discipline that gave birth to Anthropocene. White Geology, she says, continues to elide the long history of violence against people of color going back to the early years of European colonialism. She does not mention Humboldt by name, but she might as well have:

As the Anthropocene proclaims the language of species life—anthropos—through a universalist geologic commons, it neatly erases histories of racism that were incubated through the regulatory structure of geologic relations. The racial categorization of Blackness shares its natality with mining the New World, as does the material impetus for colonialism in the first instance. . . . The championing of the collective in geology under the guise of universality or humanity is actually a deformation of the differentiation of subjective relations made in and through geology.17 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 2, 4, 107.

Attentive to the politics of language, Yusoff further contends that “to be included in the ‘we’ of the Anthropocene is to be silenced by a claim to universalism that fails to notice its subjugations, taking part in a planetary condition in which no part was accorded in terms of subjectivity. The supposed ‘we’ further legitimates and justifies the racialized inequalities that are bound up in social geologies.” Yusoff effectively dismisses all universal, collective notions as evidence of unmarked White racism.18 Yusoff, 12 (emphasis in original).

Given Yusoff’s apparent fastidiousness about the coercive power of universalizing language, her own repeated use of unmarked first-person plural pronouns—referring to “we” and “us” (without quotation marks) more than thirty times—is surprising, especially since she never bothers to identify or locate herself as a scholar or person vis-à-vis the political ecology in question. The back cover of Yusoff’s book explains that she is “professor of inhuman geography at Queen Mary University of London,” affiliations suggesting a particular institutional history and privilege, but these remain unacknowledged and unexamined in her text. Pointing out such contradictions might seem a petty ad hominem attack, but Yusoff’s own insistence upon the violent role of universalizing language invites critical scrutiny. Indeed, she argues that “the Anthropocene” functions linguistically in a manner similar to the pronouns “we” and “us” by tacitly asserting White normativity, so her reliance on these pronouns instantiates the very problem she intends to expose. Yusoff even admiringly quotes a number of writers who similarly invoke the same pronouns, including Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Césaire, James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Katherine McKittrick, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, Édouard Glissant, Tina Campt, Dionne Brand, and Maurice Blanchot. Demos and Horton use universalizing pronouns extensively as well, prompting the question: Who are “we” and “us” in these ostensibly antiuniversalist texts?19 Yusoff uses the pronouns “we” or “us” without quotation marks on the following pages (several pages with multiple instances): 13, 14, 15, 20, 24, 27, 28, 33, 42, 44, 52, 56, 58, 63, 80, 81, 91, 101, 104, 105, and 107. She cites the other authors on pages 1, 11, 15, 16, 38, 47, 51, 62, 76, 87, 95, 97, and 100. First-person plural pronouns appear throughout Demos, Against the Anthropocene; and Horton, “Indigenous Artists against the Anthropocene.”

For the record, I am a White, cisgender, heterosexual man of Western European descent who speaks English and is a U.S. citizen, born near the end of the baby boom, the son of a petit bourgeois university professor and tenant farmer’s daughter. My ancestors were a mix of Dutch, Swedish, Swiss, and Scots-Irish, who immigrated to the United States mostly during the nineteenth century, except for my maternal grandfather, who arrived at Ellis Island in 1921 from the Netherlands. This profile locates my family within a broad trajectory of Euro-American settler colonialism, beneficiaries of White privilege to be sure, but remote from the haute bourgeoisie or aristocratic elite. I teach at William & Mary, a public institution named after the king and queen of England and founded in Virginia by colonial charter in 1693, with complex entanglements in the history of slavery.20 “Slavery at William & Mary: A Brief Overview,” https://www.wm.edu/sites/enslavedmemorial/slavery-at-wm/index.php.

Humboldt’s civilizing vision of “humanity” and his promotion of Europe’s “empire” of science for the advancement of “America” foreshadowed the Anthropocene as a universalizing idea that erases difference within a contested political ecology. Late twentieth-century critiques of Humboldt cited earlier by Pagden, Pratt, and other scholars likewise anticipate the antiuniversalist approaches of Demos, Horton, and Yusoff regarding the Anthropocene. Should “we” therefore abandon Humboldt, “humanity,” and the Anthropocene concept? If so, what is the price to be paid? Or is there something of value to be gleaned from them, problematic though they are? Do they at least help provoke imagination of a new, more complex collective in the making?

I see the inadvertent, yet persistent, invocations of “we,” “our,” and “us” by Yusoff and others as expressions of desire for such a collective—one that strives to represent humanity in a fuller sense of diversity and equity while critically acknowledging historical violence. To cite the words of Césaire in a text quoted by Yusoff, such a new collective would imagine “a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.” All these writers apparently imagine some sort of community or collective that includes themselves, however vaguely. Perhaps this helps explain a note of optimism—or least ambivalence—in Yusoff’s assessment of the future prospects of the Anthropocene concept. She says, “A tentative movement toward the decolonialization of the Anthropocene might be made through geo-Poethics,” which “would turn against Man and the homogenizing impulse of humanist tropes into another world of matter that puts race as central to the geosocial and geo-Poethical formations of the Anthropocene.”21 Yusoff, Billion Black Anthropocenes, 31 (quoting Césaire), 104.

CONCLUSION: THE HUMBOLDT EFFECT

As I have tried to suggest, the dilemma of “humanity” and the Anthropocene as universal concepts is not new. In an essay on the Anthropocene, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty acknowledged the problem of reconciling universalism with a need to retain “what is of obvious value in our postcolonial suspicion of the universal,” but he also observed, “The crisis of climate change calls for thinking simultaneously on both registers.”22 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 219–20.

The contemporary Ecuadoran artist Fabiano Kueva productively thinks on both registers in a creative project titled Alexander von Humboldt Archive. Combining performance, video, sound, and other media, Kueva’s project expresses Indigenous and Latinx decolonial perspectives on the legacies of empire. Dressing in period European clothing and retracing the scientist’s travels through the Andes region, Kueva poses in self-portraits as—and alongside—Humboldt, thereby (re-)constructing an alternative version of the scientist’s paper trail, including fictionalized reproductions of letters, maps, prints, and other documents. Interviewed about the project, Kueva has said, “My technique is not that of a formal investigation. I pervert the sentences, I change the punctuation, I alter the whole speech of Humboldt. It is the trip backwards. I have taken all liberties to manipulate letters, texts, as I have wanted and needed, because that writing is already fragmented of origin.”23 Kueva quoted in Gabriela Ruiz Agila, “Fabiano Kueva: Entre el archivo y la huella de Humboldt,” La Barra Espaciadora, April 7, 2016.

Restaging the 1814 Atlas frontispiece in one of his multimedia tableaux, Kueva posed as Humboldt in the position originally occupied by Minerva and Mercury, astutely revealing meanings that were only implicit in the original allegory and changing the setting (see fig. 3). In an email exchange, Kueva sent me the following statement explaining his ideas:

The journey of Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland is part of the geopolitics of European imperial science. Its zero point is: the equinoctial line; and its journey: an exhaustive inventory that seeks to show “the resources” and codify the “forces of nature,” from the exactitude of science and a romantic reason. The travelers draw a series of physical maps that transform the American space into a geography, determined in its territorial limits and its borders of knowledge; . . . they produce a repertoire of picturesque views that will later become national landscapes, an aestheticized version of our complexity. The imperial gaze on the indigenous, Andean or Aztec world inscribes an idealized vision of the “past,” always in analogy with the ancient Greco-Roman or Egyptian civilizations.24 Fabiano Kueva, pers. comm., January 10, 2021 (my translation, emphasis in original).

The artist also referred to Humboldt’s Atlas frontispiece, calling it “a frank gesture of a civilizing-civilized relationship, an allegory of European science as ‘redemption’ and as ‘natural destiny’ for the young American nations, which resonates to this day.” Kueva’s thinking here recalls the critical interpretations cited earlier in its confrontation with the imperial implications of Humboldt’s “civilizing” scientific/aesthetic enterprise. Not unlike Yusoff and the other scholars, he uses a universalizing first-person pronoun in describing “our complexity,” presumably meaning “the indigenous, Andean or Aztec world.”25 Kueva. Elsewhere Kueva has closely attended to the coercive power of universalizing language, including “the use of the ‘plural’ subject: the marking of an ambiguous ‘we’ as an author’s strategy.” Fabiano Kueva, Archivo Alexander von Humboldt (Quito: n.p., 2015), 24, 37 (my translation).

In contrast to Kueva’s straightforwardly decolonial statement, a subtler expression appears in his art—specifically his self-inclusion as Humboldt in the position previously occupied by Minerva and Mercury. The substitution suggests an acknowledgment by this contemporary Ecuadoran artist of his own implication with those paragons of European “civilization” and the legacy they represent, for better or worse. Kueva’s text articulates the familiar decolonial critique, but his picture implies something else, as if “our complexity” encompasses an inextricable connection with Humboldt.

Interviewed during the 2019 commemorative events surrounding Humboldt’s 250th birthday, which included an exhibition and related programs at the Palace Museum in Berlin, Kueva voiced additional considerations that further complicate the well known decolonial narrative. Using nuanced language, he said that the German scientist produced “maps . . . like an X-ray of Latin America on which one can see environmental and social problems that have a lot to do with the scientific discourse today” as well as “a narrative that can make you ask yourself questions about these landscapes.” Neither hagiography nor condemnation, Kueva’s assessment mirrored the recursive, self-reflexive approach of his art by acknowledging his own entanglement in—and critical conversation with—Humboldt’s legacy. Kueva thereby provides a creative model for reimagining humanity and the Anthropocene with a built-in sense of differentiation, akin to Césaire’s “true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.” Such an approach, it seems to me, helps envision a much-needed new collective by building constructively upon the contested past without foreclosing the future.26 Fabiano Kueva interviewed in Who Is Alexander von Humboldt? (Berlin: Humboldt Forum, Palace Museum, 2019).

Epigraph: “humanity, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/89280.

1 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Otté, 5 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848–62). Scholarship on Humboldt is vast and uneven. For a usefully detached account, see Nicolaas A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). On Humboldt’s visual strategies, see Rachael Z. DeLue, “Humboldt’s Picture Theory,” American Art 31, no. 2 (2017): 37–40. »

2 Humboldt, Cosmos, 1:182, 368, 368; quotation translated from Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java, vol. 3 (Berlin: Druckerei der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1839), 426. For other invocations of “humanity,” see Humboldt, Cosmos, 1:316, 369, 2:xii, 447, 567, 568, 635, 673, 741, 3:78, 5:267, 312. »

3 Humboldt, Cosmos, 1:22. »

4 Humboldt, 1:56. On Humboldt’s pre-Darwinian perspective, see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 137. »

5 Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A369 (2011): 842. »

6 Patrick Anthony, “Mining as the Working World of Alexander von Humboldt’s Plant Geography and Vertical Cartography,” Isis 69, no. 1 (2018): 53; Ursula Klein, “The Prussian Mining Official Alexander von Humboldt,” Annals of Science 69, no. 1 (January 2012): 27–68. For deeper historical chronologies of the Anthropocene and Industrial Revolution, see Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature, March 12, 2015, 171–80; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2015); and Juan-Carlos Córdoba, “Malthus to Romer: The Colonial Origins of the Industrial Revolution,” MPRA Papers, no. 4466, August 14, 2007. Regarding the urgency of climate change, see David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019). »

7 “‘I Am My Brother’s Keeper’, Philonise Floyd Tells UN Rights Body, in Impassioned Plea for Racial Justice,” UN News, June 17, 2020, https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/06/1066542. For other invocations of “humanity,” see Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019), 49, 52, 54, 191, 236; and Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston: Beacon, 2018), x, xi, 27, 29, 56. »

8 Alexander von Humboldt, Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of America, trans. Helen Maria Williams, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1814), 1:39–40, quoted in Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 131. On Aztec identification, see Helga von Kügelgen Kropfinger, “El frontispicio de François Gérard para la obra de viaje de Humboldt y Bonpland,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas—Anuario de Historia de America Latina 20, no. 1 (1983): 575–616, esp. 588. See also Michael Dettelbach, “Global Physics and Aesthetic Empire: Humboldt’s Physical Portrait of the Tropics,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287–89; Peter Mason, The Lives of Images (London: Reaktion, 2001), 140–47; and Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 136–38. »

9 Regarding Chimborazo’s elevation (6,263.47 meters, or 20,549.44 feet), see “Chimborazo, el volcán de Ecuador más alto que el Everest (si se mide desde el centro de la Tierra),” BBC Mundo, April 7, 2016. For Gérard’s original legend, see Mason, Lives of Images, 142; and Dettelbach, “Global Physics,” 288. »

10 Alexander von Humboldt to François Gérard, Paris, 1815, in Correspondance de François Gérard, peintre d’histoire, avec les artistes et les personnages célèbre de son temps, ed. Henri Gérard (Paris, 1867), 237; Pliny the Younger, Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 72–73; Cicero, Letters to Quintus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), §27, 3031. On “Humanitas” in European Enlightenment discourse, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966; repr. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 107–8; and T. J. Reed, Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 59. »

11 Alexander von Humboldt, “Supplément,” in Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent, vol. 4 (Paris: Librairie grecque–latine–allemande, 1817), 328 (my translation). »

12 Martin Beckmann, The Column of Marcus Aurelius: The Genesis and Meaning of a Roman Imperial Monument (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 206; Melissa Barden Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 261. On Straet’s “America,” see Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xiv–xxii. »

13 Richard Henry Stoddard, The Life and Travels of Alexander von Humboldt (London: Blackwood, 1860), 308. On Humboldt’s pervasive influence, see Eleanor Harvey, Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Princeton University Press, 2019). »

14 Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 8–9. See also Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “How Derivative Was Humboldt? Microcosmic Narratives in Early Modern Spanish America and the (Other) Origins of Humboldt’s Ecological Sensibilities,” in Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 112–29; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 109–40; Mason, Lives of Images, 140–47; and Dettelbach, “Global Physics,” 258–89. On Humboldt’s waning fortunes outside Germany circa 1900, see Harvey, Alexander von Humboldt, 20; and Sandra Nichols, “Why Was Humboldt Forgotten in the United States?,” Geographical Review 96, no. 3 (2006): 399–415. »

15 Regarding Humboldt’s “radical approach to nature and humanity,” see Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking 2006), 2. On Humboldt as the person who “invented the web of life, the concept of nature as we know it today,” a “visionary . . . far ahead of his time,” and “father of the environmental movement,” see Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 5, 58. On Humboldt as “proto-ecologist,” see Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 39; and as “proto-environmentalist,” see Harvey, Alexander von Humboldt, 21. “Ecology” first appeared as “Oecologie” in Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866), 286–87; see also Worster, Nature’s Economy, 192–204. On Humboldt and slavery, see Harvey, Alexander von Humboldt, 215–53. »

16 T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Berlin: Sternberg, 2017), 17; Jessica Horton, “Indigenous Artists against the Anthropocene,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 50. »

17 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 2, 4, 107. »

18 Yusoff, 12 (emphasis in original). »

19 Yusoff uses the pronouns “we” or “us” without quotation marks on the following pages (several pages with multiple instances): 13, 14, 15, 20, 24, 27, 28, 33, 42, 44, 52, 56, 58, 63, 80, 81, 91, 101, 104, 105, and 107. She cites the other authors on pages 1, 11, 15, 16, 38, 47, 51, 62, 76, 87, 95, 97, and 100. First-person plural pronouns appear throughout Demos, Against the Anthropocene; and Horton, “Indigenous Artists against the Anthropocene.” »

20 “Slavery at William & Mary: A Brief Overview,” https://www.wm.edu/sites/enslavedmemorial/slavery-at-wm/index.php. »

21 Yusoff, Billion Black Anthropocenes, 31 (quoting Césaire), 104. »

22 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 219–20. »

23 Kueva quoted in Gabriela Ruiz Agila, “Fabiano Kueva: Entre el archivo y la huella de Humboldt,” La Barra Espaciadora, April 7, 2016. »

24 Fabiano Kueva, pers. comm., January 10, 2021 (my translation, emphasis in original). »

25 Kueva. Elsewhere Kueva has closely attended to the coercive power of universalizing language, including “the use of the ‘plural’ subject: the marking of an ambiguous ‘we’ as an author’s strategy.” Fabiano Kueva, Archivo Alexander von Humboldt (Quito: n.p., 2015), 24, 37 (my translation). »

26 Fabiano Kueva interviewed in Who Is Alexander von Humboldt? (Berlin: Humboldt Forum, Palace Museum, 2019). »

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