Alexander von Humboldt's transatlantic personae

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Notes

1. Humboldt, Essai politique sur l'île de Cuba, II.102. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.

2. See Humboldt, Voyage; Humboldt, Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, trans. Williams.

3. Ette, “Zwischen Welten,” in Humboldt, Kritische Untersuchung, II.227.

4. Ette, “Zwischen Welten,” in Humboldt, Kritische Untersuchung, II.241. Ette has elsewhere called this “vectorial history.” See also Godlewska, Geography Unbound, 245.

5. I use the term “mapping” advisedly here, and in cautious reference to William Boelhower's privileging of what he calls the cartographic text. Such a text, “representing a stratified and temporally rich skein of intersecting discursive and material trajectories across the Atlantic world – allows us to refer to Atlantic studies research practices as a new disciplinary matrix” (Boelhower, “Rise,” 90).

6. On the representational synthesis of art and science, see Graczyk, Das literarische Tableau, 291–410.

7. Boelhower, “Rise,” 85.

8. Humboldt, Essai politique sur le royaume, IV.286.

9. Boelhower, “Rise,” 83.

10. Rupke, Metabiography, 210–1.

11. See Safier, Measuring the New World.

12. See Humboldt, Island of Cuba, trans. Thrasher; Humboldt, “Baron von Humboldt's Political Essay”; and Thrasher, “Baron Humboldt.” See also Ette, Globalisierung, 292; Kutzinski, “Translations of Cuba”; Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 201–6; and Zeuske, “Comparando al Caribe.”

13. See Walls, Passage to Cosmos, 206–9.

14. See Sachs, Humboldt Current, 339.

15. See Rupke, Metabiography, chaps. 3 and 4.

16. See Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

17. I offer here a review of select scholarship on Humboldt rather than attempting a complete account. Such an account, even for just the past decade, would exceed the space of this editorial.

18. There are also a number of print-on-demand or reprint publishers, such as Kessinger, BiblioBazaar, and Cambridge Scholars Publishing, which have, in 2009, flooded the market with cheap editions of just about everything available by Humboldt, most often reprints of old translations. Even the seven volumes of Hanno Beck's incomplete and not very thorough edition of Humboldt's Werke from the 1990s was reissued as a set in 2008.

19. See Zeuske, “Comparando al Caribe.”

20. See also Humboldt, Ensayo político.

21. See http://www.gallica.bnr.fr.

22. See Humboldt im Netz 10, no. 19 (2009), http://www.uni-potsdam.de/u/romanistik/humboldt/hin.

23. See http://www.avhumboldt.net.

24. A rare embarrassment was the 2001 prize-winning reprint of John Thrasher's mutilated translation under the title The Island of Cuba: A Political Essay in an edition by Luis Martínez-Fernández. See Kutzinski, “Translations of Cuba.”

25. HiE will also have its own website with additional materials for scholarly and pedagogical use.

26. Outside of Germany, several recent conferences have been devoted to Humboldt: “Alexander von Humboldt and the Hemisphere” at the Center for the Americas, Vanderbilt University in January 2009; “Humboldt's Transatlantic Personae” at Louisiana State University (LSU) in May 2009; and “Alexander von Humboldt and America” at the British Academy of Sciences, London in November 2009. Earlier Humboldt conferences in the USA of which there are proceedings and/or essay collections have taken place in Boston and at the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies at the City University of New York's Graduate Center: see Northeastern Naturalist, special issue 1: “Alexander von Humboldt's Natural History Legacy and Its Relevance for Today” (2001) and “Alexander von Humboldt: From the Americas to the Cosmos” (2004), for which papers are available at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/bildn/publications/humboldt.pdf. Most of the essays in this issue were either presented at or inspired by the Humboldt conference at LSU, which was sponsored by the Program in Louisiana and Caribbean Studies at LSU. Our collective thanks go to John Lowe and Christian Fernández Palacios for making this event possible.

27. Ette writes mainly in German, French, and Spanish, and little of his work on Humboldt is available in English. One exception is Katharina Vester's translation of Literatur in Bewegung, entitled Literature in Motion, which does Ette's prose rather a disservice. See also Ette's “Scientist as Weltbürger.”

28. Dettelbach squarely confronts the discomfort that historians of science have with the relationship between the natural sciences and Romanticism, still regarding “the emergence of modern physical science [as] escaping from Romanticism as though from a bad dream” (“Face of Nature,” 473). See also Dettelbach, “Alexander von Humboldt.” For a recent account that connects nineteenth-century scientific developments mainly in Britain with the work of that country's Romantic poets, see Holmes, Age of Wonder.

29. For geography, see especially Mathewson, “Alexander von Humboldt's Image” and Cushman, “Humboldtian Science.” For botany, see Lack, Botanical Exploration.

30. Godlewska, Geography Unbound, 241, 264.

31. See Cannon “Humboldtian Science.”

32. Rupke, Metabiography, 185–6.

33. Safier, Measuring the New World, 12.

34. Safier, Measuring the New World, 15.

35. See Gerbi, Dispute; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 124. Pratt's reasons for excluding both of Humboldt's “Political Essays” because they fall outside of her focus on South America strike me as spurious.

36. There are various publications that have come out of exhibitions on Humboldt organized by Frank Holl in Germany, Mexico, and Cuba.

37. See Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation, chap. 7. See also Holl, Alejandro de Humboldt.

38. Esty, “Oceanic, Traumatic, Post-Paradigmatic,” 107.

39. Ette, Globalsierung, 13.

40. Ette, Globalsierung, 13.

41. Boelhower, “Rise,” 94 (my emphasis).

42. Boelhower, “Rise,” 84.

43. See Ette, Globalisierung, 27.