Infrastructural Utopias in Amazonia: Forms of Desire and Failure

This article studies the articulations of the notion of utopia in relation to the Amazonian space since colonial times. The first part of the article focuses on perspectives that associate utopia with nature, that is, with the space understood as unknown and wild, and with notions such as the “desert”. The become central to the descriptions of the Amazonian and Latin American space beginning in the 19th century, to then think of the figure of the engineer and in the notion of infrastructure within that modernizing perspective. The concept of utopia is associated here with ideas of order, construction and invention. The final part of the article consists of an analysis of the short story “Inferno verde” [Green Hell], by the Brazilian engineer Alberto Rangel, included in the homonymous book, published in 1908. Here the idea of utopia is associated with the unwavering faith in progress and in the capacity of human beings to bend nature to their will, and also with the idea of velocity as the text centers on scenes of navigation that are increasingly being slowed down by the rhythms of Amazonian rivers.