Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, McGill University
A New World Wrought by Fire and Water: The Theory and Practice of Landscape Transformation in the Early Modern Iberian World.
My contribution to the seminar examines early modern Iberian discourses on the transformation of nature. I trace how Iberian observers in Mexico and South America in the sixteenth and seventeenth registered the profound environmental changes set in motion by the “Old World’s” biological invasion of the continent. This opens up the broader issue of transformation. By exploring the transformative arts of pyrotechnics and hydraulics in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ibero-America, my presentation aims to show the subjective and ideological dimensions of how nature became an object of long-distance colonial manipulation.