Tropical Landscapes and Nature-Culture Entanglements: Reading Tropicality via Avatar

Abstract

Landscape integrates both natural and cultural aspects of a particular geographical area. Environmental elements include geological landforms, waterscapes, seascapes, climate and weather, flora and fauna. They also necessarily involve human perception and inscription which reflect histories of extraction and excavation, of planting and settlement, of design and pollution. Natural elements and cultural shaping by humans – past, present, and future – means landscapes reflect living entanglements involving people, materiality, space and place. A landscape’s physicality is entwined with layers of human meaning and value – and tropical landscapes have particular significance. The Tropics is far more than geographic and needs to be understood through the notion of tropicality. Tropicality refers to how the tropics are construed as the exoticised Other of the temperate Western world as this is informed by cultural, imperial, and scientific practices. In this imaginary – in which the tropics are depicted through nature tropes as either fecund paradise or fetid hell – the temperate is portrayed as civilised and the tropical as requiring cultivation. In order to frame this Special Issue through an example that evokes tropicality we undertake an ethnographic and ecocritical reading of Avatar. The film Avatar is redolent with images of tropical landscapes and their nature-culture entanglements. It furthermore reveals classic pictorial tropes of exoticism, which are in turn informed by colonialism and its underlying notions of technologism verses primitivism. Furthermore, Avatar calls to mind the theories of rhizomatics and archipelagic consciousness.

The Pattern of Land-Grabbing Practice in Year of the Weeds Novel by Siddhartha Sarma

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Some Things are not held together by Glue: Chunambo and other ‘Sticky Matter’ in Subtropical Macao, China

“…A prime example of this is the Avatar series of films which re-purposed the ZhangJiaJie National Forest Park in China's Hunan Province to represent a distant alien paradise full of such karst formations. In their introduction to a recent journal special issue entitled 'Tropical Landscapes: nature-culture entanglements', the authors show how this trend of using tropicality in speculative fiction, and the Avatar series specifically, is tied to a longer history of western exotification of a tropical other (Lundberg, Regis & Agbonifo, 2022).…”

Gardening in Polluted Tropics: The Materiality of Waste and Toxicity in Olive Senior’s Caribbean Poetry

“…Glissant borrows from Deleuze and Guattari the image of the "rhizome"as opposed to the "root"as a metaphor for illustrating the decentralization and interconnections of the archipelagic geographies and ontologies of the Caribbean. SeeLundberg et al (2021).…”