Across North American and European imaginaries, the Amazon River Basin has figured as both a region rich in “natural resources” ready for the taking, and, consequently, a geography of lands and peoples in need of saving. Both Amazonian exploration and salvation have been characterized by a hyper-masculine discourse of evangelists, explorers, and entrepreneurs seeking both riches and redemption in the jungle. But Amazonian cultures have long generated their own counter-narratives, documented in oral histories, visual cultures, and through spaces such as the Biblioteca Amazónica, a library located in Iquitos, Peru, which houses the second-largest collection of Amazonian maps, images, and texts in the world. This talk describes an alternate set of exploration and saving practices, framed through the lens of a feminist ethics of care.
Since 2020, Dr. Smith and Dr. Silverstein have worked to secure funding for and supervise a project to create an open access digital archive of materials housed in the Biblioteca Amazónica. They describe how this process was enacted alongside practices of mothering their own children, nurturing an inexperienced research team to develop skills in digital archiving, and negotiating with the “fathers”—Augustinian priests—who controlled access to the archive. In describing this process, they engage with a series of questions: What are the complexities of digitally preserving endangered cultural objects as foreigners in a region where endangerment has been produced by patriarchal ideals? How can mothering serve as a metaphor and a practice for programs like the EAP? What does one gain by bringing mothering into the discussion of archival preservation? The speakers will touch on their work with the Biblioteca Amazónica, their relationship with the Spanish priests—the fathers of the archive—who are its de facto custodians, the mothers on their team whom they accommodated through birthing and child rearing, and what it takes to manage a project from thousands of miles away.
An in-person and virtual presentation by Amanda Smith, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz and Sydney Silverstein, Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences, Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine, Ohio
**Co-presented & co-hosted by The American Trust for The British Library