Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics by Michael Boyden (review)

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• Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics by Michael Boyden
• Abby Goode (bio)

Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics
michael boyden
Oxford University Press, 2022
214 pp.

What might the early American tropics have to do with today's climate crisis? What can we learn from late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of climate, the body, and tropicality that might shed new light on contemporary debates about global climate justice and science? Michael Boyden takes up these questions in Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics (2022), a wide-ranging study of climate and sensibility in American literary encounters with the tropics, especially the Caribbean. Highlighting this lesser-known history of early climate thinking and embodied knowledge, Boyden shows how deeply entrenched conceptions of tropicality continue to shape current climate change debates. In this Anthropocenic era, Boyden's work offers a timely and vital [End Page 485] intervention into ongoing conversations about climate injustice and the interrelated impacts of colonialism and environmental degradation. This book will appeal to scholars interested in early and nineteenth-century American literature, transnational American studies, Caribbean history, aesthetics, environmental humanities, and science studies.

As Boyden highlights, climate was not always understood, as it is today, as a singular, global, and abstract concept oriented toward the future. In the eighteenth century, thinkers such as John Locke prioritized direct sensory knowledge as a mode of understanding the climate: we can feel and understand the climate on our skin and within our individual bodies. Boy-den refers to this epistemological framework as "climate sensibility" or "the mutual imbrication of atmospheric circumstances and embodied knowledge" (2). This framework contrasts sharply with that of today's climate science, which prioritizes weather patterns, simulation, and future predictions over bodily sensations: a wind chill on one's face does not negate the broader phenomenon of global warming. Far from arguing against this point, Boyden shows how abstract models of climate knowledge gradually eclipsed climate sensibility as the dominant epistemological framework. As part of this process, climate transformed from a spatial concept into a temporal one. In its earlier version, climate functioned as an index for "ranking civilizations according to spatially defined zones" (6). This spatial conception of climate was rooted in the primacy of sensory knowledge and the mutual imbrication of bodies and discrete climatological zones. Today, however, climate is understood as a process, its impacts defined increasingly in terms of future projections that elide individual bodily experience.

Importantly, for Boyden, this shift in climate thinking occurred through literary encounters with American tropics during the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries—a threshold period fraught with Euro-American imperialism, industrial slavery, and environmental degradation in the region. By focusing on the tropics, Boyden uncovers a lesser-known, early transformation in climate thinking, one that "prefigures the modern climate imaginary but also points to its fundamentally political qualities" (10). In other words, the notion of a future-oriented, singular climate did not come out of nowhere; it emerged from encounters with the American tropics and histories of settler colonialism. For American travel writers coming from the north, the tropical climate stimulated the senses and provoked anxiety about the atmosphere's impact on bodily health and [End Page 486] moral stability. The tropics, in this context, served as a key imaginative resource for climate theories, particularly as the climate gradually mutated from a spatial concept rooted in sensory experience to an abstract, singular one rooted in averages and predictions. Yet during this transition period and beyond, the settler colonial divisions between the temperate and torrid climates, and the moral, sexual, and bodily assumptions that attended them, persisted in various forms. As Boyden argues, these pejorative assumptions about the tropics—about their inhabitability, their association with moral degeneracy and sexual excess—continue to lurk within today's climate change communication: "What is this 'hothouse' earth if not a futurized version of the unhabitable tropics as they figured in the colonial visions of earlier times?" (32).

The picturesque aesthetic is central to Boyden's analysis of what he calls "the climatic regime"—the key period of transition from a pluralized, spatial climate to an abstract, singular climate. Boyden highlights the...