Tras las huellas de Humboldt: el occidentalismo y el arte pictórico de Johann Moritz Rugendas en las novelas de César Aira y Patricia Cerda

The novels An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000) by César Aira and Rugendas (2015) by Patricia Cerda focus on the South American voyages of the German nineteenth-century painter Johann Moritz Rugendas. Inspired by Alexander von Humboldt, his drawings are characterized by a tension between a scientific urge to document the influence of the landscape’s morphology on the character of the inhabitants, and a romantic-exoticist tendency of Latin American reality. Based on Walter Mignolo’s thought, the article analyzes the coloniality of Rugendas’s pictorial work and its narrativization in both novels, by paying special attention to the tension between a colonial and Eurocentric gaze, which subordinates Latin American reality, and a humanizing and emancipating gaze, which strengthens the consciousness of a distinctive Latin American identity.