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What ever happened to the legend of El Dorado, the tale of the
mythical city of gold lost in the Amazon jungle? Charlotte Rogers
argues that El Dorado has not been forgotten and still inspires the
reckless pursuit of illusory wealth. The search for gold in South
America during the colonial period inaugurated the ""promise of El
Dorado""-the belief that wealth and happiness can be found in the
tropical forests of the Americas. That assumption has endured over
the course of centuries, still evident in the various modes of
natural resource extraction, such as oil drilling and mining, that
characterize the region today. Mourning El Dorado looks at how
fiction from the American tropics written since 1950 engages with
the promise of El Dorado in the age of the Anthropocene. Just as
the golden kingdom was never found, natural resource extraction has
not produced wealth and happiness for the peoples of the tropics.
While extractivism enriches a few outsiders, it results in
environmental degradation and the subjugation, displacement, and
forced assimilation of native peoples. This book considers how the
fiction of five writers-Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, Mario
Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis, and Milton Hatoum-criticizes extractive
practices and mourns the lost illusion of the forest as a place of
wealth and happiness.
The sinister ""jungle""-that ill-defined and amorphous place where
civilization has no foothold and survival is always in doubt-is the
terrifying setting for countless works of the imagination. Films
like Apocalypse Now, television shows like Lost, and of course
stories like Heart of Darkness all pursue the essential question of
why the unknown world terrifies adventurer and spectator alike. In
Jungle Fever, Charlotte Rogers goes deep into five books that first
defined the jungle as a violent and maddening place. The reader
finds urban explorers venturing into the wilderness, encountering
and living among the ""native"" inhabitants, and eventually losing
their minds. The canonical works of authors such as Joseph Conrad,
Andre Malraux, Jose Eustasio Rivera, and others present jungles and
wildernesses as fundamentally corrupting and dangerous. Rogers
explores how the methods these authors use to communicate the
physical and psychological maladies that afflict their characters
evolved symbiotically with modern medicine. While the wilderness
challenges Conrad's and Malraux's European travelers to question
their civility and mental stability, Latin American authors such as
Alejo Carpentier deftly turn pseudoscientific theories into their
greatest asset, as their characters transform madness into an
essential creative spark. Ultimately, Jungle Fever suggests that
the greatest horror of the jungle is the unknown regions of the
character's own mind.
What ever happened to the legend of El Dorado, the tale of the
mythical city of gold lost in the Amazon jungle? Charlotte Rogers
argues that El Dorado has not been forgotten and still inspires the
reckless pursuit of illusory wealth. The search for gold in South
America during the colonial period inaugurated the ""promise of El
Dorado""-the belief that wealth and happiness can be found in the
tropical forests of the Americas. That assumption has endured over
the course of centuries, still evident in the various modes of
natural resource extraction, such as oil drilling and mining, that
characterize the region today. Mourning El Dorado looks at how
fiction from the American tropics written since 1950 engages with
the promise of El Dorado in the age of the Anthropocene. Just as
the golden kingdom was never found, natural resource extraction has
not produced wealth and happiness for the peoples of the tropics.
While extractivism enriches a few outsiders, it results in
environmental degradation and the subjugation, displacement, and
forced assimilation of native peoples. This book considers how the
fiction of five writers-Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, Mario
Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis, and Milton Hatoum-criticizes extractive
practices and mourns the lost illusion of the forest as a place of
wealth and happiness.
The sinister "jungle"-that ill-defined and amorphous place where
civilization has no foothold and survival is always in doubt-is the
terrifying setting for countless works of the imagination. Films
like Apocalypse Now, television shows like Lost, and of course
stories like Heart of Darkness all pursue the essential question of
why the unknown world terrifies adventurer and spectator alike. In
Jungle Fever, Charlotte Rogers goes deep into five books that first
defined the jungle as a violent and maddening place. The reader
finds urban explorers venturing into the wilderness, encountering
and living among the "native" inhabitants, and eventually losing
their minds. The canonical works of authors such as Joseph Conrad,
Andre Malraux, Jose Eustasio Rivera, and others present jungles and
wildernesses as fundamentally corrupting and dangerous. Rogers
explores how the methods these authors use to communicate the
physical and psychological maladies that afflict their characters
evolved symbiotically with modern medicine. While the wilderness
challenges Conrad's and Malraux's European travelers to question
their civility and mental stability, Latin American authors such as
Alejo Carpentier deftly turn pseudoscientific theories into their
greatest asset, as their characters transform madness into an
essential creative spark. Ultimately, Jungle Fever suggests that
the greatest horror of the jungle is the unknown regions of the
character's own mind.
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