My Cocaine Museum
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- $36.99
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- $36.99
Publisher Description
In this book, a make-believe cocaine museum becomes a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian gold miners drawn into the dangerous world of cocaine production in the rain forest of Colombia’s Pacific Coast. Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia’s central bank, the Banco de la República, Taussig’s museum is also a parody aimed at the museum’s failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country’s wealth for almost four hundred years.
Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life of gold and cocaine.
This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig’s museum is about the lure of forbidden things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and above all the conventional way we write stories. Please note: The digital edition does not include 1 of the 45 images that appear in the physical edition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If Hunter S. Thompson had been trained by Boaz in anthropology, Engels in economics and Arendt in philosophy, he might write something like Taussig, whose ninth book follows on the heels of Law in a Lawless Land, and is a further study of the ways and means of south Colombia's poor communities. Taussig literally imagines his book to be a"cocaine museum"; it's a conceit that brings Taussig's first-person outsider's perspective together with Colombia's major cash crop, and with the things that people make and use around it. Short chapters riff on a particular person, place or thing--town officials who clap out death warrant-like denuncias on manual typewriters; citizens who distill the lighter fluid-like drink biche as their only income-generating activity; children who mine gold by hand and can go years without finding any--and then spiral out into the entwined histories of slavery, drugs and colonialism, as well as into philosophical speculations."Transgressive substances," Taussig writes,"make you want to reach out for a new language of nature, lost to memories of prehistorical time that the present state of emergency recalls." A book of"spells, hundreds and thousands of spells, intended to break the catastrophic spell of things," Taussig's virtual museum feels as real as the hot, damp rainforest where it's set.
