Taussig, Michael T.,

My cocaine museum / Michael Taussig. - xix, 336 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Includes bibliographical references (pages 319-328) and index.

Author's note : A user's guide -- Gold -- My cocaine museum -- Color -- Heat -- Wind & weather -- Rain -- Boredom -- Diving -- Water in water -- Julio Arboleda's stone -- Mines -- Entropy -- Moonshine -- The accursed share -- A dog growls -- The coast is no longer boring -- Paramilitary lover -- Cement & speed -- Miasma -- Swamp -- The right to be lazy -- Beaches -- Lightning -- Bocanegra -- Stone -- Evil eye -- Gorgon -- Gorgona -- Islands -- Underwater mountains -- Sloth -- Afterword -- Acknowledgments -- Bibliography -- Index.

"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 Rep⬩ca, 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."--Publisher description.

0226790088 9780226790084 0226790096 9780226790091

2003021831


Indians of South America--Social conditions--Colombia--Santa María (Cauca)
Indians of South America--Economic conditions--Colombia--Santa María (Cauca)
Indians, Treatment of--Colombia--Santa María (Cauca)
Slavery--History--Colombia--Santa María (Cauca)
Gold mines and mining--Colombia--Santa María (Cauca)
Cocaine industry--Colombia--Santa María (Cauca)
Drug traffic--Colombia--Santa María (Cauca)


Santa María (Cauca, Colombia)--Social conditions
Santa María (Cauca, Colombia)--Economic conditions

F2269.1.S24 / T28 2004

986.153