PloCC Seminar Series: Too Monstrous to Fail? Cannibal Capitalism in the Urban Peruvian Amazon

Speaker: Dr Japhy Wilson

This paper begins from the assumption that there is no solution to climate change within the parameters of global capitalism, and asks what the urban cutting edge of our combined and uneven apocalypse can tell us about the nature of this system, and the possibility of moving beyond it. It explores the monstrosity of capital through a surrealist ethnography of the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon: an extractivist metropolis that embodies what Nancy Fraser calls cannibal capitalism, and that seems to confirm David Harvey’s suggestion that capitalism is too monstrous to survive. But a consideration of the radical art and street culture of the city suggests that Harvey’s claim is less self-evident than it seems. The libidinal investment of the subaltern inhabitants of Iquitos in extractive forms of capital accumulation indicates that capitalism may instead be too monstrous to fail. On the other hand, the demonic carnival rituals through which these same inhabitants celebrate their right to a city built on the murderous enslavement of their ancestors, and deliriously subvert their own monstrous pathologization in forms of collective expenditure, suggest that capitalism is perhaps not monstrous enough, and prefigure the ecstatic rebel monstrosity of cannibal communism.