My Cocaine Museum (Carpenter Lectures)

My Cocaine Museum (Carpenter Lectures) by Taussig, Michael. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780226790091.

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 Colombias Pacific Coast. Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombias central bank, the Banco de la República, Taussigs museum is also a parody aimed at the museums failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the countrys 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, Taussigs 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.