Too Monstrous to Fail? Cannibal Capitalism in the Urban Peruvian Amazon

This paper 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, in contrast to the ecstatic rebel monstrosity of cannibal communism.