ABSTRACT This paper explores the political ecology of subaltern existence at the urban cutting edge of our apocalyptic present, in the case of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon. Through an ethnographically surrealist montage of multiple elements across the themes of accumulation, architecture, and art, cannibal salvage expenditure emerges as a subversive urban style. This style is rooted in the material dynamics of cannibal capitalism, which thrives on the multiple resource frontiers of the region. The subaltern inhabitants of Iquitos seize what they can of its extractive spoils; collaborate with its mafias in the invasion of privately held land; and produce street art that celebrates its plundered wealth. Their relationship to this regime of accumulation is configured by multiple forms of salvage: they deploy practices of salvage accumulation that claw back shards of value and lay claim to slivers of freedom; they kick out the invasion mafias and build salvage communities on the appropriated land; and they salvage Indigenous cultural practices and the refuse of the city in their street art and communal architecture. This complex form of subaltern urbanism is infused with the orgiastic ethos that Georges Bataille called expenditure: the everyday philosophy of Iquitos holds that any surplus should be spent immediately in shared moments of excess; the street art of the city gives uninhibited expression to the libidinal energy of this constant collective discharge; and instances of looting and armed resistance to evictions embody the spirit of revolutionary expenditure in explosions of violent insurrection.
J. E. Wilson (Sun,) studied this question.