Sometimes a Hippopotamus is Just a Hippopotamus: Animal Tropings in Colombian Culture Post-2009

This seminar will trace the fortunes of a bloat of African hippopotamuses introduced to Colombia in the early 1970s by notorious drug baron, Pablo Escobar, and which, since the 2000s, have been roaming around the middle reaches of the nation’s major river, the Río Magdalena. Having mapped these amphibious creatures’ wanderings beyond Escobar’s country-estate-cum-safari-theme-park, the talk will chart their migrations, as signifying animals, through four cultural objects: a prize-winning ‘post-Escobar’ novel, El ruido de las cosas al caer (Juan Gabriel Vásquez, 2011), an animated docudrama, Pablo’s Hippos (Antonio Von Hildebrand, 2010), a selection of political cartoons and news articles, and paintings from the collection ‘Estudios de paisajes comparados’ (2008-2023) by the self-styled ‘artificial naturalist’, Alberto Baraya. The seminar draws on insights from memory studies, animal studies, political theory and landscape aesthetics to explore what oblique and unsettling insights these encounters with the animal might offer into the ecology, the social and political life and the culture of a South American river in the twenty-first century.

Rory O’Bryen is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. He likes cats, photography, juggling and swamps, and is happy to do the washing up if the talk is a flop.

Please RSVP for the public lecture.

For questions or to request accessibility accommodations, please email the Centre for Comparative Literature (comparative.literature@utoronto.ca).