Reading Silva Against the Grain: De Sobremesa a Tropical Novel

Fernández’ civilizatory fantasy in J.A. Silva’s De Sobremesa provides a position from which to re-read discourses about space and place written by elite Colombian geographers and ethnographers. From a vantage point infused in parody, this fantasy deploys the metaphorical arsenal used by elites to encode the Colombian tropics. Thus, Silva unmasks contemporary intellectuals as travelers whose spatial imagination was literary, prophesizes the consequences of conceiving the tropics from a temperate worldview, and mocks the possibility of conceiving national culture as a natural product.