Overview
"Let me sail, let me sail, let the orinoco flow," sings Enya. Soon, like her, we find ourselves on an extraordinary voyage to the heart of the famed Rio Orinoco with intrepid quester Keith Belton. Through the use of narrative analysis, Belton explores the production of cultural knowledge about Venezuela's Orinoco River—the second largest in the Neotropics and the third largest in the world—and surrounding environs. Beginning with the earliest images of America from the voyages of Columbus, he examines how scientific, academic and novelistic discourse on the Orinoco has engendered a chronologically layered archive (a prime source of information for cultural elites) and a repository of images and impressions (its topos). At the same time, he considers how the rise of mercantilism and globalism has shaped the organization and distribution of both archive and topos. If you have ever wondered how cultural knowledge has emerged historically, and in particular how it relates to larger changes in the political economy of information, then you must come "sail away, sail away, sail away" with Orinoco Flow.