One Hundred Years of La Vorágine. The Critical Gentrification of Selva in the Age of Capital

Abstract

This article highlights the great relevance of Rivera's work, not only for its literary value, but for its
ability to construct, through the confrontation between humanity and Nature, a discourse on current
global modernity. One hundred years after its publication, the rereading of the novel La Selva is justified for two essential reasons: the first is to remember that José Eustasio Rivera wrote one of the first literary works where the transatlantic dynamics of the Capitalocene is exemplified, between Selva (the global South) and the metropolis (the global North), and where devouring is introduced as a leitmotiv to warn us of the danger of self-destruction. The second has to do with the projection seen
from our today, the apparent contradictions and incongruities dissolve when we read La Selva, gentrified as an ecocritical concept, rather than a specific bioregion, that is, as a denunciation of the Capitalocene condemned to devour itself.