From Here to Tierra del Fuego (Transnational Cultural Studies)

"Beginning with Darwin, who saw the Fuegian Indians as the world's most primitive inhabitants, Magee interweaves the offhand anecdotes of nineteenth-century colonial adventurers with the primitivist jokes of the travelers he encounters. Reading these self-superior texts through the theories and commentaries of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Michael Taussig, Theodor Adorno, and others, Magee explores the West's obsession with seeing its commodities, from Coke bottles to cakes of Pears' Soap, as objects of native fascination and fetishism.". "Bringing the trivial, the offhand, and the anecdotal into the space of politics, Magee demonstrates how links between them and the genocidal colonization of the island implicate even the casual, overtly purposeless tourist in the exploitative structures of global capitalism." "From Here to Tierra del Fuego maneuvers through a history of racial violence, primitivist fantasy, and throwaway lines to reveal the international tourist industry's role in contemporary world power."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.