ABSTRACT
We are at the MGM Casino in Las Vegas, watching the throngs gawk at the lion mascots that inhabit a sort of jungle grotto-real, in-the-flesh predators that meander around their enclosure, perhaps curious about the mass of humanity that presses against the glass separating man from beast. The lions are a token for the pristine jungle of Tarzan, a slice of the “dark continent” providing a sanitized sense of “Africanity”—the simulated sensation of being “in the heart of Africa.” The tourists gawk because, despite the obvious simulacrum, they can see and feel the palpable reality of the jungle, brought to life by these living, panting feral trophies, which, figuratively defanged for the pleasure of American tourists, represent the primitiveness of the faraway jungle. There is a circus-like excess here, in the form of a spectacle that can only be possible by the promiscuous mix of capitalism and primitivism. The former literally invests stupendous sums of capital to bring Africa to Las Vegas. “Africa-in-Las-Vegas” is a sign whose import is stretched to its postmodernist extreme, where the boundaries that separate nature and culture are dissolved. Lion and human inhabit the same space, which itself is an artificial creation of the Western, capitalist imagination.
