Explores not only cruel acts but the discriminatory thinking that made them possible, their long-term effects, the precariousness of memory, and the pathos of survival
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. The "Insignificant Incident" and Its Aftermath 23
2. Alien to Modernity 45
3. Raping the Dead 77
4. Killers, Torturers, Sadists, and Collaborators 93
5. Revolutionary Justice 100
6. Cruel Survival 152
7. Tortured Souls 172
8. The Ghostly Arts 192
9. Apocalypse Now 214
Afterword. Hypocrite Modernity 247
Notes 253
Bibliography 279
Index 297
Jean Franco (1924-2022) was Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She was the winner of the 1996 PEN award for lifetime contribution to disseminating Latin American literature in English, and has been recognized by both the Chilean and Venezuelan governments with the Gabriela Mistral Medal and the Andres Bello Medal for advancing literary scholarship on Latin American literature in the United States. Her previous books include Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, César Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence, and A Literary History of Spain and Spanish.
"Cruel Modernity is a tour de force by Jean Franco, the major figure in Latin American cultural criticism. Franco has an unfailing sense of the political and in Cruel Modernity she reveals a kind of madness in the nation-building business. The widespread perpetration of cruelty and gratuitous violence that she seeks to understand - killing, raping, maiming - are primary and archaic impulses of permissive masculinities gone berserk, precisely because of their failures in constructing the nation state." - Ileana Rodriguez, author of Liberalism at Its Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text "In this impressively documented book, Jean Franco argues that modernity requires the establishment of borders that in turn require large sections of the population to give up the basic human taboo against harming others. Although focused on Latin America, Franco's argument about this cruel and hypocritical modernity can travel to globality. Franco interrogates many received ideas such as the banality of evil and the nature of cultural memory. Her look is fixed on the victim: tortured, raped, mutilated, disappeared, murdered. The question of gender is never absent. Modernity's relationship to narrative style, journalism, photography, film is presented brilliantly. Great learning is worn lightly. Philosophical conclusions are offered with the casual elegance of absolute control." - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present "Nobody knows more about Latin American culture and politics than Jean Franco, and Cruel Modernity is a magnificent undertaking. A major study of cruelty as integral to modernity, it is required reading, sure to become a classic." - Diana Taylor, author of The Archive and the Repertoire: Cultural Memory and Performance in the Americas "Franco wants to be optimistic about humanity, but she is too honest: all she can manage is the claim that she is "reluctant to think we are all potential killers". Her hesitation is understandable. In Cruel Modernity, turns her acute intellect to the problem of extreme violence in Latin America. State violence, military violence, revolutionary violence: these are all dissected and contextualised. Under what conditions is cruelty possible? To what extent does it require the complicity of governments or other powerful institutions? Are the innumerable atrocities that have taken place in Latin America over the past 80 years distinctive in some way from those that took place earlier or in Europe?" - Joanna Bourke, Times Higher Education, June 27th 2013 "Jean Franco indicts the orchestrated mass cruelty that has become a hallmark of late modernity. Incubated in modern militaries, kidnapping, torture, rape, and dismemberment became codified skill sets. Cruelty's trained agents disperse into society, staffing gangs, cartels, police forces, and militias, institutionalizing an extreme masculinity expressed in unspeakable brutality, especially against women. Drawing on vast testimonial archives, Franco unfolds the story case by case across Latin America, insisting on detail, rejecting resignation while confronting the possibility of a civilizational breakdown that makes extreme cruelty a condition of everyday life. A powerful, chilling book." - Mary Louise Pratt, author of Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation "[W]hile the utopias are gone, the dystopias are still here. They have been given a new lease on life by the ways in which the Latin American state has withdrawn even the pretense of protecting basic liberties. It has fallen to poets and journalists, photographers and novelists, to undertake the task of chronicling realism without the magic. This is the subject of Cruel Modernity. It is a work that charts the coming of age of a new ideological and cultural moment whose horrors appear to have eclipsed hope. Widespread, dehumanizing violence has become a fixture in Latin America. Franco explores it with moving compassion for its victims and perceptive observation of its causes. This may be Franco's best book; it is certainly one that will have the most universal resonance. Transcending disciplinary genres of literary criticism or political commentary, Cruel Modernity is sophisticated yet raw, at once history, sociology, cultural analysis, and moral indictment. The result is haunting, elegant, and tough to read if one is not girded to deal with just how awful humans can be to others." - Public Books
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