Narrative Complicity in Stories of Violence from Latin America

This book explores why stories of Latin American violence are commonplace. These stories are often set in exotic locations and feature cartel hitmen and carbon copies of cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, ragtag guerillas, and bloodthirsty dictators. This book examines how Latin American violence has become a genre catering to Northern audiences’ appetite for images of either a violent Latin American Other or one who exists in the supernatural realm of the magical realism genre popularised by Gabriel García Márquez.

This book argues that readers in the Global North are at once affirmed and comforted by their distance from these images of Latin American violence while their appetite for such images reconciles the region to an often-dire state of exception. Recognising that it is necessary, and indeed an ethical imperative, to traverse the fantasy that sustains such states of exception that confine people to either magical or violent realities, this book examines Latin American writers including Roberto Bolaño, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Evelio Rosero who have gained varying degrees of international popularity through translation of their works while avoiding representing Latin American violence. Instead, they tell stories of violence from Latin America that hold us all to account.

Through characters from the North whose violence precedes and anticipates that in Latin America, voyeuristic narrators whose enthusiasm for and exaggeration of Latin American violence mirrors our own appetites, and by way of shifting the focus to the global epidemic of violence against women, these stories establish a libidinal network of narrative complicity.