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Narconarratives : posthegemony and space in Mexican contemporary fiction

University of British Columbia

On a local and global scale, narcoliterature narrates the effect of narcotrafficking in Latin America. As many have observed, narcotrafficking is a clear sign of our current epochal crisis. It suggests a spatiality crisis which is clearly depicted by the narconarratives. Is not narcotrafficking after all indebted in territorial conflicts? From a posthegemonic perspective, this thesis focuses on the spaces, affects, habits and multitudes that five contemporary Mexican fiction oeuvres trigger. The latter are: Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda’s Contrabando (1991/2008), Daniel Sada’s Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (1999) and El lenguaje del juego (2012), Carlos Velázquez’ La biblia vaquera (2011) and El karma de vivir al norte (2014). These oeuvres were written in the context of the “Operación Condor” in Mexico until the Mexican and Central America Narco-War. In the first chapter I focus on Contrabando and I develop the relationship between two types of spatiality (“espacio del campo” and “espacio rural”) and the concept of affect. I argue that Contrabando depicts the inefficiency of the Mexican post revolutionary pacts of the early twentieth century, and that it illustrates a new model of state repression that unfolded in the 1980’s in Mexico rendering the state indistinguishable from what it was fighting against. Soon it becomes impossible to distinguish between victims and perpetrators. In the second chapter, following Pierre Bourdieu’s and Jon Beasley-Murray’s concept of habit, I depict the transition from societies of discipline in Mexico to societies of control, following Gilles Deleuze, in both Daniel Sada’s novels. Finally in the third chapter, through two collections of text by Carlos Velázquez, I describe the process of captures and expressions of the multitudes’ constituent power, following Antonio Negri’s conceptualization and revised by Beasley-Murray, in the context of the Mexican Narco-War.

Text

2019-09-03

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/71581

Hispanic Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/