Narcoliteratura

Narconarratives often portray drug-trafficking culture through an "us versus them" or "friend versus enemy" Manicheism. This dichotomy erases the role of the government in the history of narcoviolence and reproduces a formulaic and a marketable "good versus evil" distinction commonly found throughout the Mexican literary field. In this article, I analyze two short stories that deconstruct this narrative, "Z" (Julián Herbert) and "Hombres armados" (Daniel Espartaco Sánchez), from the collection Narcocuentos. I approach these stories through the concept of biopolitics, emphasizing the relationship between state and (il)legal violence(s), as well as the authors' positions in the literary field. These stories reframe the friend-versus-enemy rhetoric, offering unidentifiable perpetrators and victims instead. Moreover, they challenge the hegemonic discourse by using two figures that thrive at the boundaries between life and death: the zombie and the homo sacer. However, the anthology's failure to attract a wide readership reveals that Herbert's and Espartaco Sánchez's attempts to subvert the traditional drug-trafficking "grand narrative" has not been commercially successful in challenging the deeply engrained us-versus-them Manicheism.

"When I Wear My Alligator Boots examines how the lives of dispossessed men and women are affected by the rise of narcotrafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, the book explores a crucial tension at the heart of the “war on drugs”: despite the violence and suffering brought on by drug cartels, for the rural poor in Mexico’s north, narcotrafficking offers one of the few paths to upward mobility and is a powerful source of cultural meanings and local prestige.

In the borderlands, traces of the drug trade are everywhere: from gang violence in cities to drug addiction in rural villages, from the vibrant folklore popularized in the narco-corridos of Norteña music to the icon of Jesús Malverde, the “patron saint” of narcos, tucked beneath the shirts of local people. In When I Wear My Alligator Boots, the author explores the everyday reality of the drug trade by living alongside its low-level workers, who live at the edges of the violence generated by the militarization of the war on drugs. Rather than telling the story of the powerful cartel leaders, the book focuses on the women who occasionally make their sandwiches, the low-level businessmen who launder their money, the addicts who consume their products, the mules who carry their money and drugs across borders, and the men and women who serve out prison sentences when their bosses' operations go awry."

[Pre-print draft of article to appear in special issue of CounterText on the ‘Afterwardly’, edited by Norbert Bugeja, 2018].

This article contemplates the question of the afterwardly through a reading of Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014). I argue that in Brief History, anxieties about the inability to summon a future beyond the present – to know a world beyond neoliberal capitalism – are formally generative, providing the very material for experimentation. Far from having exhausted the potential of the literary, the novel instead insists on the vitality of counter-hegemonic representation, and the capacity to resurrect the 'not-known' social totality of an earlier historical event even as it simultaneously struggles to mobilise potentialities of collective agency in the present. This 'event' is the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976, reinterpreted from the standpoint of the twenty-first century in the attempt to reconstruct not only the individual traumas incurred by the attempt, but in order to rematerialise a collective history of the social, systemic and interstate violence incurred by the 'neoliberal turn' of capitalist accumulation in the Caribbean. The reverberations of the event in time, radiating out across the novel's extraordinary cast of multiple narrators, enable a meditation not only on the psychic wounds of the individuals involved in the original event, but a hemispheric imagination of the event's structural causality in the broader context of US imperial violence and hegemony: the political destabilisation of Caribbean and Latin American states through CIA-sponsored drug and arms trafficking, the exploitation of extractivist resource regimes, and the socioeconomic violence perpetrated by structural adjustment programmes, visualising their lived impact on social lifeworlds through the local experiences of organised crime and structural poverty and production of hierarchical constellations of race, gender and class in Kingston, Jamaica. Through a world-literary reading of Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), this article approaches the question of the afterwardly in the doubled sense of temporality implied by Laplanche's interpretation of Nachträglichkeit as the synthesis of two temporal movements: the linear movement of deferred action and the retroactivity of after-the-event comprehension. In a recent definition, Laplanche emphasises the temporal significance of the notion of aprés-coup for psychoanalysis: 'It establishes a complex and reciprocal relationship between a significant event and its resignification in afterwardness, whereby the event acquires new psychic efficiency' (Laplanche 2005: 277-8). In James' Brief History, this 'event' is the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976, reinterpreted from the standpoint of the twenty-first century in the attempt to reconstruct not only the individual traumas

En este trabajo se trata de abordar aquello que comúnmente se conoce por narcocultura desde el punto de vista de tres diferentes aristas; por un lado se escudriñará el narcocorrido a partir de su significado intrínseco y asimismo social, las claves de identificación en base a la exaltación de la vida de los capos con esta contra-cultura y las estrategias del gobierno para impedir su difusión, con la esperanza de frenar las estrategias de comunicación del crimen organizado. Una segunda arista a tratar es el papel de la mujer como reina y como capo en este negocio y su irrupción en el imaginario colectivo gracias a las telenovelas. Por último se abordará la devoción por los narcosantos, Malverde y San Nazario. Se podrá llegar a la conclusión de que la narcocultura es expresión de lo popular y contracultura ante la modernidad, ya que es producto de la tierra, del compadrazgo, de la lealtad y está aferrada a la religión. A la vez es un producto de la modernidad capitalista porque es el cumplimiento popular del sueño del consumismo y de la libertad. La narcocultura también representa la idea de la posmodernidad porque la vida culmina en el momento. Creemos que es exagerado aseverar que la cultura del narco ha sustituido la cultura del maíz, pero no debe menospreciarse el poder de arraigo y atracción que emana de ella.

This essay argues that narco-narratives--in film, television, literature, and music--depend on structures of narrative doubles to map the racialized and spatialized construction of illegality and distribution of death in the circum-Caribbean narco-economy. Narco-narratives stage their own haunting by other geographies, other social classes, other media; these hauntings refract the asymmetries of geo-political and socio-cultural power undergirding both the transnational drug trade and its artistic representation. The circum-Caribbean cartography offers both a corrective to nation- or language-based approaches to narco-culture, as well as a vantage point on the recursive practices of citation that are constitutive of transnational narco-narrative production.

e  n cada fase de su desarrollo, el género negro, al describir la transgre
-
sión de las normas, paradójicamente suele confirmar y reforzar su vigencia. La
narconovela igualmente demuestra ser fruto de una realidad social muy concreta
y un momento histórico determinado. El objetivo del artículo es caracterizar esta
modalidad dentro de la producción negra y criminal, echando mano a ejemplos
de la narrativa colombiana y mexicana. Dicho subgénero, nacido en una realidad
postpolítica, globalizada y de capitalismo
gore
,  manejando  la  profunda  anomia 
combinada con discursos revolucionarios y utopistas, niega al mismo tiempo tres
fundamentos en que basan (o declaran basar) las sociedades contemporáneas: el
Estado y la ley como garante de seguridad, un sistema de valores compartido que
sirva de fuente de la legislación vigente y la visión de un desarrollo equilibrado
dentro del sistema legal establecido.

Luis Manuel Salcido Arispuro, cuyo alias da nombre a la novela El Sinaloa, es un policía con una doble personalidad: agente al servicio del Estado mexicano, que a su vez sirve para los intereses de la mafia del cártel del narcotráfico sinaloense de finales de los años noventa. De la mano de la narración de Guillermo Rubio, el lector se introducirá en el mundo de la mafia, con su impunidad y desparpajo, donde en medio de fiestas, excesos y violencia, descubriremos un personaje carismático, con un hambre insaciable y de una voracidad exacerbada. Ante ello, es válido preguntarnos si es una condición normal de un personaje de su tipo, o si se trata de una maldición de tintes insospechados, así como ancestrales.

Disponible en:
https://revistas-filologicas.unam.mx/acta-poetica/index.php/ap/article/view/906

https://revistas-filologicas.unam.mx/acta-poetica/index.php/ap/article/view/906/1286

Partiendo de las preocupaciones de Zavala sobre la neutralización política de los productos de la narcocultura, este ensayo mira a reconstruir las huellas de una repolitización del periodismo desde la literatura. Se analizarán las implicaciones estéticas, éticas y políticas de la ficcionalización del periodista, de su cuerpo y su voz, en tres novelas de Roberto Bolaño, Cristina Rivera Garza y Pedro Ángel Palou, que se ocupan directa o indirectamente de narcoviolencia. Las figuras simbólicas reconstruidas por estos autores engendran un discurso urgente sobre la responsabilidad de arte y periodismo acerca de la representación del narco y de sus efectos en la sociedad.

En el año 1992, antes de la divulgación de la novela del escritor colombiano Fernando Vallejo, La virgen de los sicarios, de 1994, que daría origen al boom de la denominada narcoliteratura, el escritor chileno Ramón Díaz Eterovic, publicaba Solo en la oscuridad, una obra que, a la luz de las investigaciones sobre narconarrativa y, considerando las características narratológicas de este género, hoy podríamos leer desde este modelo. Previo a la abundancia de textos narcoliterarios, Díaz Eterovic ya aventuraba algunos de sus rasgos: estética traqueta, personajes femeninos víctimas y la visibilización de redes transnacionales en este lucrativo negocio. No obstante, son sus diferencias las que validan la novela en su dimensión ética: los narcotraficantes no son romantizados, sino representados como criminales despiadados y, a pesar de que el detective es un desencantado del sistema político, prima la seguridad de que aún queda gente honesta. Estos elementos, por lo tanto, la posicionan como un antecedente de la narconarrativa, a la vez que la diferencian de esta por su postura crítica ante el fenómeno del narcotráfico.

Resumo Neste artigo, buscamos articular a questão da violência na sociedade, e como se dão suas repre-sentações na literatura, suas construções e dilemas com vistas a obter o efeito de uma narrativa que choque seu leitor, a partir de suas descrições e representações, seguindo as preposições de Slavoj Zizek (2014), Hannah Arendt (2011) e Ronaldo Lima Lins (1990), entre outros. Primeiramente apresentamos as raízes da violência e suas diversas configurações para, em seguida, concentrarmos nossa atenção no narcotráfico mexicano, que é o pano de fundo da narrativa de Juan Pablo Villa-lobos, em Fiesta en la Madriguera (2010). O texto será analisado rapidamente, com este enfoque na violência que é nítida e fielmente construída pelo autor. O romance é narrado por uma criança com cerca de sete anos que não considera, pelo fato de não saber, que sua realidade é banhada de violência, já que seu pai é um chefe de cartel do narcotráfico. Nossos objetivos são observar a violência dentro de uma narrativa hispano-americana contemporânea; analisar seus vários pontos e descrever sobre o contato da violência com a literatura. Conforme os estudos forem avançando, por fim, utilizaremos do enfoque a criança presente na literatura de Villalobos. Palavras-chave: Violência; Sociedade; Literatura mexicana; Juan Pablo Villalobos. Resumen En este artículo, buscamos articular la cuestión de la violencia en la sociedad, y cómo se dan

In this article, I show how Mexican artists Edgar Clément and Tony Sandoval work through representations of mutable, gendered bodies to explore the manifestations of neoliberalism and the kinds of violence that are encouraged or facilitated within that socioeconomic framework. More specifically, I argue that both artists make use of a wide range of monsters and monstrous characters to revelatory effect as they employ a series of specifically Mexican monsters to relate multifaceted stories of violence on a personal and systemic level. This is particularly true regarding their construction and positioning of la Malinche or malinchista characters as the monstrous/revelatory centers of each text. Lastly, I argue that the use of an open medium such as comics/graphic narrative provides both artists with an ideal platform to relate issues of drug-related violence and trauma for two reasons: first, it interrogates what Oswaldo Zavala has called the critical limits of narconarrative, as both texts refuse to present drug or other violence as disconnected from the nation and the state. Secondly, this interrogative power is due in part to the way in which the Mexican reading public has historically been trained to consume and interact with graphic narrative.

El artículo explora el fenómeno mediático surgido en torno a la telenovela La Reina del Sur (2011), basada en la novela homónima de Arturo Pérez Reverte, dentro del marco de la globalización. Tanto la novela de Pérez Reverte como la teleserie coproducida por EE.UU. (Telemundo), España (Antena 3) y Colombia (RTI) son ejemplos paradigmáticos de las tendencias globales en la promoción y distribución de la narco-cultura. El ensayo se centra en la dimensión transcontinental de ambos productos y en su papel dentro de la canonización del género narco más allá de Colombia y México

The infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar certainly contributed to Medellin’s international fame. Since 2011, memorial initiatives relating to the war and the ‘narco-heritage’ in Colombia (museums, memorials, artistic and touristic projects) have started to develop. In Medellin, local guides are now leading tourists in the footsteps of Pablo Escobar. These tours usually comprise different sites with links to the figure of the drug lord, and some also take tourists outside the city, for instance to the Hacienda Napoles – famous for the zoo created in the eighties by Escobar – where some hippopotamuses now wander in the surrounding area. If Pablo Escobar legacy and narco-trafficking unfortunately represent familiar elements to many people in Medellin, this violent heritage can also be associated by foreign tourists with images of strangeness. It is thus stated here that many international visitors still view Colombia as a kind of exotic and dark other where drug and violence rules, and that this image is largely exploited by local and private tourism entrepreneurs when they advertise these ‘Pablo Tours’. If this strategy is certainly working – ‘Pablo Tours’ are among the most popular with Western tourists - the presentation of this specific heritage is controversial, especially for the local authorities who are trying to promote the image of a city recovering from its dark past. This paper will explore the different narratives attached to such a historical and ambiguous figure as Pablo Escobar and will look at the conflicts the touristification of this violent heritage may trigger.

The weight of the figure of Gabriel García Márquez and of magical realism in later generations is the root of a conflict that became part of literary matters. The writer's work has become an inevitable reference for all Colombian writers, no matter how much it is hated, petrifying into a label that is as frequent as, in many cases, erroneous. In the writings of authors like Fernando Vallejo, Hector Abad Faciolince, Nahum Montt or Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the complex relationship with the heritage of García Márquez is reiterated as a secondary theme complementing the image of a violent Colombia.
The article discusses specific examples of narrative works of the above mentioned authors and their very specific attitude with respect to the paternal figure of García Márquez and his work, to love-and-hate, to rejection-and-tribute, to a simultaneous affirmation-and-negation, which results in an ironic transformation and reinterpretation of the concept of magical realism and of the Macondian heritage, and subsequently widens the perspective from which the literary image of contemporary Colombia is constructed, and read.

Se ofrece un análisis discursivo del papel de la mujer en una muestra de 100 narcocorridos grabados y difundidos en México entre 1984 y 2012. Este papel es analizado a través de los nombres que se asignan a las figuras femeninas, sus atributos, sus posicionamientos como objeto y como sujeto, y sus intervenciones dentro y fuera de la esfera de actividad y organización del narcotráfico. Se examina la progresiva desidealización de la mujer, así como un proceso que puede interpretarse ya sea como una conversión trágica o como un desenmascaramiento cómico de las mujeres degradadas o pervertidas en el desarrollo de los narcocorridos.