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Cruel Coloniality; or, The Ruse of Sovereignty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo
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Extract

[A] historical narrative is not a seamless curve toward the present but the broken remains that are buried and waiting for their resurrection.

[M]emory is not a holdall that can be drawn on as needed but constantly has to be reconstructed from fragments and fortuitous remains. Memory of atrocity is not simply available but is constituted post hoc with the aim not only of clarifying the fate of the disappeared but of documenting a crime.

—Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity

Historical Narrative and Memory: The Former is Usually the Site of Power; the Latter, for Jean Franco in Cruel Modernity, is the site of force. Historical narrative represents Latin American nations as emerging—or, in Brazil's case, emerged—markets progressing on a seamless curve toward a glossy, technologically sophisticated, communicative hypermodernity, whereas memory is the desperate, slow, brute force of the people who refuse to forget the unmitigated cruelty of the second half of the twentieth century in Latin America. Memory here is the continental but subaltern force of family and friends who are still noisily waiting to bury the broken remains of their disappeared sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, comrades in hope or children of a utopic vision. Forensic subaltern memories document the phantasmagoric crimes committed against fragmented and maimed bodies, buried in mass graves or in the depths of lakes from Patagonia to the border between Mexico and the United States, interrupting the gleaming historical narratives that describe the slow but steady progress toward national development. In Cruel Modernity, Franco is part of this force: she is a forensic memory worker, examining the crime scenes, the tortured, raped, mutilated bodies, describing in awful detail who did what to whom, with what instruments, and in what order. One of the most striking aspects of Cruel Modernity is Franco's refusal to look away. Each chapter provides “thick description” of these crimes, as Franco tries to comprehend the excess of the acts perpetrated, the motivations of the perpetrators, the effects on the victims. Several rationales

Type
Commentaries on Jean Franco's Cruel Modernity
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 722 - 730
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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