The Novel of Violence in Latin American Literature

Abstract

In this essay, Tavares-dos-Santos et al argue for the emergence of a new sub-genre of crime fiction: “the novel of violence.” This new mode of narration is a product of the ways in which extreme violence, typically perpetuated by the state and its proxies, has been normalized as a social pattern in late-modern Latin America. In particular, the essay examines the ways in which contemporary Latin American authors both draw on, and reinvent, the conventions of crime fiction to treat the transnationalization of crime and policing networks, the connections between crime, business, politics and corruption, and the cognitive mapping of the microphysics of violence. At stake is the larger question of how adequately conventional crime novels, and the revisions initiated by Roberto Bolaño, Rubem Fonseca and Alfredo Garcia-Roza, speak to the conditions that make possible violence understood as a network of power relations permeating across the entire social body—and whether the “novel of violence” is distinctive to Latin America or reflects wider social changes forced through by neoliberal globalization.