"Cruel Modernity is a tour de force by Jean Franco, the major figure in Latin American cultural criticism. Franco has an unfailing sense of the political and in Cruel Modernity she reveals a kind of madness in the nation-building business. The widespread perpetration of cruelty and gratuitous violence that she seeks to understandkilling, raping, maimingare primary and archaic impulses of permissive masculinities gone berserk, precisely because of their failures in constructing the nation state." (Ileana Rodriguez, author of Liberalism at Its Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text) "In this impressively documented book, Jean Franco argues that modernity requires the establishment of borders that in turn require large sections of the population to give up the basic human taboo against harming others. Although focused on Latin America, Franco's argument about this cruel and hypocritical modernity can travel to globality. Franco interrogates many received ideas such as the banality of evil and the nature of cultural memory. Her look is fixed on the victim: tortured, raped, mutilated, disappeared, murdered. The question of gender is never absent. Modernity's relationship to narrative style, journalism, photography, and film is presented brilliantly. Great learning is worn lightly. Philosophical conclusions are offered with the casual elegance of absolute control." (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present) "Jean Franco indicts the orchestrated mass cruelty that has become a hallmark of late modernity. Incubated in modern militaries, kidnapping, torture, rape, and dismemberment became codified skill sets. Cruelty's trained agents disperse into society, staffing gangs, cartels, police forces, and militias, institutionalizing an extreme masculinity expressed in unspeakable brutality, especially against women. Drawing on vast testimonial archives, Franco unfolds the story case by case across Latin America, insisting on detail, rejecting resignation while confronting the possibility of a civilizational breakdown that makes extreme cruelty a condition of everyday life. A powerful, chilling book." (Mary Louise Pratt, author of Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation)
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Jean Franco
Jean Franco is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the winner of the 1996 PEN award for lifetime contribution to disseminating Latin American literature in English, and has been recognized by both the Chilean and Venezuelan governments with the Gabriela Mistral Medal and the Andres Bello Medal for advancing literary scholarship on Latin American literature in the United States. Her previous books include Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, César Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence, and A Literary History of Spain and Spanish.
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