Cruel Modernity
eBook - PDF

Cruel Modernity

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Cruel Modernity

About this book

In Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco examines the conditions under which extreme cruelty became the instrument of armies, governments, rebels, and rogue groups in Latin America. She seeks to understand how extreme cruelty came to be practiced in many parts of the continent over the last eighty years and how its causes differ from the conditions that brought about the Holocaust, which is generally the atrocity against which the horror of others is measured. In Latin America, torturers and the perpetrators of atrocity were not only trained in cruelty but often provided their own rationales for engaging in it. When "draining the sea" to eliminate the support for rebel groups gave license to eliminate entire families, the rape, torture, and slaughter of women dramatized festering misogyny and long-standing racial discrimination accounted for high death tolls in Peru and Guatemala. In the drug wars, cruelty has become routine as tortured bodies serve as messages directed to rival gangs.

Franco draws on human-rights documents, memoirs, testimonials, novels, and films, as well as photographs and art works, to explore not only cruel acts but the discriminatory thinking that made them possible, their long-term effects, the precariousness of memory, and the pathos of survival.

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Yes, you can access Cruel Modernity by Jean Franco in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Latin American & Caribbean History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Acknowledgments
  3. Introduction
  4. 1. The “Insignificant Incident” and Its Aftermath
  5. 2. Alien to Modernity
  6. 3. Raping the Dead
  7. 4. Killers, Torturers, Sadists, and Collaborators
  8. 5. Revolutionary Justice
  9. 6. Cruel Survival
  10. 7. Tortured Souls
  11. 8. The Ghostly Arts
  12. 9. Apocalypse Now
  13. Afterword. Hypocrite Modernity
  14. Notes
  15. Bibliography
  16. Index