@article{TERRITORIOS:1438,
      recid = {1438},
      author = {Jimenez-Anglada, Thelma B.},
      title = {TERRITORIOS, ARTE Y SOBERANÍA: LA NOVELA DEL NARCOTRÁFICO  EN MÉXICO},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2017-08},
      pages = {229},
      abstract = {The present study offers an analysis of an often  neglected—and contentious—corpus of Mexican novels  published at the turn of the twenty-first century. These  novels are part of what has been called literature of  narcotrafficking or, more specifically, narconovelas: a  group of texts that imagine the violent world and cultures  of drug trafficking in Mexico. Although critics such as the  Mexican writer Jorge Volpi have claimed that narratives of  drug trafficking presuppose a new magical realism that  reproduce a discourse of Latin American exoticization, I  argue against this notion. In fact, novels such as Yuri  Herrera’s Trabajos del reino (2004), Guillermo Fadanelli’s  Hotel DF (2010) and Daniel Sada’s El lenguaje del juego  (2012) explore the ways in which the machinery of drug  trafficking becomes a generator of literary aesthetics. As  such, these novels present a reformulation of the core  elements of the literary legacy of nineteenth-century in  Latin America, during the period of national formation: the  notions space, sovereignty and art.

They present drug  cartels are crafters of spatial configurations that call  into question the previously ordered spatiality forged by  the sovereign state. Narcotrafficking performs a constant  erasure of the borders and geographical limits. Cartels  form a multiplicity of protean, mobile, unstable borders  that cannot be represented through maps when they take hold  of the territories. Control over a territory—as I argue  these texts show—is established by waging an incessant war  against any and all perceived threats. In so doing, these  novels also attempt to reconstruct and impart order over  spatialities that had been traditionally associated with  the power of the sovereign state but that have become  fractured with the emergence of the power of  narcotrafficking. As art, and as cultural productions,  so-called narconovelas fashion themselves as one of the  very few outlets for organizing this chaotic reproduction  of borders in Mexico. As such, literature itself becomes a  map with which to make sense of this volatile spatiality.  

All of the texts analyzed also coincide in their  representations of this testing of power. Capos, those  commanding subjects at the head of drug cartels, gain  control of both territories and subjects by developing  archaic forms of power. In these texts, capos and cartels  are fashioned after medieval power structures. The drug  lord becomes either a feudal lord or a king that is closely  followed by a group of courtiers; territories grabbed from  the state become a kingdom. Furthermore, this absolutist  form of power that articulates its sovereignty by  distributing systematic death requires the presence of an  artistic subject in its group of courtiers. 

But without  art, or an artist that will fulfill its role, it would be  impossible to disseminate the mythology of the drug lord’s  sovereignty, nor would it be possible to solidify spatial  control. Thus narcotrafficking uses artistic creation as a  weapon at the service of its power. However, the literature  of narcotrafficking attempts to dismantle these inner  workings by subverting them. These novels are not  interested in reifying the drug lords or the cartels. As I  argue, their undertaking points at the articulation of an  emerging set of codes that resists the overwhelming  violence of narcotrafficking, a violence which threatens to  occlude the conditions of possibility of intellectual  discourse.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1438},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1438},
}