Description
Book SynopsisGang-related violence has forced thousands of Hondurans to flee their country, leaving behind everything as refugees and undocumented migrants abroad. To uncover how this happened, Jon Carter looks back to the mid-2000s, when neighborhood gangs were scrambling to survive state violence and mass incarceration, locating there a critique of neoliberal globalization and state corruption that foreshadows Honduras's current crises. Carter begins with the story of a thirteen-year-old gang member accused in the murder of an undercover DEA agent, asking how the nation's seductive criminal underworld has transformed the lives of young people. He then widens the lens to describe a history of imperialism and corruption that shaped this underworldfrom Cold War counterinsurgency to the War on Drugs to the near-impunity of white-collar crimeas he follows local gangs who embrace new trades in the illicit economy. Carter describes the gangs' transformation from neighborhood groups to sprawling crimin
Trade Review[An] ethnography noir of the drug economy in Honduras...Carter introduces us to dizzying conspiracies and a lurid cast of characters that make the Hollywood treatment of the subject matter, like Netflix’s
Narcos, seem tame...Readers who approach this book with an interest in understanding the cultural forms and aesthetics surrounding gang life in Central America will certainly learn a great deal. Others will come to this book with more of an interest in the complex vectors of the drugs and arms underworld, and they will be rewarded by an alternative political mapping of this world. * American Ethnologist *
Gothic Sovereignty offers a nuanced anthropological analysis of pervasive gang violence in Honduras, which transcends narrow sociological approaches to organized crime and state corruption in Central America...
Gothic Sovereignty will appeal to students of the anthropology of crime, aesthetics, and Latin American political history...Recommended. * CHOICE *
[
Gothic Sovereignty] builds on a critical framework centered on the writing of Walter Benjamin, offering a nuanced critic’s reading of the experience of gang activity in that country. Carter presents a deep analysis of various aspects of gang activity...These are important interventions in the debate on gangs in Latin America. Acknowledging the critical aesthetics of sovereignty in Honduras and how gangs reflect a challenge to that is an insightful contribution to understanding the implications of gang activity for state power and the ways that violence and governance are practiced that goes beyond much of the existing scholarship. * Latin American Politics and Society *
Gothic Sovereignty is a fascinating read about street gangs and the state in Honduras...Carter is to be lauded for completing an important study that was difficult to finish...Carter’s study warrants analysis by both specialists and the public...If you are interested in political and legal anthropology or the study of organised crime in Central America, I highly recommend [
Gothic Sovereignty]. * Anthropological Forum *
What is most remarkable about this book, however, is how little violence it actually holds. Carter does an extraordinary job of writing about violent acts and violent actors without reproducing that violence . . .
Gothic Sovereignty is an exemplary anthropology, as it is at once method, theory, argument, narrative, positioned reflexivity, and a bit of memoir. The text is theoretically rich, expecting a sophisticated facility with social theory from the reader. * Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology *
Table of Contents
- Preface
- A Note on Translations and Anonymization
- Introduction
- Part I. Angels
- Chapter 1. Flash
- Chapter 2. Baroque
- Chapter 3. Allegory
- Chapter 4. Image
- Chapter 5. Danger
- Part II. Devils
- Chapter 6. Underworld
- Chapter 7. Dragons
- Chapter 8. Crime
- Chapter 9. Storm
- Chapter 10. Rubbish
- Chapter 11. Evil
- Chapter 12. Corruption
- Chapter 13. Lumpen
- Part III: Justice
- Chapter 14. Community
- Chapter 15. Sovereignty
- Chapter 16. Apocalypse
- Chapter 17. Trust
- Chapter 18. Futures
- Afterword
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
