Description
Book SynopsisRadical Justice investigates the convoluted relationship between memory and justice as it is portrayed in political documentaries and detective fiction from Spain and the Southern Cone. It argues that the possibility of achieving justice in these regions lies beyond market and state and is yet to come. Rather than focusing on "high literature" Radical Justice uses popular culture as a site from which to question both the inability of the State and the transnational market to come to terms with the dictatorial past and to deliver justice. This book will interest a wide range of scholars, from national literature and film specialists of Argentina, Chile, and Spain, to philosophers and students of ethics, human rights, and questions of justice.
Trade ReviewReading Radical Justice is not for the faint-of-heart, but for the not-so-faint. I suspect it would be worthwhile. In Radical Justice Martín-Cabrera mourns the impossibility and inadequacy of memory and offers some hope in this bleak vision of at least some modes of resistance, found in the figure of the melancholic detective and in the political documentaries of the second generation struggling to encounter the reality of trauma, or the Lacanian Real, in Martín-Cabrera’s lexicon. * Project Muse *
How do we situate ourselves as intellectuals and citizens, before an act of injustice? Is it possible remedy experiences of extreme injustice ? These are the questions that this book explores from a theoretical, legal, political and cultural perspective. Focusing on the case of Chile, Argentina and Spain—three countries that suffered most repressive dictatorships paths in the second half of the twentieth century—the author intelligently analyzes critically the different ways they have tried to answer these questions politicians, academics, citizens and courts, with a particular focus on the political documentary film and crime fiction. ... Martin Cabrera raises an important and crucial question: what is our duty as intellectuals and citizens, to demand justice for victims of different forms of political repression? * Revista de ALCES XXI *
I found the experience of reading Radical Justice to be extraordinary refreshing and engaging. At long last there is a voice among the younger generation of Hispanists who has something really important to say on an interdisciplinary topic that truly matters, not only within but also outside of the academy. . . . Radical Justice is all of an intellectual project - in the highest sense of the term. It is not just another set of 'readings," however clever, not just another stepping stone along the career ladder, however adroitly taken. It is a work of serious and often compelling thought that will provoke others to respond both in agreement and in principles debate. -- Tom E. Lewis, The University of Iowa
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1. The Transatlantic Circulation of Terror: Reflections of the Paradoxes of Political Disappearance Chapter 2. The Politics of Melancholia: Hardboiled Fiction as a Parable of the State of Exception Chapter 3. Gazing at the Real: Trauma and Repetition in Contemporary Documentaries from Spain and the Southern Cone Chapter 4. Toward a Model of Global Justice? El Caso Pinochet and the Limits of Human Rights and International Justice Bibliography
