Description
Book SynopsisHector Amaya examines how the dramatic escalation of drug violence in Mexico in 2008 transformed how people discussed violence and the rules of participation in the public sphere.
Trade Review“
Trafficking is a vital and critically sophisticated study of US-Mexico politics and culture at a time of great political and social urgency for the communities, economies, and lives that Hector Amaya theorizes and examines. Turning our attention to the ways in which the trafficking of violence is restructuring life on both sides of the border, Amaya makes a significant contribution to how we think about and study contemporary US-Mexico relations.” -- Josh Kun, editor of * The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles *
“Hector Amaya's weighty, ambitious book sheds new light on the plague of violence around trafficking networks between Mexico and the United States by taking it seriously as a deep philosophical problem.
Trafficking's scope is breathtaking; it is first-rate scholarship that makes an important intervention into an essential topic of our time.” -- Joshua Lund, author of * The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico *
“Amaya’s book … helps readers understand [drug-related violence in Mexico] in relation to narcoculture, digital and social media, and theories of the public sphere. But his analysis works both ways: Mexico’s troubles expose the flaws in conventional thinking about publicity, the state, and securitization.
Trafficking proves an indispensable conceptual tool for a world teetering on the edge of a fascist future, in which we will all be far from heaven.” -- Susan Zieger * ALH Online Review *
"Héctor Amaya’s
Trafficking illustrates the new forms of publicness in popular music, traditional U.S. newspapers, and digital bloggers resulting from the spike of criminal violence in Mexico since 2006.... Amaya enriches the discussion on publicness by highlighting the different ways in which digital media have delocalized public conversation on criminal violence.” -- Diego Cortes * Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly *
Table of ContentsPrologue vii
Introduction. Trafficking, Publicness, and Violence 1
1. Prelude to Two Wars 25
2. Almost Failing: Violence, Space, and Discourse 57
3. Censoring Narcoculture: Mexican Republicanism and Publicity 91
4. Narcocorridos in the USA: Deterritorialization and the Business of Authenticity 124
5. Bloody Blogs: Publicity and Opacity 158
6. Trust: The Burden of Civics 192
Conclusion. Publicity's Contingent Insularity 213
Notes 225
References 235
Index 251
