Latin American Detectives against Power

Fabricio Tocco is assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese convenor at the Australian National University.

Fabricio Tocco’s Latin American Detectives against Power is a magnificent and ambitious work of literary analysis and cultural critique. It is essential reading for anybody interested in the history of the detective genre in Latin America. Moreover, it is also a case study in cultural translation, influence, and resistance, as Tocco shows how and why Latin American authors—from Borges to Bolaño, Ricardo Piglia to Rubem Fonseca—write both within and against a literary tradition imported from Britain and the United States. Finally, and most significantly, this book’s careful and sensitive close readings of individual texts open up to a general theory of the workings of the state in the Southern Cone and elsewhere. Tocco vindicates detective fiction as political philosophy, as a vector through which, in the aftermath of state violence and neoliberalism, Latin Americans have experimented in new ways to think and practice community.

• Chapter 1: The Anglo-American Detective: Individualism against the StateChapter 2: Argentina: The State against Individualism Chapter 3: Chile: Individualism within the StateChapter 4: Brazil: The State against the StateChapter 5: Coda: The Mexican-American Border Seen from Chilean EyesChapter 6: Final Thoughts: From Failure to Community