The Poetics of Invocation: Haunted Writing and Political Subjectification in 21st Century Mexico

There is a trend in contemporary literary production in Mexico that addresses a number of social issues raised by the so-called War on Drugs since 2006 –an armed, ongoing conflict that has triggered a generalized eruption of violence in the country. Drawing from a theoretical framework featuring spectrality theory and certain key concepts coined by 20th century French philosopher Jacques Rancière, this research analyzes an array of diverse Mexican cultural production –digital, literary, and journalistic, among others– from the last decade. This essay proposes that these works can be defined as products of haunting that attempt to endow the greatly marginalized social group of victims with social visibility and political subjectification. Issues of memory, language, and justice are fundamental to understand the political agenda underscoring these cultural endeavors that aspire to rehabilitate the sense of community. This work attempts not only to understand and identify such motivations, but also to advance a critique of such an enterprise’s contributions, its potentialities, and its shortcomings