Narco Realism in Contemporary Mexican and Transnational Narrative, Film, and Online Media

This dissertation theorizes the political meaning of contemporary “narco narratives” from or about Mexico. It challenges “the narco-realist thesis,” that is, the increasingly common notion that the Mexican drug trade/war constitutes a privileged framework for interpreting Latin America as a whole. The novels, films, and online media analyzed hereing avoid the narco-realist reduction of the Hemisphere to the image of a Narco-Mexico and instead set themselves the task, at once subtler and more ambitious, of using themes of drugs and violence as a kind of magnifying glass through which to perceive, for instance, the nature of power and violence in general or even the ontological basis of reality itself. “Chapter One” equates aesthetics with ontology and explores the inherently narcotic nature of power and sovereignty in Trabajos del Reino by Yuri Herrera and La vida es sueño Pedro Calderón de la Barca. The second and third chapters expand definition of “narco narrative” by exploring “pharmacological” themes and concepts in narratives about Mexico but not directly related to drug trafficking or violence. “Chapter Two” offers analyzes how Jorge Baradit's neo-fantasy novel Ygdrasil contributes to the critique of the common apocalyptic interpretation of drug-related violence in Mexico, suggesting that any real apocalypse would derive from capitalism, not the supposedly radical evil of narcos. In “Chapter Three,” Bernard Stiegler's “pharmacological critique” of capitalism is used to analyze the political ontology of late capitalism in the films of US Latino director Alex Rivera. “Chapter Four” theorizes and the role of the environment in grass-roots resistance to cartel violence as manifested in Youtube video testimonies by drawing on theories of “object-oriented ontology.