Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America, 1816–1929 (review)

We have here a rare genealogy of the ciudad letrada and its Others, as revealed by the uses of banditry in Latin American literary texts. Narratives about banditry, the author suggests, could be read as study of monstrosity. For in this trope—banditry—the different cultural elites of the region condensed their anxieties about the political and social order of the new nations. This book, written by a literary critic, should interest social and cultural historians of the region, to the extent that it provides an exquisite and erudite re-interpretation of key texts relating not only to banditry but, more generally, to the anxieties of nation formation and modernity in the fragmented polities and cultures of Latin America.

After a well-informed discussion of the issue of banditry in history (the question of social versus political or profiteering bandits), the author presents the central hypothesis of the book: banditry was the monstrosity that haunted the letrado elites of Latin America during the long nineteenth century. Banditry as a trope, Dabove claims, was the arena for the contestation of national imagined communities. Bandit narratives served as allegories to the violent constitution of nation-states in Latin America. Taking bandit stories as national foundational tropes, Dabove proceeds to present a historically contextualized analysis of 17 different narratives, including Os Sertoes, Juan Moreira, Astucia, Facundo, Los de abajo, Zárate, among others.

Chapters are grouped into three parts, according to the function banditry played in nation-state formation: the bandit as Other; the bandit as instrument of critique; and the bandit as devious brother or as suppressed origin. When construed as an adversarial force, bandits helped to constitute the national self. In the post-independence period, the opposition bandit/citizen was crucial to the construction of state sovereignty. The bandit represented the absence of a state monopoly of violence as well as the reasons for building a more stable social order. During economic modernization and political centralization, the trope of banditry served a different function. It was as a location from which to enunciate a critique to modernity in the name of traditional paternalism, popular liberalism, or nationalism. Once the nation-state was consolidated, bandit narratives contributed to canonize heroic figures as emblems of nationality, suppressing at the same time the violent origins of the nation-state.

In the concluding chapter, Dabove expands Hobsbawm’s model of social banditry into a more complex regime of representation that includes Orientalist motifs, naturalist metaphors, images of monstrosity and chaos, a carnivalesque counter-theatre, an alternative territoriality, and a time outside of history. Quite interestingly, the author presents bandit narratives as the reversal of foundational national romances. Here the romantic relation is lost; love is often replaced by rape, and no offspring are left to regenerate the nation. Rural violence and illegality, not romantic love, were at the center of elite concerns during the long nineteenth century.

The merits of this book are many. There is a true attempt to compare representative texts from different countries of the region. Dabove includes bandit narratives from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, places where rural bandits left important imprints on the imagination of elites. The critical reading of each text is superb, bringing new interpretations that are at the same time historically grounded, argumentatively complex, and quite persuasive. Initially, I was doubtful about the notion of monstrosity in writings about banditry. By the end of my reading, I was persuaded of the importance and impact that the trope of banditry played in writers’ thinking about nation formation. Another merit of the book is the gesture to read the texts from a subalternist perspective. This often means re-constructing the values of the “bandit world” or gang, and placing them in contrast to letrado norms. In the view of this reviewer, a true “subalternist” view would have entailed the valorization of peasant politics...