Cruel Modernity by Jean Franco (review)

Franco emphasizes in this insightful and tear-provoking book that cruelty suggests a “deliberate intention to hurt and damage another” (1). Governments, anti-governments, and criminal organizations are the principal authorities governing its perpetration. Cruelty’s forms range from blunt acts of violence (killings, torture, and rape) to more subtle ones; the sudden “disappearance” of people can be “even more cruel than public assassinations” (192). Those who manage to avoid execution embody the “destruction of the lives of those who must go on living” (171); those who collaborate with the torturers illustrate “the moral ambiguities created by the military regimes” (190).

Eight chapters focus on historical episodes. Chapter 1 considers the 1937 massacre of Haitians by dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Chapters 2 and 3 highlight the disproportionate cruelty suffered by indigenous people and the rape of women, predominantly indigenous, in Guatemala and Peru. Chapter 4 examines torturers and collaborators, distinguishing between cruelty committed by groups “in the heat of battle” and that committed by torturers who “must calculate the degree of punishment a victim can support without dying” (94). Chapter 5 looks at cruel “revolutionary justice” as exemplified by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru and revolutionary groups in Argentina and El Salvador. Chapter 6 ponders the agonies of some survivors and the re-invention of others, and Chapter 7 thinks about those who collaborated with torturers to mitigate their own pain or to gain privileges. Chapter 8 draws from the “ghostly arts,” primarily photography. Chapter 9 focuses on the violence pandemic in Mexico, especially against women in Ciudad Juárez, where the agents of order and disorder are difficult to distinguish.

Franco writes self-confidently from the humanities. Her sources are eclectic. She relies often on reports of “Truth Commissions” but also draws from works of fiction that allow her to uncover feelings, imaginings, fear, lust, and terror. This mix of scholarly historical texts, official government reports, works of literature, and works of art makes her book an absorbing read but leaves those with social-science leanings slightly distressed.

Two verbs represent the strengths of divergent scholarly approaches—to understand and to explain. Franco exemplifies the first option. Readers will understand cruelty in its many forms better than they might through a logistic-regression equation. But explanation is not her strength; nor does it seem her intention. Notwithstanding her assertions regarding modernity, she never explains why this concept makes it into the title of the book or of the afterword. My inference from what she writes is that the practice of cruelty has a long pedigree in human experience, as exemplified in her discussion of the re-enactments of “the conquest” a half-millennium after Columbus. Modernity may have its cruelty, but modernity explains nothing in this book. Hierarchy and difference are responsible for the victimization of “the other” today, as they were in the past.

Franco does not employ concepts from the social sciences to address intellectual challenges. Among her asserted causes for the current violence in Mexico is the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta). In contrast, the considerable social-science work on violence in today’s Mexico now available serves to explain, not to damn. Finally, Franco does not discuss her choices. Why choose some works of fiction but not others? At what points does she leap to highlight meaning at the expense of accuracy? How should we understand the author’s craft, not just her topic?

Franco’s book, nevertheless, is a tour de force on its own terms, thanks to its clarity of exposition, its empathy toward the victimized, and its commitment to understand unspeakable crimes.