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Narco-narratives and Transnational Form: The Geopolitics of Citation in the Circum-Caribbean
- Postmodern Culture
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 26, Number 1, September 2015
- 10.1353/pmc.2015.0023
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
This essay argues that narco-narratives--in film, television, literature, and music--depend on structures of narrative doubles to map the racialized and spatialized construction of illegality and distribution of death in the circum-Caribbean narco-economy. Narco-narratives stage their own haunting by other geographies, other social classes, other media; these hauntings refract the asymmetries of geo-political and socio-cultural power undergirding both the transnational drug trade and its artistic representation. The circum-Caribbean cartography offers both a corrective to nation- or language-based approaches to narco-culture, as well as a vantage point on the recursive practices of citation that are constitutive of transnational narco-narrative production.