Details

Subject(s)

• Gangs—Honduras [Browse]
• Gangs—Honduras—Social life and customs [Browse]
• Police corruption—Social aspects—Honduras [Browse]
• Gangs—Political aspects—Honduras—History [Browse]

Series

• William & Bettye Nowlin series in art, history, and culture of the Western Hemisphere. [More in this series]
• The William and Bettye Nowlin series in art, history, and culture of the western hemisphere

Summary note

Gang-related violence has forced thousands of Hondurans to flee their country, leaving behind everything as refugees and undocumented migrants abroad. To uncover how this happened, Jon Carter looks back to the mid-2000s, when neighborhood gangs were scrambling to survive state violence and mass incarceration, locating there a critique of neoliberal globalization and state corruption that foreshadows Honduras’s current crises. Carter begins with the story of a thirteen-year-old gang member accused in the murder of an undercover DEA agent, asking how the nation’s seductive criminal underworld has transformed the lives of young people. He then widens the lens to describe a history of imperialism and corruption that shaped this underworld—from Cold War counterinsurgency to the “War on Drugs” to the near-impunity of white-collar crime—as he follows local gangs who embrace new trades in the illicit economy. Carter describes the gangs’ transformation from neighborhood groups to sprawling criminal societies, even in the National Penitentiary, where they have become political as much as criminal communities. Gothic Sovereignty reveals not only how the revolutionary potential of gangs was lost when they merged with powerful cartels but also how close analysis of criminal communities enables profound reflection on the economic, legal, and existential discontents of globalization in late liberal nation-states.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Source of description

Description based on print version record.

Contents

• Part I. Angels. Flash
• Baroque
• Allegory
• Image
• Danger
• Part II. Devils. Underworld
• Dragons
• Crime
• Storm
• Rubbish
• Evil
• Corruption
• Lumpen
• Part III. Justice. Community
• Sovereignty
• Apocalypse
• Trust
• Futures.

Show 15 more Contents items

ISBN

9781477324172 ((electronic bk.))

OCLC

1288428053

Doi

10.7560/324158

Statement on responsible collection description

Princeton University Library aims to describe library materials in a manner that is respectful to the individuals and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections we manage. Read more...