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Palgrave Macmillan

Drugs, Violence and Latin America

Global Psychotropy and Culture

  • Book
  • © 2021

Overview

Authors:
  1. Joseph Patteson

    1. Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Augustana University, Sioux Falls, USA

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  • Bridges the studies of culture and narco-violence and critical work that focuses on intoxication

  • Contributes to the emerging field of the study of narco-narratives

  • Dialogues with wider considerations of drugs and intoxication, such as neuroscience, psychology, culture, and politics

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-x
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  2. Introduction

    • Joseph Patteson
    Pages 1-23

  3. A Dialectics of Intoxication

    • Joseph Patteson
    Pages 25-68

  4. Loaded and Exploded: Countercultural Travel and Its Colonial Shadow

    • Joseph Patteson
    Pages 69-99

  5. From Flower Power to Les fleurs du mal: la Onda literaria

    • Joseph Patteson
    Pages 101-124

  6. High Crimes: Élmer Mendoza’s “Zurdo” Mendieta Series and the Psychotropic Economy

    • Joseph Patteson
    Pages 125-148

  7. Disturbing Innocence: Defamiliarizing Narco-violence Through Child Protagonists in Fiesta en la Madriguera and Prayers for the Stolen

    • Joseph Patteson
    Pages 149-172

  8. Escape Velocity: Narcossism, Contagion, and Consumption in Julián Herbert

    • Joseph Patteson
    Pages 173-205

  9. Conclusion

    • Joseph Patteson
    Pages 207-215

  10. Back Matter

    Pages 217-249
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Keywords

About this book

This book undertakes a psychotropic analysis of texts that deal with the violence of drug trafficking and interdiction, especially in Mexico. While most critics of so-called narcoculture have either focused on an aesthetic “sobriety” in these works or discounted them altogether as exploitative and unworthy of serious attention, Drugs, Violence, and Latin America illuminates how such work may reflect and intervene in global networks of intoxication. Theorizing a “dialectics of intoxication” that illustrates how psychotropy may either solidify or destabilize the self and its relationship to the other, it proposes that these tendencies influence human behavior in distinct ways and are leveraged for social control within both licit and illicit economies. A consideration of a countercultural genealogy in Latin America provides a contrastive psychotropic context for contemporary novels that exposes links between narcoviolence and consumerism, challenging our addictions of thought and feeling about ourselves and our relationships to drugs and narco-violence. 



Reviews

“Patteson’s work makes a highly original and suggestive contribution to the study of drugs, intoxication, addiction and trafficking in Latin America. In particular, his work is a much-needed answer to the critical current, exemplified by Osvaldo Zavala and others, that is quick to discount works that supposedly do little to oppose narco-culture. ... it will certainly be required reading for anyone studying drugs, intoxication or drug trafficking going forward.” (Brandon P. Bisbey, Chasqui, Vol. 51 (1), May, 2022)

“A surprising reading of an extremely important problem that surpasses previous studies of narcoculture and presents us with a broader image of consumer societies, their addictions, and the way narcography configures a psychic architecture of modernity informed by distinct cultural products and areas of knowledge.” (Sayak Valencia, author of Gore Capitalism [Capitalismo gore] (2010), and research professor at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, Mexico)

“Joseph Patteson has produced a perceptive cognitive and affective mapping of drugs in contemporary Latin American literature.  His groundbreaking approach to the subject of intoxication opens an unexplored comparative route between North and South, cutting across habit forming disciplinary and generic boundaries that insist on keeping psychotropics, aesthetic experimentation, and drug wars apart.” (Julio Ramos, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, USA)


Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Augustana University, Sioux Falls, USA

    Joseph Patteson

About the author

Joseph Patteson (PhD, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA) is Assistant Professor at Augustana University, USA. He researches narco-violence in Mexico, placed within an interdisciplinary global framework that highlights the interpenetration of cultural production and the problem of psychotropy. His work has appeared in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos and A Contracorriente.

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