Overview

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.

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9781477324165

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Reviews

[An] ethnography noir of the drug economy in Honduras...Carter introduces us to dizzying conspiracies and a lurid cast of characters that make the Hollywood treatment of the subject matter, like Netflix's Narcos, seem tame...Readers who approach this book with an interest in understanding the cultural forms and aesthetics surrounding gang life in Central America will certainly learn a great deal. Others will come to this book with more of an interest in the complex vectors of the drugs and arms underworld, and they will be rewarded by an alternative political mapping of this world. * American Ethnologist *

This is a diabolically original book about urban worlds, carcerality, US militarized imperialism, elites vampirizing young people's energy and hopelessness, and the rippling creativity of those young people and their communities. Jon Carter writes with great artistry, rage, and compassion about Hondurans seeking to walk away from lives made barely livable by the baroque grotesqueries of the illicit webs of extraction woven about them. By terms heartbreaking and heart-pounding, Gothic Sovereignty is theoretically nimble and ethnographically rich. Deeply respectful of lived complexities, it offers profane visions and counterintuitive methods for understanding the unfolding worlds in which we are all enmeshed.- Diane M. Nelson, Duke University, author of Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide Jon Carter engages with hypervisible gang violence in Honduras by moving slowly and with deliberate understatement, using a grounded theory approach to build a subtle string of observations into powerful considerations of violence, debilitating injury, and death. He avoids the familiar analytics of deviance and pathology that can become realities of their own, too often foreclosing the possibility of social change. By delving into a prehistory of gang formation in Honduras, Carter takes on the institutional violence that opens the way for political transformation and future making. This book will be widely read and will resonate beyond anthropology.- Laurence Ralph, Princeton University, author of The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence

[An] ethnography noir of the drug economy in Honduras...Carter introduces us to dizzying conspiracies and a lurid cast of characters that make the Hollywood treatment of the subject matter, like Netflix's Narcos, seem tame...Readers who approach this book with an interest in understanding the cultural forms and aesthetics surrounding gang life in Central America will certainly learn a great deal. Others will come to this book with more of an interest in the complex vectors of the drugs and arms underworld, and they will be rewarded by an alternative political mapping of this world. * American Ethnologist * Gothic Sovereignty offers a nuanced anthropological analysis of pervasive gang violence in Honduras, which transcends narrow sociological approaches to organized crime and state corruption in Central America...Gothic Sovereignty will appeal to students of the anthropology of crime, aesthetics, and Latin American political history...Recommended. * CHOICE *

Author Information

Jon Horne Carter is an associate professor of anthropology at Appalachian State University.

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