Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Bandit Narrative in Latin America. From Villa to Chávez by Juan Pablo Dabove

2019; Washington University in St. Louis; Volume: 53; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rvs.2019.0013

2164-9308

Rafael Acosta Morales,

Gender, Health, and Social Inequality

Reviewed by: Bandit Narrative in Latin America. From Villa to Chávez by Juan Pablo Dabove Rafael Acosta Morales Dabove, Juan Pablo. Bandit Narrative in Latin America. From Villa to Chávez. U Pittsburgh P, 2017. 397 pp. After producing the core reference book for bandits in the nineteenth century, Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America, 1816-1929, Juan Pablo Dabove continued his project with Bandit Narrative in Latin America. From Villa to Chávez, a book in which he studies the populist resistance towards the total incorporation of the people into the progressively globalized world. This is a work of great ambition, scope and reach, proposing a study of widely spread materials, ranging from Pancho Villa's biographies, through Guimarães Rosa's Grande Sertão Veredas, Jorge Luis Borges's gaucho narratives, to Ricardo Piglia's Plata quemada. This is perhaps the most panoramic representation of the political systems surrounding and related to banditry since Eric Hobsbawm's work. In his approach to banditry, Dabove threads a middle ground between Hobsbawm's romanticized vision of the social rebel and Vanderwood's contemptuous construction of all social banditry as a natural ally of the bourgeoisie. His approach is less essentialist and refuses to offer a unified theory of banditry, but rather focuses on how the discourses by which this manifestation of popular resistance is qualified as without the realm of politics describe the shortcomings of the political systems from within which they are disparaged. The issue at stake in most of Dabove's analysis comes from what he terms the Porfirio Díaz paradox, in reference to the dictator deposed by the Mexican Revolution. In this paradox, the state draws its legitimacy from "The people," but, in a revolution, when contrasted with such people exercising sovereignty, in the state discourse The People have become armed gangs, making any principle of representation impossible … The People in a revolutionary situation is, as mentioned above, a sort of political sublime. That is, the People is beyond representation, in both senses of the term, since the revolution is an interdiction of the accepted means of representation. This means that, for all practical purposes, the People ceases to be a People (purported origin of the constitutional order, but, as an object of representation, a creation of that constitutional order) and becomes a Multitude. (xv) From this perspective comes the structure of the book, where its discourses surrounding multitudes cannot be programmatically structured, as the defining aspects of the multitudes being studied is a rejection of incorporation into a political structure. The book is, then, structured into four parts and thirteen chapters, a structure that is very fitting with its underlying proposition. The nearly absolute presence of political actors termed bandits by economic elites in Latin America during its two centuries in existence is a manifestation of political competition, where, "for the elites vying for national dominance, the greatest threat was not from competing elites across the border, but from the masses below" (262). As Dabove points [End Page 402] out in reference to Vargas Llosa's novel about the Canudos rebellion "La Guerra del fin del mundo," the elites try to peg the Conselheiro rebellion on British interference, as framing the war as one within competing states, might make it not only easier to fight, but also easier to accommodate a loss and to negotiate conditions than it was to contend against a millenarian program of resistance to the economic structure of the Sertão. A contest between the First Brazilian Republic's elite in Rio de Janeiro and the British Empire might be a contest for a different distribution of the economic product of the Sertão's economy, but not a threat to its structure, while the Belo Monte social organization proposed a completely different economic construct. In this way, banditry is not so much a positive definition of a political program, but the collectivization of popular resistance to the institutions of modernity. Dabove organizes his inquiry into four parts addressing different problems surrounding banditry, which is an approach that allows Dabove to engage with the polymorphous phantom of banditry. The first part, "Part I. Banditry, self...