Precarious Secrets: A History of the Latin American Political Thriller(Border Hispanisms)

An exploration of the political thriller genre and its context in Latin American politics and entertainment. For the past five decades, a distinctive type of political thriller has been steadily developing in Latin America. Precarious Secrets is a panoramic overview of the genre in the hands of renowned writers and filmmakers from Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, as well as lesser-known Uruguayan and Paraguayan artists for whom the style has been a vehicle for pungent narratives shot through with menace and conspiracy. Fabricio Tocco explores the genre’s unique role in Latin American entertainment and activism. Precarious Secrets traces the evolutions of the Latin American political thriller from its emergence in the 1970s, through the silence imposed by dictatorships and the genre’s resurgence after the Cold War. The political thriller has dramatized the region’s turbulent past, through assassinations, coups, mass killings, revolutions and the search of desaparecidos by human rights organizations. In the process, Tocco isolates the Latin American political thriller’s particular grammar of secrecy. In the Hollywood thriller, revealing secrets involves high stakes and transformative consequences. In Latin American political thrillers, by contrast, secrets produce only more precarity—moral ambiguity as unsettling as it is unshakeable.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Thrilling Gringos: Americans and Europeans Lost in Latin America 2. Botched Jobs: Coups and Magnicides as Precarious Conspiracies 3. Picturing the Slaughter: Massacres, Innocence, and the Political 4. Resisting and Investigating Genocide: Guerrilla Thrillers and Human Rights Thrillers 5. Screening Oppression: Paramilitary, Accomplices, and Unemployed Thugs in Action Coda Acknowledgments Filmography Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Fabricio Tocco is an assistant professor at the School of Literature, Languages & Linguistics at the Australian National University and author of the prize winning Latin American Detectives against Power: Individualism, the State, and Failure in Crime Fiction.

Review :
Precarious Secrets is not just the first comprehensive study of the political thriller in Latin American literature and film; much more importantly, it proposes a radically new interpretation of the genre as a privileged site for understanding the signifying traces of the structural violence that has shaped the history of the region. This brilliant monograph shows how the phenomenologies and topographies of secrecy and disclosure at work in thrillers problematize any facile or unmediated approach to the archives of collective trauma that the genre interrogates. It illuminates the interstitial space between entertainment and critique where Latin American thrillers dare to reimagine the political beyond politics and the state, as a life-shaping, monstrous force that pierces and thrills our mundane existences.--Mariano Siskind, Harvard University, author of Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America Arriving late to the genre, Latin American cinema has revitalized the political thriller, taking it in rich and strange new directions that make classics like Z and All the President's Men look rudimentary by comparison. Fabricio Tocco brings a deep knowledge of Latin American history, culture, and politics to the first comprehensive overview of an important but under-recognized area of recent film history.--Martin Rubin, University of Illinois, Chicago, author of Thrillers