| This dissertation focuses on the investment in brotherhood, and in a metaphorology of fraternity as it appears in the portrayal of gangs and para-institutional configurations in Spanish American and Brazilian literature from the 1990s to the present. It also explores the way the State produces and depends upon such fraternal agglomerates. Following Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of fraternity in his Politics of Friendship, the various chapters trace the ambivalence inherent to fraternity, and the way the fiction of brotherhood is often employed in order to justify exclusionary violence.;Written after a period of genocides and dictatorships in Latin America, the works I address often bear witness to the weakening of the nation-state. One of questions the dissertation poses is whether these literary texts may evince a desire for the return of a strong state sovereignty, and whether the brother, long associated with the democratic slogan of "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite", masks this desire under the guise of equality and the dissolution of hierarchies.;The chapter on Brazilian literature and film addresses testimonial works and novels written by a medical doctor, by policemen and by the former Secretary of Public Security, Luiz Eduardo Soares. Framed by the AIDS crisis and by the weakening of State security, these texts invite us to read them in relation autoimmunity and to a crisis in the State's immunity.;In the two chapters on Roberto Bolano, I focus on his three literary works that explicitly address Nazism and warring brotherhoods: La literatura nazi en America (1996), Estrella distante (1996), and El Tercer Reich (2010). I trace the way Bolano's writing indicates a retreat from exclusionary brotherhoods, as well as other forms of identity-formation.;The final two chapters on the Colombian writer, Fernando Vallejo, trace Vallejo's depiction of fraternity from the familial to the political, exploring the continuities and the contamination between the two. Here, I address the question of sibling displacement, and the way brotherhood, for Vallejo, implicates the exclusion of the sister, as well as the traumatic displacement from the seat of narcissistic grandiosity, which requires a process of mourning. |
