Book Discussion with Jean Franco

Browsing Room, Knight Library, 4 p.m., October 23, 2013

Jean Franco is one of the foremost scholars of Latin American cultural and literary studies. She is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. A former president of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), she has received numerous awards, including the 1996 PEN award for lifetime contribution to disseminating Latin American literature in English, the Gabriela Mistral Medal from the Government of Chile, and the Andrés Bello Medal from the Government of Venezuela. She is the author of numerous books, including The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2002), which won the Bolton Prize from the American Historical Association.

In Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco examines the conditions under which extreme cruelty became the instrument of armies, governments, rebels, and rogue groups in Latin America. She seeks to understand how extreme cruelty came to be practiced in many parts of the continent over the last eighty years and how its causes differ from the conditions that brought about the Holocaust, which is generally the atrocity against which the horror of others is measured. In Latin America, torturers and the perpetrators of atrocity were not only trained in cruelty but often provided their own rationales for engaging in it. Franco draws on human-rights documents, memoirs, testimonials, novels, and films, as well as photographs and art works, to explore not only cruel acts but the discriminatory thinking that made them possible, their long-term effects, the precariousness of memory, and the pathos of survival. Discussants: Pedro Garcia Caro (Department of Romance Languages) Tamara Lea Spira (Department of Women’s and Gender Studies) Jean Franco (Columbia University) A book signing will follow the panel discussion