The systematic repetition and justification of acts of violence within modern nations, either on the grounds of or in response to the raison d’état, raises difficult questions about the place of cruelty in the modern project. How can cruel actions perpetrated by or against the state and involving rape, torture, mutilation and slaughter be explained in the face of increased economic, social, technological and ethical advancements? In Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco offers an honest and compassionate reflection which moves beyond this apparent contradiction and suggests a much more complex scenario, namely that the process of modernisation has been built on the creation and subsequent annihilation of an Other that threatens its healthy progression. In the case of Latin America, throughout the twentieth century the aim to push forward modernisation at an accelerated pace engendered a reiterated ‘state of exception’ and justified ‘the suppression of groups deemed subversive or alien to modernity’ (p. 2). The legacy of colonialism based on racism and ‘extreme masculinity’, expressed through the creation of the ‘savage’ and the feminisation of the indigenous, makes Latin America especially prone to fears of regression and, therefore, to periodical waves of cruel repression.

Franco supports this thesis convincingly throughout the book. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with the racialisation of processes of nation-building and national restructuring through the massacre of indigenous communities. In analysing the 1937 slaughter of about 20,000 black Haitians living on the Dominican side mainly through the 1974 novel El masacre se pasa a pie, the author asks whether nations need an enemy to be fully constituted and argues that General Trujillo achieved that through the creation of a racialised Other who had to be eliminated (Chapter 1). The civil wars that ravaged Guatemala and Peru through the 1970s and 1980s are looked at through the notion of savagery: common narratives representing the indigenous as alien to the modern man were perpetrated by writers and intellectuals as well as by the political and military elites, associating indigenous mobilisation with acts of primitive rebellion that threatened the creation of a unified and urbanised nation (Chapter 2).

The ‘alibi’ of ‘indigenous savagery’ (p. 113) is shown to be a common feature in many national discourses: in Salvadorean novelist Horacio Castellanos Moyá's El arma en el hombre (2001) the archaic and cannibalistic indigenous spirit is used to explain the brutality and sadism of discharged soldiers after the transition to democracy (Chapter 4). Therefore, the volume lucidly addresses not only the role of the state in fomenting violent behaviours but also their subsequent ‘privatisation’ in times of peace as further suggested, for example, in relation to Central America (Chapter 3) and Mexico (Chapter 9). The exaltation of the values of what Franco calls ‘extreme masculinity’ both in military training and in the left-wing guerrilla groups of Central and South America are convincingly linked to a culture of unwavering sacrifice on the one hand and to the violent repression of the ‘(female) enemy within’ (Chapter 5, p. 121) on the other.

The contradiction between the discourse of envisaged socio-political rationalisation and the reality of bloody killings becomes apparent in the testimonies of both killers and survivors. Disguised behind the thin veil of technological and military prowess, on the ground, rape, torture and ethnic massacres were perpetrated mostly using archaic methods: ‘[i]n Argentina, where the preferred instrument of torture was the cattle prod that had been used for decades, it was not the methods of torture that were innovative but […] the disappearance of bodies […]’ (p. 100). As discussed in Chapter 8, ‘[t]he involuntary memories of the disappeared, through the mechanical reproduction of photography, becomes deliberate memory’ (p. 197). The generic status of ‘victim’ is, therefore, refuted by Franco as in the cases, for instance, of survivors of massacres and executions (Chapter 6) or in that of prisoners-turned-collaborators (Chapter 7). Following Diamela Eltit's questioning of Primo Levi's statement that ‘no one can witness death’ (p. 168), Franco looks at the complex experience of pain and survival though a compassionate discussion of individual testimonies and literary narratives.

Such a vast array of sources from different periods and countries, including testimonios, human rights reports, interviews, novels, film and visual arts, is analysed within a framework that merges psychoanalytic theory with literary and cultural analysis. In a relentless and outspoken dissection of cruelty as most often perpetrated in the name of the modern state, Franco seems to want to go beyond Jonathan Littell's assertion that in the face of inhumanity ‘there is only humanity and more humanity’ by disclosing the connections between cultural narratives, social and ethnic inequality, and modernist political projects. The dehumanisation of the (female and indigenous) Other covered by the technological façade of neoliberal and post-neoliberal individualism reach an apocalyptic climax in the final chapter, where the rape and murder of thousands of women in Ciudad Juárez is seen as the ultimate scenario of deeply-ingrained cultural values feeding social neglect and exploitative industry. This is a brave and necessary endeavour to answer many troubling questions, and above all the role of violence in the formation of identities and subjectivities. Yet, despite the honest and chilling bluntness of her narrative, Franco is all too aware of the distant freedom of the reader who learns of these events from the safety of another place (Afterword). How, and whether at all, the scholar can approach this question leaves little hope for bridging the distressing gap between intellectual knowledge and socio-political reality.