This is a diabolically original book about urban worlds, carcerality, US militarized imperialism, elites vampirizing young people’s energy and hopelessness, and the rippling creativity of those young people and their communities. Jon Carter writes with great artistry, rage, and compassion about Hondurans seeking to walk away from lives made barely livable by the baroque grotesqueries of the illicit webs of extraction woven about them. By terms heartbreaking and heart-pounding, Gothic Sovereignty is theoretically nimble and ethnographically rich. Deeply respectful of lived complexities, it offers profane visions and counterintuitive methods for understanding the unfolding worlds in which we are all enmeshed.
~Diane M. Nelson
Jon Carter engages with hypervisible gang violence in Honduras by moving slowly and with deliberate understatement, using a grounded theory approach to build a subtle string of observations into powerful considerations of violence, debilitating injury, and death. He avoids the familiar analytics of “deviance” and “pathology" that can become realities of their own, too often foreclosing the possibility of social change. By delving into a “prehistory” of gang formation in Honduras, Carter takes on the institutional violence that opens the way for political transformation and future making. This book will be widely read and will resonate beyond anthropology.
~Laurence Ralph
[An] ethnography noir of the drug economy in Honduras...Carter introduces us to dizzying conspiracies and a lurid cast of characters that make the Hollywood treatment of the subject matter, like Netflix’s Narcos, seem tame...Readers who approach this book with an interest in understanding the cultural forms and aesthetics surrounding gang life in Central America will certainly learn a great deal. Others will come to this book with more of an interest in the complex vectors of the drugs and arms underworld, and they will be rewarded by an alternative political mapping of this world.
~American Ethnologist
Gothic Sovereignty offers a nuanced anthropological analysis of pervasive gang violence in Honduras, which transcends narrow sociological approaches to organized crime and state corruption in Central America...Gothic Sovereignty will appeal to students of the anthropology of crime, aesthetics, and Latin American political history...Recommended.
~CHOICE
