Latin American Detectives against Power: Individualism, the State, and Failure in Crime Fiction.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Precarious Secrets: A History of the Latin American Political Thriller, and reported the following:
Ford Madox Ford’s test works remarkably well for Precarious Secrets. A glimpse of page 99 would offer a browser a very accurate idea of what the book is about. It features a scene analysis of one of the most significant Latin American political thrillers ever made: Jorge Fons’ Rojo amanecer (Red Dawn), a Mexican film made in the late 1980s. The thriller, a unique portrayal of the Tlatelolco Massacre held in Mexico City in 1968, is a paradigmatic case study of the theories that I develop throughout the book: it serves as a central example to explore how Latin American filmmakers have used precarity in favor of storytelling. I understand “precarity” in a very broad way. From the most obvious point of view, there’s the financial constraints, as Fons operated with a very tight budget. As a result, the film was shot indoors almost in its entirety. From a less evident perspective, I examine how precarity informs political censorship, too. The polysemic nature of precarity paves the way for discussions on filmmaking choices regarding sound and offscreen techniques, but also around interiority and exteriority, fiction and archive, affect and infrapolitics, motherhood and gender, as well as the invasion of the political in the personal, all explored in page 99.Learn more about Precarious Secrets at the University of Texas Press website.
This page includes a review of what important critics such as Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Samuel Steimberg, and Jorge Majfud have previously written about Rojo amanecer. I build on their arguments to go beyond them, offering a new reading of the film. Much like in the rest of the book, I engage in this page with a central concept I coined to study political thrillers: the “grammar of secrecy,” a category defined in the introduction as “a particular way of thinking about secrets, utilizing prepositions of space, such as ‘under’ and ‘above’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘behind’ and ‘in front of.’” This concept sheds light to the understudied ties between secrecy and space: if secrets are always stored somewhere, it is through this grammar and its prepositions that political thrillers hide and eventually showcase secrets. In page 99, the secret in question has to do with state-sponsored violence, a key theme that obsessively reappears in Latin American renditions of the genre.
--Marshal Zeringue
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