The Culture of Peace and its Neoliberal Bargains: On Jacinta Escudos’s A-B-Sudario

Abstract

This article studies one of Central America’s most daring and experimental postwar novels, A-B-Sudario (2003), by Jacinta Escudos. A-B-Sudario centers on the life of a writer named Cayetana, who, amid the postwar devastation of an unnamed Central American country, contends with drug abuse, self-destruction, and a deep sense of malaise. I argue that through an aesthetic of dissonance and fragmentation, A-B-Sudario offers a reply to the incoherence of Central America’s peacebuilding process in the 1990s, when politicians and expert NGOs sought to implement a market-friendly regime of optimism and happiness in an environment still gripped by violence and disaffection. At the heart of the peacebuilding process was the idea that a war-torn society could be engineered to be happy, that all it needed was democracy, an education in peace-friendly values, and entry into the new global culture of consumer capitalism. But such optimism closed its eyes to the fact that the psychological scars of war—the traumas, anxieties, and self-destructive behaviors—were still festering. It is against this ethos of easy optimism that A-B-Sudario positions itself. Through its conflict-ridden protagonist, the novel posits a subjecthood that runs counter to the rosy vision of humanity promoted by the cultural politics of its time. In doing so, it reveals the crisis of subjectivity at the heart of the postwar experience.