In contrast to liberal democracy, which translates constituent power into processes and institutions of representation and government, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri place a premium on constituent power: inspired by social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, they argue that the constituent power of a multitude should not be translated into the constituted powers of a state. Doing so would deprive the multitude of its revolutionary and radically democratic potential. Pure constituent power seeks to repeat in perpetuity the exception of the revolutionary founding moment of democracy. That Hardt and Negri rely on increasingly theological models in their account of constituent power and revolution highlights the antidemocratic tendency of their conception of “constituent governance.” A political theology that seeks to make the exception permanent is not compatible with democracy. The enactment of pure constituent power in the democracy of the common inevitably leads to what Carl Schmitt described as “sovereign dictatorship.” Hardt’s and Negri’s “constituent governance” is an arbitrary form of governance without any checks and balances.

The 1920s saw hope as well as gloom. Coexistent temporalities comingled. Key themes overarched: (a) novel metropolitan life; (b) shifting class differences; (c) changes in the state; (d) gendering of social relations, social practices, and political action; (e) Europe’s relation to empire; (f) cultural life and ideas; (g) democracy’s uneven fortunes. The welfarist complex crossed regime differences (democracy versus dictatorship), embracing population and national health; a normative family; social services delivery; goals of national efficiency. Eugenicist ideas claimed an appealing coherence, whose refusal presumed key enabling factors: intact democracy; strong labor movements; liberal systems of law; and pluralist public spheres. By 1939–1940, that left only Sweden and Britain. Widening of democracy brought the welfarist field distinct cohorts of educated young men and freshly enfranchised young women. The 1880s generation passed 1914–1918 as young adults; the “war youth generation” missed the war but craved an equivalent; interwar cohorts joined the post-1918 world as it started collapsing. Those lives turned on an enabling modernity. They knitted together the “modernist wish.”

After 1917–1923, Europe’s polities varied across democracy and dictatorship. The agrarian east and south passed under dictatorship: Iberia, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia, then Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, and Greece. Liberal constitutionalism lasted in France, Britain, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. In Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia democratic republics faced polarized political cultures. Italy was fascist; the USSR socialist. Corporatism – government-brokered convergence of organized interests – shaped constitutional states, above all in Scandinavia, with its strong labor movements. Corporatism in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia was inflected by social democracy, but in societies riven by liberal-conservative enmities and religious, regional or ethno-cultural cleavage. Fascism beckoned as an extreme remedy for chronic parliamentary instability, where leftist defense impeded capitalist stabilization. Nazism and its state mapped onto this topography. Via the Belgian Plan de Man, the French Popular Front, and the Spanish Civil War, the polarizing fallout from rightwing radicalization cast western Europe into crisis.

Esteban Echeverría (1805–1851) was born in Buenos Aires before the May 25, 1810, revolution, but was educated in the liberal environment of Bernardino Rivadavia’s government, which sent him to Paris to further his education. Upon return in 1830, he saw the rise of Juan Manuel de Rosas and became an opponent of his regime in both a literary and a political sense. He along with others founded the Asociación de Mayo in 1837, which caused his exile in Montevideo, where he wrote the compelling ‘El matadero’ (The Slaughterhouse) and published the Dogma socialista, from which the current selection is taken. The “socialism” of the title might be somewhat deceptive, in that Echeverría’s program contained the standard tenets of liberal democracy. His thoughts on the rule of law, while not entirely original, became a powerful weapon against dictatorship, one that was seen as applicable well beyond his native land and became a classic of Spanish American political thought.

Chile is a paradigmatic transitional justice case illustrating the sequencing, coexistence, and intermingling of the types of victim engagement that this book examines. This chapter traces active (co)-creation by relatives in the search for the Disappeared in dictatorial and post-dictatorship Chile. It outlines the gradual accretion of different forms of engagement: denunciation and resistance, legal activism and political lobbying, and protagonism in calling for, and calling forth, a new state policy response in the form of a National Search Plan, launched in 2023. Analysing relatives’ participation in design of the Search Plan meanwhile reveals divergent and changing views about the relative importance of trials, truth, recovery, and identification of those still disappeared. Overall, Chile’s trajectory shows how many now-familiar categories of transitional justice demands were originally hard won from below. It also suggests the state may at times be needed to mediate between contrasting or contradictory victims’ voices.

Various critics have labeled Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah as a dictator novel, a dictator-novel, or a novel about dictatorship, forcing the questions that inform this chapter: isn’t there a well-defined genre where Anthills fits unproblematically? Is the African novel that thematizes dictatorship a sub-genre, or the unwieldy name for the genre from which the African dictator novel emerges? Or are they co-existent genres? If genres “change when new topics are added to their repertoires” (Fowler 233), I explore the germinal novels of disillusionment in the 1960s, the imprecise “dictatorial literature” and “dictator” novel descriptors used in the early 1990s for clues that illuminate the difference between the dictator novel and novels about dictatorship. Playing off Derrida’s argument that the word “genre” establishes a “limit,” a line of demarcation (57) that simultaneously creates “an edgeless boundary of itself” (81), I argue that this indeterminacy fits the African novel variously labeled as the dictator novel or the novel about dictatorship, and the delimitation should be flexibly located in the “edgeless boundary” defined by the themes and function the novels serve. Further, the rise of increasingly authoritarian rulers globally lends currency to the African dictator novel in unmasking their rhetoric of dictatorship.

Attending to Latinx South American writing generates a more expansive understanding of how violence and migration shape Latinx literary history and narrative forms. This chapter elucidates the theoretical salience of el Hueco through its multiple significations as gap, hole, hollow, space of detention, liminal status, and form of undocumented migration. Likewise, the chapter demonstrates how the term desaparecido illuminates the emotional holes and the gaps in kinship structures left by those who are disappeared by state terror practices and immigration policies. Using texts by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Romina Garber, Juan Martinez, Carolina de Robertis, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Daniel Alarcón, and Cristina Henríquez, the chapter demonstrates how prose narrative draws linkages between various kinds of state-perpetrated violence in the Américas. The chapter analyzes genres – from creative nonfiction to speculative fiction – and narrative strategies – from temporality and spectrality to focalization and characterization – to illuminate how Latinx South American fiction activates narrative as a form of reappearance and as a means of imagining different Latinx futurities.

Totalitarian systems, marked by extreme violence, are fundamentally bound to an ideology, such as Marxism-Leninism, which is instrumental to their creation and persistence, from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia to modern China. The chapter examines the genesis of communist totalitarian ideology in early Christian communal equality, connecting it to Rousseau’s and Babeuf’s anti-property ideals, which ultimately influenced Marxism and its vision of a dictatorial society in the name of absolute equality. The enduring pull towards egalitarianism, when pushed to extremes, can encroach on private property rights, ironically culminating in totalitarian rule and unprecedented inequality.

This chapter connects the burning and removal of the Praia do Pinto favela in 1969, the development of the Cidade Alta housing project on Rio’s north side, the development of the middle-class apartment complex Selva de Pedra on the former site of Praia do Pinto, and the preeminent soap operas of Globo Television in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The chapter shows how the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985) carried out a process of state-sponsored gentrificaion through favela removal and subsidized development for the conservative middle class.

On June 27, 1973, Juan María Bordaberry, the democratically elected president of Uruguay, dissolved the general assembly and remained in office, sharing executive power with the military command. Uruguayans mention this date when asked when was the last coup d’état in their country. However, political and social actors have long disagreed over the exact meaning of this event and few would now reject that it was just one, albeit final and dramatic, step in a relatively long path toward authoritarianism. Things were different after that date in terms of state institutions as well as freedoms and rights for the citizenry, but many analysts have shown that most of these changes were in the making since at least 1968, when Jorge Pacheco Areco took power and governed under repressive measures of exception. A more recent body of literature has gone further back in time to show the importance of previous steps that aligned national politics with the polarized order of the Cold War. This chapter aims at offering a plausible narrative of what happened in the fifteen years before the date of the coup, combining basic historical facts with the changing interpretations that placed and displaced meaning and importance among them.