Postproduction, the Narco, Infrapolitics, and Cumulation in Victor Hugo Rascón Banda's Contrabando (2008)

Abstract: This article offers a reading of Contrabando (2008) by Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda that situates the work within debates in literary criticism as well as in theoretical and political debates in the field of Latin American Cultural Studies. First, following Sophie Esch, the article locates this novel within the so-called narcoliterature debate in Mexico. It proposes that there is no debate, because there is no genre; or rather, that the genre itself exists in one single novel, Contrabando . This article also develops the notion of postproduction politics, following Nicolas Bourriaud: an understanding of politics as an accumulation of social strategies that have canceled political and social change but that also demand other forms of politics, or rather infrapolitics. Finally, this article introduces and develops the notion of cumulation, which underlies (and subverts) capitalist accumulation. Contrabando illustrates how any attempt to transform cumulation into accumulation has vanished. That is, the novel invites us to (re)think the literary and political landscape, in an epoch of narco-accumulation, as a work of cumulation where history, politics, and economics cumulate in an entropic order.