"Jean Franco indicts the orchestrated mass cruelty that has become a hallmark of late modernity. Incubated in modern militaries, kidnapping, torture, rape, and dismemberment became codified skill sets. Cruelty's trained agents disperse into society, staffing gangs, cartels, police forces, and militias, institutionalizing an extreme masculinity expressed in unspeakable brutality, especially against women. Drawing on vast testimonial archives, Franco unfolds the story case by case across Latin American, insisting on detail, rejecting resignation while confronting the possibility of a civilizational breakdown that makes extreme cruelty a condition of everyday life. A powerful, chilling book." -- Mary Louise Pratt, author of Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. "Cruel Modernity is a tour de force by Jean Franco, the major figure in Latin American cultural criticism. Franco has an unfailing sense of the political and in Cruel Modernity she reveals a kind of madness in the nation-building business. The widespread perpetration of cruelty and gratuitous violence that she seeks to understand-killing, raping, maiming-are primary and archaic impusles of permissive masculinities gone berserk, precisely because of their failures in constructing the nation state." -- Ileana Rodríguez, author of Liberalism at Its Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text.