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34 Law & Literature 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/lal34 and id is 1 raw text is: LAW & LITERATURE * VOLUME 34 * NUMBER 1 The War on Drugs between Exception and Legitimacy: Garcia Marquez's News of a Kidnapping Hector Hoyos and Jorge Gonzalez-Jacome Abstract, The article reads Garcia Msrquez's journalistic novel News of o Kidnapping against the grain, demonstrating its potential for interrogating unifying narratives about global legality. The argument has several parts. First, it builds upon a careful textual and structural analysis of the literary work in question, parsing out the suggestive complexities of the novel's narrative voice and metaphors as they confront issues of transnational legitimacy. Secondly, it examines how Garcia Msrquez's narrative, perhaps unintentionally, engages with and buttresses the selective suspension of legality in Colombia (the exception). Special attention is given to the Colombian constitutional reform movement in this context, as well as to the novel's grappling with the contradictions of reasserting legality through lawless means. Heuristically, News of a Kidnapping is then measured against contemporary judicial decisions. In closing, the article situates the novel within the panorama of contemporary legal and literary studies pertaining to the global drug trade. Keywords, war on drugs, global rule of law, Garcia Msrquez, News of a Kidnapping Is nation building enough to ask of a novel? In the notable Noticia de un secues- tro (1996, trans. News of a Kidnapping, 1997), Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez does nothing less. From an interdisciplinary law and literature perspective, we propose that the book does something more: not just provide rep- aration and national refoundation, but serve as a repository for alternative legal pasts and futures at a local and a global level against the backdrop of the War on Drugs. Our goal is to demonstrate the relevance of this hybrid work of litera- ture and journalism for thinking critically about the representations of legality during the so-called War on Drugs, understood as a three-pronged political, legal, and narrative construct. The argument, in turn, has three parts. First, we con- duct a succinct narratological study of the ways in which Garcia Mdrquez frames Law & Literature, VOL. 34, ISSUE 1, PP. 1-22. ISSN 1535-685X, ELECTRONIC ISSN 1541-2601. © 2020 by The Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2020.1754020