Gang Leader Research Articles

Gangs, Labor Mobility and Development

We study how two of the world’s largest gangs—MS-13 and 18th Street—affect economic development in El Salvador. We exploit the fact that the emergence of these gangs was the consequence of an exogenous shift in American immigration policy that led to the deportation of gang leaders from the United States to El Salvador. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, we find that individuals living under gang control have significantly less education, material wellbeing, and income than individuals living only 50 meters away but outside of gang territory. None of these discontinuities existed before the emergence of the gangs. The results are confirmed by a difference-in-differences analysis: after the gangs’ arrival, locations under their control started experiencing lower growth in nighttime light density compared to areas without gang presence. A key mechanism behind the results is that, in order to maintain territorial control, gangs restrict individuals’ freedom of movement, affecting their labor market options. The results are not determined by exposure to violence or selective migration from gang locations. We also find no differences in public goods provision.

Looking Back and Away: Jaime Barrios's <em>Film Club</em> (1968)

Looking Back and Away: Jaime Barrios’s Film Club (1968) Jessica Gordon-Burroughs (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1 and 2. Photocopy from Rodger Larson Personal Archive, photograph of Jesus Cruz and Jaime Barrios, Photo. Hella Hammid. Courtesy of Rodger Larson. The scene in Figures 1 and 2 was captured by photographer Hella Hammid1 on location during the filming of A Park Called Forsyth, a twelve-minute student film shot in the summer of 1967, in the context of productions made by the students at the Young Film-makers Foundation (YFF).2 In the foreground, the photo captures [End Page 281] seventeen-year-old student filmmaker Jesús Cruz (Figure 1) and Chilean film teacher and filmmaker Jaime Barrios (Figure 2), a Bolex camera on a tripod between them. Cruz’s short film, like many amateur student films of the period, is replete with blood and gore. The film portrays a gang conflict in which one gang leader strangles another with a bicycle chain in an “empty Forsyth Park, a park made of stone, concrete and a few scraggly trees” surrounded by an “aura of loneliness and abandonment.”3 The photo betrays little of this narrative machinery of violent reprisals and urban social dissolution and instead outlines a taut, concentrated visual and tactile connection between student, teacher, and the apparatus of visual representation. Barrios arrived in New York City only a few years earlier in 1963 to attend the School of Visual Arts and at the time of this photograph was active in an experimental scene, which overlapped with the New York Underground and tightly intertwined with his media activism at the YFF.4 The YFF, founded by art educator Rodger Larson alongside Barrios and New York philanthropist Lynne Hofer, was a community outreach project for New York City youths dedicated to training them in the art of 16mm filmmaking. Larson was also inspired by the underground scene, albeit as a viewer and occasional collaborator, even as he evolved into an important figure in U.S. community film education.5 Hammid’s photo, for its part, was employed for promotional use by the YFF and subsequently as the first image featured in Larson’s A Guide for Film Teachers to Filmmaking by Teenagers (1968).6 Later emulated throughout the country as part of the nationwide War on Poverty, the guide was a manual on 16mm student film production, intended as a blueprint of the New York City film workshops. If we understand the gaze—or, more broadly, the nature of visuality—as a confluence of subjective, spatial, and historical contingencies, the still images of Cruz and Barrios represent a significant point of convergence in regard to the visual politics of the YFF. The camera’s focus and object of representation—the Bolex camera—is visually placed at a crossroads and, centered, divides the frame in two. The symmetry of the two photographic subjects—Cruz and Barrios, in profile and facing each other—is interrupted by the lens, which is directed toward Cruz. On the left, Cruz, dressed in a starched white button-down shirt and with neatly cut hair, extends his arm parallel to the frame to the tripod, while Barrios, in an unironed denim shirt and with long wavy hair, steadies the tripod from below so as to set it at the height of Cruz’s gaze. Barrios’s hands are cut from the frame, while Cruz eyes the angle of the camera. The camera is manifestly fixed on [End Page 282] the park in which the two filmmakers find themselves, yet Cruz is seemingly looking into a dark, opaque lens as the camera points toward him. In Figures 1 and 2, the film’s director is the Bolex’s subject of representation in a twist of the film’s declared directorial logic, foregrounding a counterintuitive cinematic production of self. As such, the photo, in its entirety, constructs a tight yet enigmatic visual relation between the two filmmakers. Though each of the photographic subjects seems concentrated on some element of the camera, both Cruz and Barrios could also be interpreted as looking at one another in a confrontation between symmetrical yet asymmetrical figures, intersubjectively...

The Politics of Violence Reduction: Making and Unmaking the Salvadorean Gang Truce

AbstractThis paper analyses a government-facilitated truce, begun in 2012, between El Salvador's three principal street gangs. Using field theory and securitisation theory, it maps the evolution of the truce, distinguishing between the three related processes of making the deal, keeping the truce, and resisting it. It analyses the complex and intriguing political processes in which various actors, such as gang leaders, government officials and international organisations, interacted with each other and made deals about the use and visibility of violence and ways of diminishing, preventing or hiding it.

The Psychological Development of The Main Character of Becoming A Gang Leader through Frustration; Reflections on Dashner’s “The Maze Runner”

In this study, the writer emphasized the psychological development of the main character reflected in the story. Then the main character must convince the other, there is a better place outside the Glade. Therefore, this study aims to analyze how the process of psychological developments of being a leader through frustration and to analyze how the main character shows an ability to lead. This is a qualitative study using psychoanalytic approach by Sigmund Freud. The writer collected the data relating to the psychological development from frustration to being a leader by using The Maze Runner novel. The secondary data were taken from some sources, such as books, dictionary, encyclopedia, and also articles related to this research. Meanwhile the procedures for collecting data were done by reading, identifying, inventorying, classifying, selecting and reporting. In conducting the study, Freud’s psychoanalysis including id, ego, and superego are employed to reveal the main character frustration and shows the leadership ability in The Maze Runner. The findings of the analysis showed that; first, the causes of frustration are anxiety, hatred, and fear. It had been found that frustration was the results of the superego pressure that cannot be controlled by the ego. The frustration can be dangerous if the person who is frustrated does not fight against the pressure he gets. Second, there are seven leading ability which found in the novel such as having a purpose, curiosity, fairness, giving the suggestion, appreciates, and source of inspiration. Thomas is able to control the pressure from superego and his desire from id. He can make a good decision for his ego whether yielding his id or obey the superego. Then, he does not only focus on his frustration, but he can develop from frustration to be a good leader.
 
 Keywords: psychoanalysis; psychological development; leader; frustation; adolescent

‘My Life is Like a Movie’: Making a Fiction Film as a Route to Knowledge Production on Gang Political Performances in Goma, DR Congo

‘My life is like a movie’ is a sentence that often surfaced during my fieldwork on gangs engaged in everyday policing in the city of Goma (Democratic Republic of Congo); referring to the martial arts and action movies they like to watch. For this article, I will reflect on how during my ethnographic research I ended up making the fiction film Street Life together with the Congolese filmmaker TD Jack, the gang leader Alino and his group Rich Gang. The paper explores the making of Street Life as a route to knowledge production on the political performances of gangs seeking to carve out a space for themselves in Goma’s urban policing environment. Broadly, two issues are dealt with. Firstly, I analyze how gangs’ everyday political performances are re-enacted and actively mirrored in the film. Secondly, I reflect on how making a fiction with gangs changed my way of dealing with ethnography: in terms of method, my positionality in the field, and ethnographic representation. The paper is also a call for taking the visual – and by extension other senses – more seriously. Not just by writing about sensory experiences, but by incorporating them in our academic work. Sometimes it is better to just let people see it!

An Ode to the PALTC Clinician

An Ode to the PALTC Clinician

US Criminal Deportations and Human Capital in Central America

In this paper I ask whether peer effects generate changes in education investments in the areas where deported criminals are located in Central America using administrative data in El Salvador. I exploit the increase in criminal deportations from the United States in 1996 to analyze how individuals who grew up in municipalities affected by gangs in 1996 have fewer years of schooling when they are young adults. I find that individuals who were exposed during childhood to gang leaders have less schooling than those who were older than 16 in 1996 when the law was passed.

Race Wars

Race Wars Matthew Pratt Guterl (bio) Kathleen Belew. Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. x + 339pp. Notes, sources, acknowledgements, and index. $29.95. In the 1996 film The Substitute, a platoon of soldiers, set adrift after a brief military intervention in Cuba, find themselves in Miami with nothing to do. A polyglot, racially and linguistically diverse group, they are led by Shale, an enigmatic white officer with a gift for clandestine wetwork, who promises to find them some more mercenary possibilities. The men are bored, hungry, and anxious to be paid. Fortunately, Shale finds them another war, this time in a local high school where gangs have taken root. As luck would have it, Shale has a girlfriend, a teacher in a dystopian institution corrupted by the drug trade. Jane, as she is called, is a two-dimensional stickler for history and a fervent believer in every child's potential. After running afoul of a gang leader recruiting in the school, she gets roughed up, her body's brutalization serving as a reminder of liberalism's failure in the stereotyped urban ghetto. And Shale, sensing the urgent need for a more muscular response, volunteers as her substitute and gears up to dispense a twisted approximation of justice. Bringing his special set of skills into the classroom, he lectures students by day on the history of Vietnam while surveilling, disciplining, and murdering the element he defines as criminal at night. Shale's approach works in the classroom, though in the end his action-starved platoon is enlisted to fight in what becomes an all-out war and the body count rises higher and higher until the school itself is engulfed in flames. There was nothing special about The Substitute. In its own inimitable way, it set out to pillory a familiar liberal savior narrative in which do-gooder types wander into a context marked as broken and impossible to fix yet manage to save some small number of those at the far margins of civil society. The movie offered no solution to the problem of poor, inner-city schools, the decades-long decline of public support and collapse of civic faith in common education. No solution, that is, except for the provision of violence as a searing, cauterizing force, as a way to stop the advance of the disease. It left intact one of the dominant tropes of American filmmaking: that the military was an [End Page 452] almost completely integrated institution, and that the racially mixed platoon was an avatar for the United States of the future. And by doing so, it enlisted the whole of the nation in the war on drugs. Finally, it also reminded viewers—as other films, like First Blood (1982), had—that combat veterans left the theatre of war permanently changed, with dramatic consequences for their eventual return to the home front. In this case, as the film closed and the credits rolled, Shale and one of his surviving comrades from that mixed-up platoon announce their intention to sign up to be substitute teachers elsewhere, an obvious plea for a sequel but just as obviously a reflection of what happens when the war comes home. An unoriginal film from an age of action movie knock-offs, The Substitute is nevertheless necessary and emblematic, a touchstone of a generation's thinking about race and violence and war. And Kathleen Belew's masterful work, Bring the War Home, cuts straight across it. Where The Substitute imagines veterans as alienated from a soft, liberal domestic world, Belew sees these same returning soldiers rapidly synergized with a broader, homegrown "paramilitary culture" that increasingly valorizes gun ownership, that grows to loathe the state, and that determinedly prepares for an eventual race war. Where the film underscored the racial diversity of the platoon, Belew uncovers a network of white racist actors, their affiliations shaped partly by military service, partly by their disenchantment with American liberalism, and partly by fever dreams of creating a paramilitary structure outside of state control, attempting to will into being a different white supremacist fantasy of the future. And where Shale, returning to the states in...

Sky without Stars by Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell

Reviewed by: Sky without Stars by Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell Natalie Berglind Brody, Jessica Sky without Stars; by Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell. Simon Pulse, 2019 [592p] (System Divine) Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-5344-1063-3 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-5344-1065-7 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 9-12 In this sci-fi realization of Les Misérables, the bleak, French-inspired planet of Laterre employs a caste system where most inhabitants live in squalor. Eighteen-year-old Chatine, the daughter of a gang leader and conman, belongs to the bottom caste; eighteen-year-old Officer Marcellus Bonnefaçon is born into the Second Estate in a life of luxury; and sixteen-year-old Alouette resides underground in the Refuge of the Sisterhood, which is supposedly designed to preserve written history in a society where nobody can read (but is actually a revolutionary base). A long-quashed revolution resurges after the toddler daughter of the king is murdered; the perspectives alternate among the aforementioned protagonists, whose worlds collide and ultimately unveil to them the ugly truths about their corrupt society. It’s an entertaining premise, but regrettably, the sci-fi setting adds little to the Les Mis story and vice versa; the world-building is uninventive, while the underwhelming plot is prone to cheap, emotion-seeking gimmicks (Chatine condescends about her sister’s shallowness until they have one sentimental moment together, and her sister is crudely killed off immediately after). Fans of Les Mis may nonetheless enjoy the many parallels to the original work and movie adaptations, from a prisoner 24601 character to the classic, doomed love triangle between the three main characters. [End Page 247] Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Gang Leader for a Day

Gang Leader for a Day

State Theory from the Street Altar: The Muscles, the Saint and theAmparo

AbstractThis article identifies traces of the state in three urban neighborhoods of Mexico City. Instead of asking what is the state, where is it located or what does it do, the question posed here is: what are the effects of state practices at the street level? By ethnographically and visually describing how protection is performed, the article argues that the state is not only ‘somewhere’ in specific functions, actors or institutions; it also manifests materialized effects produced by a web of conflict‐ridden relations. Discussion about the state in the global South generally revolves around its failures and informality. The proposal here is that, by analyzing the state from the standpoint of urban space, the focus is on how protection is performed and by means of which operations, relations, objects and actors—not whether the state works or not, or whether actors are formal or informal. Based on ongoing ethnographic work and a collaboration with two visual artists in Mexico City, the article analyzes three protective processes: the ‘muscles’ (involving actors including police officers, gang leaders, fathers and husbands), the ‘saint’ (involving caring for representations of various saints and participation in other clientelistic chains of fidelity) and the ‘amparo’ (a form of application of the rule of law in a personalized manner for the redress of interpersonal conflicts). These are three sets of practices that have been embedded in Mexico's history of state formation since the days of colonization.

The Politics of Negotiating with Gangs. The Case of El Salvador

This paper explores the dynamics of negotiations between the Salvadoran government and the street gangs, called maras. The paper argues that state negotiations with criminal groups can occur when organized crime is a significant part of the social and political order. This tacit order allows a great deal of coordination between and within criminal organizations and the focus of negotiations from the state's point of view is limited to the management of violence, not the dismantling of gangs' territorial control. This article draws on seventeen in‐depth interviews with middle‐level gang leaders, government officials, and participants of the truce negotiations from 2012 to 2016; it also relies on public information published by Salvadoran journalists and government sources about the truce.

Convertirse en El Más Malo: trayectorias masculinas de violencia en las pandillas de Medellín

Con base en cuarenta entrevistas de historias de vida con miembros de las pandillas de Medellín, Colombia, la presente investigación argumenta que muchos jóvenes se unen a las pandillas con el fin de emular y reproducir identidades masculinas que se consideran “exitosas” localmente. La acumulación de “capital masculino” por parte de las pandillas, con sus significantes materiales y simbólicos de hombría, acompañados de demostraciones y manifestaciones estilísticas, lleva a los jóvenes a percibirlas como espacios de éxito masculino, lo cual impulsa la reproducción social de las pandillas. Una vez vinculados a la pandilla, se vuelven cada vez más “malos” al hacer uso de la violencia para defender los intereses de esta a cambio de capital masculino. Los líderes de las pandillas, conocidos localmente como “los duros”, tienden a ser los “más malos”. El “proceso de empandillamiento” no debe entenderse como un comportamiento juvenil aberrante, sino más bien como uno lógico y práctico, dado que se percibe a la pandilla como un espacio aspiracional de formación de identidad para jóvenes que llegan a la mayoría de edad en un momento en que las condiciones estructurales de exclusión conspiran contra ellos.

Personal Memoirs of the Events at Steadville, 2000–2008: A Socio-Political Exploration

In the year 2000, Steadville (a township near Ladysmith in the province of KwaZulu-Natal) descended into chaos as two factions of the African National Congress (ANC) in the area clashed. The violence claimed more than 50 lives. More than 80 per cent of those killed were community members who were not involved in the violence. Following an investigation by the Provincial Department of Safety and Liaison in KwaZulu-Natal in 2008 a number of gang members were arrested for their involvement in the violence. The alleged gang leaders were killed in 2003 and 2005, but the violence continued after their deaths, with gang members seeking revenge. The literature and newspaper reports do not do justice to the situation that prevailed in the area for over eight years. The aim of this paper is to share personal narratives of people who were involved in the violence as well as community members whose lives were affected. There were no-go areas, scholars were unable to attend school out of fear for their own safety, and people vacated the area because the violence affected their quality of life. This study does not aim to tell all the stories of the people of Steadville. However, it hopes to encourage further research into this under-explored topic and elicit aid, so that affected people may find some form of healing and reconciliation. The qualitative research method, the oral history methodology as well as the traditional methods of historical research were employed to examine why there was such violence in Steadville, and how it started. Smaller focused samples were used, and owing to the nature of the study, the researcher relied on group discussions, texts, telephonic interviews, oral testimonies, and individual conversations.

How Can Violence Among Urban Youth Be Stopped?

How Can Violence Among Urban Youth Be Stopped?

A Tale of Two Yusifs: Recovering Arab Agency in Palestine Exploration Fund Excavations 1890–1924

The scholarly literature on the history of archaeology and archaeological organisations in late nineteenth/early twentieth century Palestine focuses almost exclusively on the Western excavators and scholars who headed this work. But Arab workers did the bulk of the actual digging, and on a daily basis they were often overseen by fellow Arabs as foremen and gang leaders. This paper applies lessons from relational history as it has been used in Levantine intellectual and labour contexts to understand the roles of two particular men, Yusif ‘abu Selim' Khazin and Yusif Khattar Kanaan, who worked for the Palestine Exploration Fund between 1890 and World War One, acting as foremen, researchers, site directors and many other roles for Frederick Bliss, R.A.S Macalister, and Duncan Mackenzie. Despite their often slim and ghostly presence in the records, in which both men are often referred to only by their shared first name, the writings of Bliss and Macalister reveal them to have been indispensable on-site and as offering insights and knowledge which influenced how both archaeological finds and indigenous life in Palestine was understood.

Becoming the ‘Baddest’: Masculine Trajectories of Gang Violence in Medellín

AbstractDrawing upon 40 life-history interviews with gang members in Medellín, Colombia, this paper argues that many young men join gangs to emulate and reproduce ‘successful’ local male identities. The accumulation by the gang of ‘masculine capital’, the material and symbolic signifiers of manhood, and the accompanying stylistic and timely displays of this capital, means that youths often perceive gangs to be spaces of male success. This drives the social reproduction of gangs. Once in the gang, the youths become increasingly ‘bad’, using violence to defend the gang's interests in exchange for masculine capital. Gang leaders, colloquially known asdurosor ‘hard men’, tend to be themás malos, the ‘baddest’. The ‘ganging process’ should not be understood in terms of aberrant youth behaviour; rather there is practical logic to joining the gang as a site of identity formation for aspirational young men who are coming of age when conditions of structural exclusion conspire against them.

O american dream e a cultura das aparências em Little Caesar, de Meryvn Leroy

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p233Considerado o precursor dos filmes sonoros de gângster do chamado período “clássico” desse gênero, Little Caesar, dirigido por Mervyn LeRoy em 1931, narra o percurso do protagonista Rico Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) da sua ascensão à liderança da gangue à sua queda no final do filme. Little Caesar, além de estabelecer os parâmetros seguidos pelas narrativas dos filmes de gângster a partir dos anos 1930, também contribuiu para que o gângster se tornasse um ícone da cultura norte-americana graças à disseminação de sua figura por meio da indústria cultural, principalmente no cinema. Nosso objetivo com o presente trabalho é, por meio da análise de algumas cenas do filme, verificar de que maneira se configuram a cultura das aparências e a ideologia do American Dream ao longo da narrativa.

Savage Theories by Roy Kesey

Palo Oloixarac. Savage Theories. Trans. Roy Kesey. New York. Soho Press. 2017. 291 pages. In Savage Theories, Palo Oloixarac addresses the conflict of being both an individual with ideas and a social animal with libido. Theory and sexuality are woven together in the work, but only through an endless, brutal process, which the narrator depicts with uncompromising wit and arrogance. Oloixarac gives her narrator freedom to comment on anything by the tonal illusion of disinterestedly commenting on everything . Her style grants a feeling of resolution to each issue raised—be it an analysis of 1980s Argentine pop culture or the effects of early psychoanalysis on political philosophy. The reader feels learned and rushed along to the next exciting revelation . And they are exciting—Oloixarac explores hushed-away and ignored culture in broad daylight as well as that part of a person we would rather forget about, though it churns and wails. Situated in the dark corners of Argentine academia and counterculture, the narrator invests the reader in her fierce ambitions while relaying, entwining the intelligent passion of Kamtchowsky and the haughty genius of Pabst. If there is love in Savage Theories, it is first sensual, then intellectual. Emotion, in this world, is an oft-ignored chemical byproduct. And yet each character is full of yearning, more or less silent, which compels and completes them. But completion, or self-realization, is not their ultimate goal. Each character strives to enable or force others to see the world through their perspective; in order to realize this goal, Kamtchowsky employs her camera, Pabst relies on his blog, and the narrator turns herself over to her obsessively grand philosophical theory. The language of Savage Theories is dense but fluid. At times the erudite references and ideas, so casually intermingled, border on the solipsistic. It is then that the reader may grow frustrated; pulled along by the author’s artful current, one may find oneself finishing a section and surprised at how little has been understood. Occasional endnotes and footnotes do much to repair this experience, and the pleasure of puzzling over Oloixarac’s complexity is very real. While remarkably intelligent and uncompromising, Oloixarac’s artistic touch is her principal means of captivating readers. And, even this, she is not shy to assert. The narrator writes to her prey, “The seductive powers of syntax grow ever stronger by subjugating those gathered around the one who organizes the verbs,” and the reader blushes, compelled to continue reading. Carson Schatzman University of Oklahoma Chan Ho-Kei. The Borrowed. Trans. Jeremy Tiang. New York. Black Cat. 2017 (©2016). 490 pages. This is a remarkable book, truly brilliant, whose 490 pages is initially intimidating, but reading it is as pleasurable as bingewatching a miniseries or reading your way through another author’s novel series. Divided into six chapters, The Borrowed is really six discrete novellas with six different crime stories set in Hong Kong in six years beginning in 2013 and scattered backward to 1967. Each focuses on the relationship between mentor Kwan Chundok and his “student,” Sonny Lok. Kwan is a brilliant police detective with great powers of observation and deduction , while Sonny, sincere and honest, plays Watson to him. Kwan, of course, uses unconventional methods to trick out confessions , and the first story shows Lok has taken up the baton his mentor (on his deathbed) has been forced to drop. Some of the stories have a lot of action in them—shoot-outs, ransom drops, and bombings—while at least one is a masterpiece of the old-fashioned drawing room mysteries in which the suspects have been gathered to talk through the odd details of a crime until one of them confesses. Each story is a worthy detective story on its own, but together they make a mosaic of Hong Kong as it passes from being one of the jewels of the British Empire to political reintegration with China. The constabulary changes in the level of corruption. The bureaucracy and internal politics of the organization hinder the honest cop seeking justice, and gang leaders often have more influence than government officials. World Literature in Review 94 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2017 ...

The Borrowed by Jeremy Tiang

Palo Oloixarac. Savage Theories. Trans. Roy Kesey. New York. Soho Press. 2017. 291 pages. In Savage Theories, Palo Oloixarac addresses the conflict of being both an individual with ideas and a social animal with libido. Theory and sexuality are woven together in the work, but only through an endless, brutal process, which the narrator depicts with uncompromising wit and arrogance. Oloixarac gives her narrator freedom to comment on anything by the tonal illusion of disinterestedly commenting on everything . Her style grants a feeling of resolution to each issue raised—be it an analysis of 1980s Argentine pop culture or the effects of early psychoanalysis on political philosophy. The reader feels learned and rushed along to the next exciting revelation . And they are exciting—Oloixarac explores hushed-away and ignored culture in broad daylight as well as that part of a person we would rather forget about, though it churns and wails. Situated in the dark corners of Argentine academia and counterculture, the narrator invests the reader in her fierce ambitions while relaying, entwining the intelligent passion of Kamtchowsky and the haughty genius of Pabst. If there is love in Savage Theories, it is first sensual, then intellectual. Emotion, in this world, is an oft-ignored chemical byproduct. And yet each character is full of yearning, more or less silent, which compels and completes them. But completion, or self-realization, is not their ultimate goal. Each character strives to enable or force others to see the world through their perspective; in order to realize this goal, Kamtchowsky employs her camera, Pabst relies on his blog, and the narrator turns herself over to her obsessively grand philosophical theory. The language of Savage Theories is dense but fluid. At times the erudite references and ideas, so casually intermingled, border on the solipsistic. It is then that the reader may grow frustrated; pulled along by the author’s artful current, one may find oneself finishing a section and surprised at how little has been understood. Occasional endnotes and footnotes do much to repair this experience, and the pleasure of puzzling over Oloixarac’s complexity is very real. While remarkably intelligent and uncompromising, Oloixarac’s artistic touch is her principal means of captivating readers. And, even this, she is not shy to assert. The narrator writes to her prey, “The seductive powers of syntax grow ever stronger by subjugating those gathered around the one who organizes the verbs,” and the reader blushes, compelled to continue reading. Carson Schatzman University of Oklahoma Chan Ho-Kei. The Borrowed. Trans. Jeremy Tiang. New York. Black Cat. 2017 (©2016). 490 pages. This is a remarkable book, truly brilliant, whose 490 pages is initially intimidating, but reading it is as pleasurable as bingewatching a miniseries or reading your way through another author’s novel series. Divided into six chapters, The Borrowed is really six discrete novellas with six different crime stories set in Hong Kong in six years beginning in 2013 and scattered backward to 1967. Each focuses on the relationship between mentor Kwan Chundok and his “student,” Sonny Lok. Kwan is a brilliant police detective with great powers of observation and deduction , while Sonny, sincere and honest, plays Watson to him. Kwan, of course, uses unconventional methods to trick out confessions , and the first story shows Lok has taken up the baton his mentor (on his deathbed) has been forced to drop. Some of the stories have a lot of action in them—shoot-outs, ransom drops, and bombings—while at least one is a masterpiece of the old-fashioned drawing room mysteries in which the suspects have been gathered to talk through the odd details of a crime until one of them confesses. Each story is a worthy detective story on its own, but together they make a mosaic of Hong Kong as it passes from being one of the jewels of the British Empire to political reintegration with China. The constabulary changes in the level of corruption. The bureaucracy and internal politics of the organization hinder the honest cop seeking justice, and gang leaders often have more influence than government officials. World Literature in Review 94 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2017 The Borrowed manages to combine the pleasures...