Radical Justice investigates the convoluted relationship between memory and justice as it is portrayed in political documentaries and detective fiction from Spain and the Southern Cone. It argues that the possibility of achieving justice in these regions lies beyond market and state and is yet to come. Rather than focusing on "high literature" Radical Justice uses popular culture as a site from which to question both the inability of the State and the transnational market to come to terms with the dictatorial past and to deliver justice. This book will interest a wide range of scholars, from national literature and film specialists of Argentina, Chile, and Spain, to philosophers and students of ethics, human rights, and questions of justice.

"Reading Radical Justice is not for the faint-of-heart, but for the not-so-faint. I suspect it would be worthwhile. In Radical Justice Martín-Cabrera mourns the impossibility and inadequacy of memory and offers some hope in this bleak vision of at least some modes of resistance, found in the figure of the melancholic detective and in the political documentaries of the second generation struggling to encounter the reality of trauma, or the Lacanian Real, in Martín-Cabrera’s lexicon." - Project Muse

"How do we situate ourselves as intellectuals and citizens, before an act of injustice? Is it possible remedy experiences of extreme injustice ? These are the questions that this book explores from a theoretical, legal, political and cultural perspective. Focusing on the case of Chile, Argentina and Spain—three countries that suffered most repressive dictatorships paths in the second half of the twentieth century—the author intelligently analyzes critically the different ways they have tried to answer these questions politicians, academics, citizens and courts, with a particular focus on the political documentary film and crime fiction. ... Martin Cabrera raises an important and crucial question: what is our duty as intellectuals and citizens, to demand justice for victims of different forms of political repression?" - Revista de ALCES XXI