Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction 3031117913, 9783031117916

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STUDIES IN GLOBAL SCIENCE FICTION

Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction Edited by Antonio Córdoba · Emily A. Maguire

Studies in Global Science Fiction Series Editors

Anindita Banerjee Department of Comparative Literature Cornell University Ithaca, NY, USA Rachel Haywood Ferreira Department of World Languages and Cultures Iowa State University Ames, IA, USA Mark Bould Department of Film and Literature University of the West of England Bristol, UK

Studies in Global Science Fiction (edited by Anindita Banerjee, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, and Mark Bould) is a brand-new and first-of-its-kind series that opens up a space for Science Fiction scholars across the globe, inviting fresh and cutting-edge studies of both non-Anglo-American and Anglo-American SF literature. Books in this series will put SF in conversation with postcolonial studies, critical race studies, comparative literature, transnational literary and cultural studies, among others, contributing to ongoing debates about the expanding global compass of the genre and the emergence of a more diverse, multinational, and multi-ethnic sense of SF’s past, present, and future. Topics may include comparative studies of selected (trans)national traditions, SF of the African or Hispanic Diasporas, Indigenous SF, issues of translation and distribution of non-Anglophone SF, SF of the global south, SF and geographic/cultural borderlands, and how neglected traditions have developed in dialogue and disputation with the traditional SF canon. Editors: Anindita Banerjee, Cornell University Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Iowa State University Mark Bould, University of the West of England Advisory Board Members: Aimee Bahng, Dartmouth College; Ian Campbell, Georgia State University Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe), Portland State University Rob Latham, Independent Scholar Andrew Milner, Monash University Pablo Mukherjee, University of Warwick Stephen Hong Sohn, University of California, Riverside Mingwei Song, Wellesley College.

Antonio Córdoba  •  Emily A. Maguire Editors

Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction

Editors Antonio Córdoba Manhattan College Bronx, NY, USA

Emily A. Maguire Northwestern University Evanston, IL, USA

ISSN 2569-8826     ISSN 2569-8834 (electronic) Studies in Global Science Fiction ISBN 978-3-031-11790-9    ISBN 978-3-031-11791-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Sergey Krotov / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Putting together this collective project during a pandemic was a challenging task that took longer than we had anticipated, and we are very grateful to our contributors for the trust and patience they showed while this volume was taking shape and getting ready for publication. At Palgrave Macmillan, we want to thank Allie Troyanos for her interest in our collection of essays and her support, the anonymous readers for their generous feedback, and Vinoth Kuppan for his guidance during the production process. This collection is the result of many conversations the editors have had over the years. We would like to thank the organizing committees of the Latin American Studies Association’s annual convention for giving us the chance to talk about science fiction in San Juan, New York, and Barcelona. We are also grateful to María del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page for inviting us to a memorable symposium on Latin American speculative fiction that took place in Puerto Rico in September of 2015. Antonio would like to thank his colleagues at Manhattan College, Beti for all the walks taken together in Riverside Park, and Erika for all her love and understanding. Emily thanks her colleagues at Northwestern University for their support; her husband, Rafa, and her son, Miguel, for their love and patience; and Idaho and Badger, for making kin and reminding her to live in the moment.

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Contents

1 Introduction:  Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction  1 Antonio Córdoba and Emily A. Maguire Part I Posthuman Subjects  27 2 Prosthetic  Futures: Disability and Genre Self-­ consciousness in Maielis González Fernández’s Sobre los nerds y otras criaturas mitológicas 29 Ana Ugarte 3 We  Have Always Been Posthuman: Eve Gil’s Virtus and the Reconfiguration of the Lettered Subject 49 Miguel García 4 D  oes the Posthuman Actually Exist in Mexico? A Critique of the Essayistic Production on Posthumanist Discourse Written by Mexicans (2001–2007) 69 Stephen C. Tobin

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Contents

Part II Slow Violence and Posthuman Environments  89 5 Fukú,  Postapocalyptic Haunting, and Science-Fictional Embodiment in Junot Díaz’s “Monstro” 91 Maia Gil’Adí 6 Villa  Epecuén: Slow Violence and the Posthuman Film Set123 Jonathan Risner 7 Catfish  and Nanobots: Invasive Species and Eco-critical Futures in Alejandro Rojas Medina’s Chunga Maya143 Samuel Ginsburg Part III Posthuman Others 165 8 Andean  Cyborgs: Market and Indigeneity in Miguel Esquirol’s “El Cementerio de Elefantes”167 Liliana Colanzi 9 The  Politics of Resistance in Brazil’s Dystopian Thriller 3%185 M. Elizabeth Ginway 10 Bruja  Theory: Latinidad Without Latinos in Popular Narratives of Brujería201 William Orchard 11 “A  Mutant Faith”: Science Fiction, Posthumanism, and Queer Futurity in Arca’s KiCK Album Pentalogy219 Antonio Córdoba 12 Afterword:  Posthuman Subjectivity in Latin America— Changing the Conversation237 Silvia G. Kurlat Ares Index251

Notes on Contributors

Liliana Colanzi  has written the short story books Vacaciones permanentes (2010), Nuestro mundo muerto (Our Dead World, 2017), and Ustedes brillan en lo oscuro (2022). She edited La desobediencia, antología de ensayo feminista (2019) and co-edited Latin American Speculative Fiction (2018). Our Dead World has been translated into five languages. She won the Mexican Aura Estrada literary prize in 2015 and the Ribera del Duero prize for her story collection Ustedes brillan en lo oscuro (2022). The Hay Festival Cartagena included her among the best Latin American writers under 40 (Bogota39, 2017). In 2017 she started the literary press Dum Dum editora in Bolivia. Colanzi holds an M.Phil. in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. She is Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature and Creative Writing in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University, USA.  Her research focuses on popular genres in modern and contemporary Latin American literature (science fiction, horror, the fantastic). Antonio Córdoba  is an associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Manhattan College, USA. His main area of specialization is Latin American and Iberian science fiction. He has written ¿Extranjero en tierra extraña?: El género de la ciencia ficción en América Latina [Stranger in a Strange Land?: The Science Fiction Genre in Latin America] (2011) and co-edited two collections of essays on modernity and the sacred in Spain. He has written articles and book chapters on Latin American and Spanish science fiction and horror. ix

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Miguel  García holds a Doctorate in Latin American Literatures and Cultures from the University of California, Davis, USA.  He is Assistant Professor of Mexican Studies at Arizona State University. His teaching and research focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexican literature and film, with an emphasis on the cultural representation of science and technology. He has written academic articles in journals such as Chasqui, Revista Iberoamericana, and Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea. He is currently working on his first book monograph, titled Redes modernizantes: ciencia y tecnología en la literatura y el cine mexicanos (1917–1968) [Modernizing Networks: Science and Technology in Mexican Literature and Film (1917–1968)]. Maia  Gil’Adí is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Boston University, USA, where she specializes in Latinx and multiethnic literature and culture. Her book project, Doom Patterns: The Aesthetics of Violence and Reading Pleasures in Latinx Speculative Fiction, shows how portrayals of violence and destruction paradoxically foreground pleasure in humor, narrative beauty, and the grotesque. She has been an Institute for Citizens and Scholars Fellow (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), a member of the founding executive committee for the Latinx Forum of the Modern Language Association, co-chair of the Latinx Section of the Latin American Studies Association, and serves on the editorial boards for Label Me Latina/o and Palgrave’s SFF: A New Canon. Samuel Ginsburg  is Assistant Professor of American Studies, Comparative Ethnic Studies, and Spanish at Washington State University’s School of Languages, Cultures and Race, USA.  He holds a Ph.D. in Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures from the University of TexasAustin and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from New York University (NYU). He studies twenty-first-century Caribbean, Latin American, and Latinx science fiction literature, films, and art. His scholarly work can be found in Latin American Research Review, Latin American Literary Review, Alambique, Mitologías Hoy, and Sargasso. He is currently working on a book project on representations of bodies and technologies in recent Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican science fiction. M. Elizabeth Ginway  (she/her) is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Florida, USA. She is the author of Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in the Land of the Future (2004). She co-edited a volume of essays, Latin American Science Fiction:

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Theory and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) with J. Andrew Brown. She has written articles in journals such as Extrapolation, Science Fiction Studies, Alambique, Hispania, Luso-Brazilian Review, Modern Language Studies, Paradoxa, and Revista Iberoamericana. Her second monograph Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction was published in 2020. Silvia  G.  Kurlat  Ares, PhD is an independent scholar specializing in Southern Cone literature. Kurlat Ares has taught at George Mason University, Johns Hopkins University, and Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, among others. Her books include Para una intelectualidad sin episteme (2006) and La Ilusión peristente. Diálogos entre la ciencia ficción y el campo cultural (2018). She has co-directed the two-volume Historia de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana (2020–2021), the bilingual edition of the Peter Lang Companion to Latin American Science Fiction (2021), and several dossiers and collective volumes for academic journals such as Revista Iberomericana and Alter/nativas. Her articles have appeared in Alambique, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesía, Hispamerica, and Science Fiction Studies, among others. She has contributed chapters to collective volumes such as Latin American Textualities, Cultures of War in Graphic Novels, and Interface Between Literature and Science, among others. Emily A. Maguire  is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, USA, where she specializes in literature of the Hispanic Caribbean and its diasporas. The author of Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography (2011; 2nd edition, 2018), her articles have appeared in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Small Axe, A Contracorriente, ASAP/Journal, and Revista Iberoamericana, among other places. She is currently finishing a second book project on questions of temporality in recent Caribbean science fiction. William  Orchard  is Associate Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA. He teaches Latinx literature, queer studies, Native American and Indigenous literatures, and visual culture. He is the co-editor of Bridges, Borders, and Breaks: History, Narrative, and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Chicana/o Literary Criticism (2016) and The Plays of Josefina Niggli (2007). He has recently completed a monograph titled Graphic Educations: The Lessons of Latinx Comics that is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press, and is editing the final volume in Cambridge University Press’s Latinx

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Literature in Transition series, Latinx Literature and Critical Futurities, 1992–2022. His essays have appeared in Aztlán, Women’s Studies Quarterly, ASAP/J, Post-45 Contemporaries, and CENTRO Journal. Jonathan Risner  is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington, USA.  His research focuses on Latin American genre cinema, and he is the author of Blood Circuits: Contemporary Argentine Horror Cinema (2018). He has written articles in journals such as the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Hispanófila, and Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas. Stephen  C.  Tobin  is an assistant adjunct professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA, where he teaches Latin American science fiction literature and film and researches the genre in Mexico. His research interests include posthumanism, gender representations in science fiction, ecocriticism regarding anthropogenic climate change, and the relationship between science fiction and visual culture. His first book Vision, Technology, and Subjectivity from Mexican Cyberpunk Literature (forthcoming in Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies in Global Science Fiction series) argues that science fiction literature of the neoliberal period has become a unique discursive space through which to think through alterations in the broader visual sphere of the country as it relates to the screens of television, computers, and cell phones. His research has appeared in Alambique, alter/nativas, The Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Latin American Literature Today, Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades, and Tapuya, among others. Ana Ugarte  is an assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross, USA. Her research interests include the interdisciplinary fields of medical and health humanities and Caribbean contemporary literature. Her book manuscript, titled Laboratory Fictions: Reading Disease, Disability, and the Test-Subject in Contemporary Hispanic Caribbean Literature and Cultural Production, examines how fiction from the 1950s to the present exposes the historical functioning of tropical territories as laboratories for political, economic, and ­scientific experimentation. Ugarte’s research focuses on how medical and literary discourse intersect to create eugenic diagnoses, elucidating how contemporary fiction intervenes in these diagnoses through counter-hegemonic forms of imagining and experiencing mental and physical health, corporeal difference, and healing processes.

List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Storm clouds loom over an anonymous Villa Epecuén in Daemonium131 Fig. 6.2 An aerial shot of Villa Epecuén in Los olvidados133

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction Antonio Córdoba and Emily A. Maguire

On the first page of her book-length meditation on mushrooms and the end of the world, Anna Tsing (2015) outlines a constellation of concepts that will resonate with anyone who approaches the relationship between Latin American and Latinx communities, posthumanism, and speculative fiction. As Tsing puts it, the intellectual and material forces that were set in motion with the Enlightenment have left to peoples considered “Non-­ Western” and “non-civilized” the task of coming up with the fables that give an account of the complex and vibrant relationships of “all beings, humans and not humans” (Tsing 2015, vii). Often previously marginalized, these narratives are increasingly relevant at a time in which modern capitalism and Western traditions of mastery over nature have led us to an environmental catastrophe of such magnitude that we are forced to A. Córdoba (*) Manhattan College, Bronx, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] E. A. Maguire Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6_1

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consider the extinction of life on earth as we know it. As the situation in which we find ourselves with respect to climate change becomes increasingly clear, scientists and thinkers have become aware of entanglements that seemed to be described only by those fabulists excluded from Western civilization and in which that Eurocentric, imperialist, Christian construct, Man, built on the exclusion of human beings from all over the world, is collapsing even as those same human beings clamor to be given the same status (Tsing 2015, vii). Latin(x) America, a region of the world whose culture has been shaped by colonial encounters between Indigenous, African, and European subjects, formed from uneasy workings through what Mary Louise Pratt (1991) has termed the “contact zone,” has long been a site of traditions that offer alternatives to hegemonic narratives of Eurocentric universalism, other ways to understand humankind and relational subjectivity. In fact, there is a Latin American tradition of what we now would call “posthumanist,” post-anthropocentric, and “new materialist” thought, to which Héctor Hoyos (2019) would ascribe, quite intriguingly, Cuban intellectual Fernando Ortiz, and in which we can include, with a far surer footing, Brazilian thinker Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar (see below). Along with these thinkers and others, in the last fifteen years we have seen a flourishing of studies on posthumanism in the field of Latin American and Latinx studies. Just to mention a few examples: J. Andrew Brown (2010, 2017) and M. Elizabeth Ginway (2020a) have reassessed the figure of the cyborg, and David Dalton (2018) has used it to rethink the cultural and material project of the Mexican Revolution to fashion a mestizo nation; Gabriel Giorgi  (2014) has examined the shifting relations between the human and the animal in Latin American cultural production; Gloria Anzaldúa’s nagualismo has attracted the attention of Analouise Keating (2013) and Kelli Zaytoun (2015); Renée Hudson (2019) has highlighted the presence of Latinx speculative fiction; a collection of essays assembled by Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant (2020) has analyzed the ways in which Latin American arts explore the limits of the human, and a volume edited by Carolyn Fornoff and Gisella Heffes (2021) has covered all kinds of creations moving beyond anthropocentric exceptionalism. Along the same lines, Joanna Page has focused on post-anthropocentric visions and “transdisciplinary art—science projects across the world [that] are taking up the challenge of representing geological and cosmic time, and of rendering visible, audible and tangible the powerful but often invisible forces that shape the planet’s systems and even its orbit through space, such as

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gravity, atmospheric turbulence, and electromagnetic and seismic waves” (Page 2021, 31). Latin American and Latinx studies are starting to map out how Latin American thinkers and artists have envisioned alternative models of human and non-human-driven processes. The scholars gathered around these projects allow us to construct distinctive Latin American and Latinx currents of thought around posthumanism. In this new reality, Latin American science fiction has become a fruitful site from which to explore posthuman relations. Indeed, in recent Latin American cultural production we can observe a questioning of the Eurocentric subject; the deployment of speculative modes of fiction; reflections on apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic past, present, and future scenarios; and the envisioning of all kinds of non- and post-­anthropocentric entanglements between, as Tsing describes it, “the human and the not human.” Speculative fiction seems a particularly useful tool with which to construct these other visions of agency, entanglements, and time that Tsing mentions, especially as planetary extinction looms larger and alternative configurations to avoid the End and/or visions of what the world may be after the End, or a certain kind of end, become more and more necessary. After all, as Frederick Luis Aldama convincingly argues, As we face a reality that seems increasingly unbearable … the space of the speculative seems more and more a place of reprieve. It’s also more and more a space for us to see a way out of this quagmirical, gelatinous mess … the creative, mindful use of our counterfactual capacity today can imagine better ways for us to think, act, and feel tomorrow—where human and planetary organic life forms can productively and creatively build in stunning and remarkable new ways a future we all want. (Aldama 2019, 3)

The chapters in this collection, with their analysis of the use of the speculative and science fiction tropes and motifs to recast the past, the present, and the future beyond and beside Western, Eurocentric constructions of Man, show how pertinent and fruitful Latin American art and thinking are when articulating their own distinctive visions of posthumanism.

On Posthumanism and Science Fiction What could—or should—“posthumanism” be at this moment? “If the 1980s initiated our becoming posthuman as a consequence of our integration with the technological, in the twenty-first century we are becoming

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posthuman because of our inextricable inter-relations (or intrarelations, to use [Karen] Barad’s term) with ‘nature,’” argues Veronica Hollinger in a piece devoted to historizing the concept of posthumanism, published in 2020, and written, we may suppose, before the COVID-19 global pandemic highlighted in the most obvious terms the embeddedness of humankind in networks of non-human materialities and agencies (Hollinger 2020, 24). As Hollinger remarks immediately after this point, the urgency to turn our attention to the complex constellation of concepts and lines of study that we may put under the umbrella of “posthumanism” is dictated by facing the extinction of humankind in a climate crisis that is, at least partly, the result of “thinking with humanism” (Hollinger 2020, 24). Yet it is obvious that “not everyone using the term posthuman means the same thing by it,” explains Sherryl Vint (2020, 5). We may surmise that it has to do with the questioning of humanism and the mirage of a bounded subject crafted in modern times, what Mark Bould forcefully describes as “the constant frantic concoction of the monadic subject—isolated, pristine, transcendent” (Bould 2021, 133–34). At a certain time, it was precisely a glorification of this monadic subject that was associated with posthumanism, as it enabled fantasies of transcendence of the human (whatever that was) amid the development of the field of cybernetics, the realities and potentialities of digital networks, and neoliberal-inflected understandings of the concept of emergence. In response to these (generally) white male dreams of power and technology-enabled immortality, N.  Katherine Hayles demanded in 1999 a posthumanism that put back “the flesh” into visions of technified selves (Hayles 1999, 5). A decade later, Cary Wolfe made a frequently quoted distinction between an Enlightenment-inspired, ultimately humanist project to “transcend the bonds of materiality and embodiment all together” (transhumanism) and a posthumanism that comes “before and after humanism” and “names embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world, the prosthetic coevolution of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival mechanisms;” this posthumanism looks to decenter the human (Wolfe 2010, xv). In the 1980s, Donna Haraway (1991) invited us to consider to what extent the cyborg was the exceedingly unfaithful offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism; twenty-five years later, she invites us to stay with the trouble and “make kin,” or, rather, “make oddkin” (Haraway 2016, 5), to form cooperative relationships with the varied and vastly different beings with whom we share a planet. In Haraway’s words,

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We become-with each other or not at all. That kind of material semiotics is always situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly. Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and neither is a sensible attitude. Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence. (2016, 4)

Human exceptionalism and the constant work to uphold a knowing subject over an objectified world that needs to be mastered in and through cognition are abandoned in favor of an integrated world (Colebrook 2014, 20). As Kared Barad suggests, we need to acknowledge that “all bodies, not merely ‘human’ bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity” (Barad 2007, 152; Barad’s emphasis). In the end, as articulated by a wide range of thinkers of posthumanism, we are urged to explore all kinds of entanglements of human materialities and agencies and non-human ones. If, as Haraway suggests, these intra-active relationships are always “situated,” always “someplace,” what does posthumanism look like in Latin(x) America, from within Latin American and Latinx communities, and in the fields of Latin American and Latinx studies? When it comes to Latin American studies, it seems that ideas developed in the context of the humanities in the Global North took their time to reach the field, according to Ignacio Sánchez Prado in 2008 (9). In 2016, Tania Gentic and Matthew Bush found that few scholars had paid attention to issues of posthumanism in Latin America (Gentic and Bush 2016, 5). However, Gentic and Bush see Mabel Moraña as exploring the matter in an essay published in Inscripciones críticas (2014). In this essay, Moraña highlights how a hegemonic Eurocentric universalism can be called into question using new ways to understand humankind and subjectivity (Moraña 2014, 205). The form of posthumanism that Moraña proposes decenters the subject, the way the critical posthumanism advanced by Wolfe does. But this is not the only instance in which we can find a reflection on posthumanism from the field of Latin American studies, or one that can be easily translated to ideas produced in metropolitan centers of knowledge. In Latin American Cyborgs (2010), J. Andrew Brown is attuned to the specific histories and material circumstances of the region, self-consciously theorizing “a peculiarly Latin American vision of technological identity in the post-dictatorial, neoliberal reality that is not the case in the situations

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where we find cyborg and posthuman theory most often cited” (Brown 2010, 2). If Haraway’s cyborg erased the militaristic, capitalist father that produced them, in the texts that Brown analyzes the cyborg “cannot help but remember the father whose prosthetic phallus [i.e., the technology of torture] engendered the mechanical appendages that constitute its existence” (Brown 2010, 4). The cyborg is a trace of trauma. This insight is expanded, but not erased, when, in a more recent text, Brown talks about posthuman selves as “a combination of technological identities and an identity that is distributed over social networks and goes beyond any border between the self and the world” (Brown 2017, 109). One could argue that it is precisely in this distribution that we can locate even more points of oppression, trauma, and potential liberation. In fact, in David Dalton’s formulation of robo sacer, global inequalities are inserted in Latin American configurations of posthumanist tropes, as these robo sacer subjects are “beings who are intimately connected to and influenced by foreign technologies of power” (Dalton 2016, 16). These beings are still able to fight global capitalist powers in their local contexts, thereby reenvisioning, and thus reclaiming, agency in contexts in which they suffer the dehumanizing effects of transnational inequalities (Dalton 2016, 13). M.  Elizabeth Ginway recently called attention to the fact that in Latin American cyberpunk’s envisioning of posthumanist realities the physical body is never transcended in dreams of disembodiment, and this emphasis on the corporeal must be understood as a conceptual maneuver to fight oppressive political conditions (Ginway 2020b, 385). If Hayles felt the need to put the flesh back into the posthumanist fantasies that had attempted to cast it off, we could say that in Latin America such calls were never needed, because the flesh never went away. If Haraway invites us to “stay with the trouble,” the bodies of the Latin American subjects in these stories never disappear into digital nirvanas, but instead find themselves in all kinds of difficult entanglements. Asking whether posthumanist ideas formulated in the centers of intellectual production in the Global North have reached Latin American studies seems to frame posthumanism as only something that flows south from the North American academic metropolis,  excluding other options. Yet elements of what we might identify as posthumanist ways of thinking and being were already present in Latin America in their own right. Indeed, Latin American thinkers such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marisol de la Cadena, and Arturo Escobar have been working for decades in exploring these situated “copresences.” Viveiros de Castro’s (2012) exploration of

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“Amerindian perspectivism” gives an account of the complex and fluctuating indigenous understanding of the relationship between humans and non-humans, a relationship in which non-human beings have personhood that does not need to be understood as permanent nor identical with that of humans and needs to be understood strictly in Amerindian terms. We must stay with the trouble, because “affirming that non-human beings are persons capable of a point of view is not the same as affirming that they are ‘always’ persons, that is, that humans’ interactions with them are always predicated on a shared personhood” (Viveiros de Castro 2012, 54). This mutable, fluctuating relationship between humans and non-humans, humanity and the world must be thought as “the relationship.” De la Cadena’s (2015) work with Indigenous Andean healers Nazario and Mariano Turpo provides a window into a complex worldview in which humans, animals, and earth-beings (landscape forms) coexist. Drawing on the work of colleagues like De la Cadena as well as his own work in the “mangrove world” (Escobar 2016, 18), the dense network of interspecies relations in which the Afro-descended peoples of Colombia’s Yurumanguí river exist, anthropologist Arturo Escobar argues for approaching political, environmental, and social justice struggles from the perspective of a “radical relationality,” an understanding that “all entities that make up the world are so interrelated that they have no intrinsic, separate existence by themselves” (Escobar 2020, xiii). This scholarship—some of which, like Escobar’s, is intimately connected to political activism—sees strains of posthumanism within longstanding Latin American ontologies and ways of being as a starting point for imagining a way out of the problems created by Anthropocenic thinking. “When Eve walked among /the animals and named them/ … /I wonder if she ever wanted/them to speak back,” writes Latinx poet Ada Limón in “A Name,” the poem that opens her collection The Carrying. Limón ends the poem wondering if Eva ever whispered, “Name me, name me” (Limón 2018, 3; Limón’s emphasis). This is a dream of reciprocity, in which Eve would demand from the animals to be recognized and identified (named) in turn. The subject of knowledge would become the object, humans and non-humans entangled in the circuit of mutual recognition that just might cancel out the alleged dominion over animals granted to human beings in the book of Genesis. Obviously enough, what we find here in this dream of shared agency is an anthropomorphizing gesture in which animals are made to behave like humans in the desired reciprocity between human and non-human consciousness. In this, Limón may seem

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to confirm Claire Colebrook’s assertion that “Man imagines himself as exemplary of life, so much so that when he aims to think in a posthuman manner he grants rights, lifeworlds, language and emotions to nonhumans” (Colebrook 2014, 141). And yet, the white, Australian, US-based Colebrook, by seemingly upholding a universal Man as the only source of articulation of posthumanist visions of the world, forecloses venues of exploration. We may take into consideration, when reading a Latina poet writing about a woman, that posthumanist theories may help us “attend to the animist, the otherworldly, the irrational, and ecological aspects of Latinx thought,” as Suzanne Bost  argues (2019, 7). By doing that, we find agencies and relations that go unnoticed otherwise. Kelli Zaytoun (2015) employs a similarly productive posthumanism when exploring Gloria Anzaldúa’s “nagualismo,” in which subjects are empowered by creating imaginative ties between the human and the non-human. Through this process, Anzaldúa expresses her skepticism of the Eurocentric universalist humanist subject. According to Zaytoun, we would all benefit from looking at Anzaldúa’s blurring of the “boundaries between self, other, and surroundings” in terms of posthumanism (Zaytoun 2015, 74). Latinx thinkers and communities uphold and recover non-universalized cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions that are able to envision non-human agencies in ways that question the Eurocentric subject behind the humanist gestures that anthropomorphize the world and make it an extension of the anthropocentric mentality pushing humankind toward its own extinction . How does Latin American and Latinx science fiction confront a world in which, as Kim Stanley Robinson argues, “we all live inside a science fiction novel we are making together,” with the result that “the genre is becoming better understood as the great realism of our time”? (Robinson 2018, xii). To begin with, we must remember that “Latin American science fiction is, above all, Latin American fiction,” as one of us asserts in his book-length study of the genre in Latin America; it is not a stranger in a strange land (Córdoba Cornejo 2011, 18). As Silvia G. Kurlat Ares suggests, we must look for all kinds of aesthetic and ideological continuities between science fiction texts and the rest of the production in the Latin American cultural field; science fiction has a long local genealogy, and debates on whether or not Latin American science fiction is an “implanted,” “inauthentic” form of art are deeply unproductive (Kurlat Ares 2018, 24). Embracing this historical perspective and moving to reconsider and even retro-label works that have not been necessarily considered science fiction

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as such not only expands our understanding of Latin American science fiction, but it also contributes to a more generous, more ambitious understanding of the potential of the genre as a whole (Haywood Ferreira 2010). Furthermore, as Kurlat Ares explains in another of her many studies, science fiction is just one more mode in which “a culture (any culture) reads processes of social and cultural transformation” (Kurlat Ares 2020, 12). While it is not helpful to get lost in unnecessary questions regarding the “legitimacy” of Latin American works nor to engage in a constant comparison of Latin(x) American SF’s trajectory to the development of the Anglo-American tradition, it is true that we may find a certain specificity in the works produced in the region. If speculative literature is usually understood as genre fiction that approaches the ways in which technology has an impact on everyday life, we may argue, as Liliana Colanzi and Debra Castillo do, that in Latin America it “stands out as a framework from which to explore philosophical ideas and to extend literary styles and formats” (Castillo and Colanzi 2018, 2). We may add, as an example of specific traits, that during the Cold War period, Latin American science fiction showed a remarkable interest in exploring the question of how center-­ periphery relationships would develop and which countries/global regions would occupy which place in that dualistic structure (Banerjee and Haywood Ferreira 2017). In the case of Latinx culture, Daniel J. Older argues that speculative literature offers authors an opportunity to fight one-dimensional representations in white mainstream culture, and to reclaim a degree of complexity that cannot be captured by “affirmative, glorious, magical versions” of who Latinxs are (Aldama 2017, 170). If Older’s speculative literature combines mythology and politics, Afro-­ Caribbean religion and Lovecraftian mythos, the Chicanofuturism of Marion C. Martínez “does not privilege science and reason over spirituality. Instead, it merges them, and, thus, offers, an ontological and epistemological alternative to that of the Enlightenment (or rational) subject” (Ramírez 2019, 157). Speculation can be turned into a form of care in which Latinx authors chart historical and personal trauma while they envision other articulations of the world. The study of science fiction in Latin American and Latinx studies has suffered from the same neglect vis-à-vis realism that genre fiction has experienced in other parts of the world (Brown and Ginway 2012). Furthermore, as is the case in the literature from other regions, we can observe that, beginning in the first decade of the twenty-first century,

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“sf—and science fictional elements—have been increasingly incorporated into mainstream Latin American literature, often by writers who do not consider themselves explicitly ‘science fiction writers.’ The end result of this trend is that the last decade and a half [i.e. 2002–2017] has seen a remarkable rise in both the presence and visibility of sf in mainstream Latin American cultural production” (Maguire 2021, 170). As an example of this double trend, we may mention the fact that Hugo Correa (1926–2008), a prolific writer of sf between 1950 and 1980, is absent from Cambridge University Press’s A History of Chilean Literature (2021), while Jorge Baradit (b. 1969), author of several recent works of alternate history and cyberpunk science fiction, is actually included (López-Calvo 2021, 618–621). In fact, current critical work on Latin American science fiction and speculative literature is defined by two main features, according to Teresa López-Pellisa: the naturalization of the genre and “an increase in the presence of women” (2021, 239). These points seem to be confirmed by the recent awarding of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize at the 2021 Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL in Spanish) to Fernanda Trías for her novel Mugre rosa (2021), in which an unidentified and simultaneous mutation in algae and the climate produces a devastating epidemic in a nameless Latin American city that looks like a spectral version of Montevideo in which residents now live under siege by the algae, sunk in a marsh of fog. Although started before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trías’ novel captures the experience of lockdown and the despair that became so prevalent in 2020 and 2021 all over the world. The tropes of science fiction can unearth “the radical alterity buried within the present,” allowing us to glimpse “a genuine alternative” while we experience the pleasure that can be found “in the conscious responsibility of constructing something new and different” (Bould and Williams 2014, 8). When reading Mugre rosa, one could say, with Kim Stanley Robinson, that in the hands of Trías the speculative lens that is intended to look for alterity actually works to give a reflective account of the science fictional world in which we live now. “Science fiction” or “speculative fiction”? Margaret Atwood considers that there is a meaningful “distinction” between “science fiction proper,” which deals with impossible beings, places, and things, and speculative fiction, “which employs the means already more or less to hand, and takes place on Planet Earth” (Atwood 2004, 531). In an arch, though positive, review of Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, Ursula K. Le Guin considered that the only distinction that really matters to Atwood is a Bourdesian one:

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“This arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto” (Le Guin 2009). Building on Paul Kincaid’s (2008) understanding of genre—and of science fiction in particular—as a question of “family resemblances,” in this introduction, and in our general understanding of this project, we have used them interchangeably, without any real effort to tell one from another, or to identify any idea of “proper” as opposed to “improper” science fiction. The challenge, it seems, is to articulate posthumanist constellations that aptly give an account of the entanglements of human and non-human agencies in productive ways. While talk about the Anthropocene and such geological matters may bring attention to the complex ways in which humankind is embedded in natural materialities, “talking about a geological epoch invites awestruck recoil at sublime magnitudes, which is not necessarily a bad thing, since hubris should be clobbered once in a while, but also risks evasion and complacency,” as Mark Bould recently warned us (Bould 2021, 14). How are we to escape this complacency, this melancholy invitation to embrace flight and non-action? The authors in this collection argue for the ways in which Latin American and Latinx works of speculative imagination produce new strands of posthumanist thought from these sites of enunciation. As these chapters demonstrate, Latin(x) American texts can be understood as sources of thought in their own right and not a mere illustration of concepts developed in academic departments in the Global North. Speculation is “a mode of contemplative creativity” that “challenges the knowable, predictable modern world, finding it insufficient” (Rogers 2021, 1, 2). We may want to remember Seo-Young Chu’s thought-provoking conceptualization of science fiction as “a mimetic discourse whose objects of representation are nonimaginary yet cognitively estranging” (Chu 2011, 3). The possible futurelessness of humankind as we know it on a planet undergoing a climate change that is a devastating event for life forms as they exist now is a palpable reality that paradoxically both defies imagination and fosters all kinds of posthumanist new concepts and artistic works to try to give an account of it. In this sense, science fiction gives us a representative tool to process the failure to represent certain objects. It is a way to handle the power of what Gayle Rogers calls the “cognitive provisionality” of speculative thought (Rogers 2021, 3). The “alterity” crafted by science fiction fails as much as any other linguistic creation when it tries

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to come to terms with the Real. But even that failure must be understood as productive, because, as China Miéville points out, science fiction’s sense of wonder is predicated on “precisely the necessary failure of alterity, the inevitable stains and traces of the everyday in whatever can be thought from within it, including its estranged/estranging other. Without such guilty stains, there could be no recognition or reception—true alterity would be inconceivable, thus imperceptible. We gasp not just at the strangeness but at the misplaced familiar within it” (Miéville 2009, 248). Precisely because science fiction fails, we are not left paralyzed in the contemplation of the absolute Other, and this failure keeps us coming to terms productively with the major crises we may face, rather than turning our face away from them or embracing melancholy and giving up. It is in the gaps between the given and the projection of what is not yet here, between the indicative and the subjunctive, that the possibility of agency and action can be kept alive.

This Volume More than seeking to strictly categorize the posthuman in particular authors and works, the chapters in this volume engage in a dialog that takes into consideration Sherryl Vint’s recent question: “How might sf help us conceptualize and respond to a world that has begun to resemble sf, in ways both marvelous and malign [?]” (Vint 2021, 1). The chapters in this collection think posthumanism through the tropes of speculative fiction to try to conceptualize and respond to this world. The ten chapters in this volume are organized in three parts, each of which centers on a different aspect of posthuman subjectivity or environment. Of course, it is simply not possible in one volume to do justice to the wealth of perspectives that the different Latin American countries and Latinx communities have to offer in a wide range of media. None of the chapters in this collection explores the cultural production of Central America, Colombia, Peru, or Chile, for instance, and while several chapters examine the relationship of race and ethnic identity to expressions of the posthuman, specific movements such as Amazonian Futurism, Brazilian Afrofuturism, and Caribbean “Prietopunk” (among others) are not explicitly addressed. Given the extraordinary contribution to the field that Edward King and Joanna Page (2017) recently made in Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America, we did not think to include any chapters on comic books and sequential art in general. Readers may consider that science fiction books

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(essays, short stories, and novels) are overrepresented, and they would be right to point out that film, TV, videogames and performance and visual arts should have received more attention. We can only hope that the lacunae in this collection may serve as an incentive to further exploration of the rich intersection between posthumanism and speculative aesthetics in the field of Latin American and Latinx studies. The volume’s first chapters explore the ways in which recent speculative fictions in Latin America propose new configurations of the subject, both (post)human subjects within the narratives themselves as well as the reading subject who consumes and engages with these fictions. In Chap. 2, Ana Ugarte focuses on the work of Cuban author Maielis González Fernández, whose short fiction features a range of technologies that probe the relationship between the body and technology. Rather than highlighting the opposition between artificialness and nature, Ugarte approaches this opposition through another dichotomy, that of the abled subject— epitome of the normative and the normal—versus the disabled subject. In this sense, Ugarte’s examination of technological embeddedness through the lens of disability studies brings to mind Irving Goh’s observation that “‘posthumanism’ so far has been motivated and mobilized largely by rejects, that is, figures excluded, marginalized, and even banned by existing sociocultural norms and dominant intellectual discourses that determine what constitutes a human and what belongs to human communities” (Goh 2015, 219). Ugarte’s reading of González Fernández’s short stories sees both the literal use of the word prosthesis—artificial body parts—and its figurative use as an “amplifying tool” that improves the functioning of a damaged or maladjusted reality—in this case, the Caribbean island’s reality. Armed flying wheelchairs, bionic limbs turned into information storing devices, or acts of self-mutilation perpetrated in order to technologically enhance the human body may trivialize or conceal disability, presupposing a lack of normality inherent to the disabled person that needs to be fixed. Veering from these “restorative” narratives, Ugarte argues that González Fernández’s fiction foregrounds prostheses and different sorts of impairments to question the institutional regulation of the Othered body and, ultimately, to reveal  the symbolic technologies of biopower in Cuba. Simultaneously, the motif of the prosthesis in her fiction becomes a master trope that elicits a meta-literary discussion on the meaning, role, and uses of science fiction as a genre in the specific context of the Caribbean. In the case of Mexico, as David Dalton explains, “the twin ideals of mestizaje and technological modernity sat at the background of most—if

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not all—articulations of postrevolutionary mexicanidad” (Dalton 2018, 13). Official discourses could (or should) be understood as prostheses that shaped people’s cognition of the world; as a result, the figure of the cyborg helps us think one hundred years of Mexican culture, even before its inception (Dalton 2018, 18–20). In Chap. 3, Miguel García explores a similar territory, arguing that in Mexican culture, posthumanism has traditionally appeared not as a promise for new subjectivities but as a nightmare of disembodiment and a threat to the legacy of humanism. As García explains, contemporary posthuman narratives in Mexican science fiction have typically focused on two themes: first, a rejection of the neoliberal policies that have widened the socioeconomic gap under the pretense of modernizing the nation; and second, the repositioning of the human as a symbol of resistance in the face of technological dehumanization. However, this dystopian view of a posthuman reality seems to be shifting in more recent fiction; turning to the novel Virtus  published in 2008 by Eve Gil, García explores the ways in which this dystopian perspective is and is not visible in the text. Although Gil’s novel follows the dystopian logic of previous Mexican science fiction, it also offers alternatives that make it an interesting case study of Latin American posthuman fiction. The novel presents a near-future Mexico where the government has ordered the surgical implantation of a computer chip that creates a virtual reality that hides the social and material decay of the country. With their only access to reality mediated by the chip, Mexican citizens become cyborgs and are thus rendered incapable of reflecting on their precarious condition. When the chip is mysteriously infected by a computer virus, only a small percentage of the population survives, including the protagonist Juana Inés, a young girl who has to (re)learn to live without the help of technology. Even as the novel suggests the cyborgs’ demise is almost a punishment for their overreliance on technology, García argues that Virtus simultaneously opens itself to another type of reading, one in which posthuman subjectivities have a place in the future of Mexico. While not oblivious to the materiality of the body, Virtus also provides another model through a subjectivity that is linked to modern technology in a more ethical way. This alternate posthuman subject acknowledges the crucial role of technology for the nation, revealing a more open-ended view of the human in its relation to the technological world even as it implicitly questions the tenets of traditional humanism. As a region in which the question of national identity has long been a topic of literary concern, it should come as no surprise that questions of

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nationalism resurface in connection to posthumanism in Latin American science fiction, particularly as these literary fictions engage with contemporary social, economic, and political issues. Chapter 4 by Stephen Tobin turns directly to this relationship, daring to ask: Does an autochthonous Mexican posthumanism actually exist in the country’s literary thought? To answer this question, Tobin examines four non-fiction, book-­length essays written by Mexicans on the topic of the posthuman in the 2000s: El cuerpo transformado by Naief Yehya (2001), La utopía de los seres posthumanos by Luz María Sepúlveda (2004), El cuerpo post-humano by Iván Mejía (2005), and Posthumano: la vida después del hombre by Mauricio Bares (2007). Although all four of these texts explore the changing relationship between the body and technology—with Mejía focusing mainly on the radically changed representation of the body in contemporary art, and Yehya, Bares and Sepúlveda widening their scope to also include the human as viewed by philosophy and technoscience—Tobin finds that they in fact lack a sustained discursive focus on Mexico and Mexicans in the treatment of the posthuman, choosing instead to focus their analyses on examples and references from other Western/Westernized countries. To understand why this might be so, Tobin analyzes the salient commonalities and differences of these four non-fiction texts, examining the scant treatment of the posthuman within the boundaries of Mexico as it relates to each authors’ background and locus of enunciation. In the end, he finds that while unequal epistemological flows between the United States and Mexico as they relate to the production, circulation, and legitimization of knowledge of posthuman discourses may explain the absence of an autochthonous posthumanism, theories of cultural hybridity might also help account for the lack of local content within Mexican discussions of posthumanism. Taking a cue from Tobin’s chapter, the three chapters that appear in the book’s second part are concerned explicitly with the relationship between posthuman subjects and their environment. Although focused on the particulars of local or national environments, they also display an interest in tracing what Haraway might understand as the landscape of the Chthulucene. What relationships are established in a world that is no longer ordered around the explicit superiority of “Man”? The texts on which these chapters focus lay bare the dark ecological loops between climate change and disaster, or between ecological degradation and human peril; they also explore the possibilities for life in their aftermath. As they recast the centrality of humans in their world, posthumanist narratives highlight the intimate connections between human societies

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and their environments. If Fernanda Trías’ Mugre Rosa highlights the ways in which human society can change in response to environmental threats, Maia Gil’Adí’s contribution (Chap. 5) to the volume explores the ways in which crisis can reveal problems at the heart of societies. Her chapter examines the Dominican-American author Junot Díaz’s short story “Monstro” (2012), which she understands as a kind of companion piece to his Pulitzer-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). “Monstro” centers on the unnamed narrator’s return to the Dominican Republic to visit his ailing mother. During his visit, the island undergoes an outbreak from a mysterious disease that attaches itself to the infected body like a “black mold-fungus.” Named “La Negrura” for its capacity to re-blacken already dark skin, the disease initially turns the infected into proto-zombies; by the story’s apocalyptic end, they have become full-­ fledged cannibal monsters, rampaging across the island. Gil’Adí’s reads “Monstro” as emblematic of the ways in which Díaz’s oeuvre is constructed around depictions of the Caribbean as a post-apocalyptic space and Afro-Latinxs as science fiction embodiments. In particular, the figure of the zombie here expands Díaz’s well-known concept of fukú americanus. “Monstro” presents the Caribbean (and the Americas) as instantiated into modernity by this curse of the New World (fukú), which remains into the present as a haunting presence and allows Díaz to narrate the Caribbean as a space created through a cataclysmic rift that emits dead bodies. Díaz has argued that all the basic tropes used in science fiction, “have their roots in the traumas of colonialism” (Taylor 2014, 101). The zombies in “Monstro” recall and make visible Caribbean histories of colonialism, slavery, embodied labor, and racial expendability: histories that demonstrate a foundational pattern of violence connected to the region’s modern formation. Seen in this light, Gil’Adí proposes that we understand the zombies’ mass groupings and screams as a form of racial protest against the histories that created them as dead subjects. As Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes point out, scholars have started paying attention to the ways in which Latin American film represents “the more-than-human;” at a time “in which human practices are recognizably inflicting permanent ecological consequences, the task of making these effects visible feels all the more urgent” (Fornoff and Heffes 2021, 3). In Chap. 6, Jonathan Risner explores the connection between the material conditions of science fiction cinema in Latin America and the dystopian elements of the cinematic texts themselves. The center of Risner’s investigation is Villa Epecuén, Argentina, a former resort town that was later the

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site of an ecological disaster. In its heyday, Villa Epecuén was an exclusive lakefront town drawing celebrities and well-to-do families from Buenos Aires, attracted in part by the salty therapeutic waters of nearby Lago Epecuén. However, in 1985 disaster struck when a dam broke and submerged the town in nearly 30  feet of water for some 25 years. As the waters have receded, the resort town has emerged as blanched ruins and has been recycled into a modest tourist attraction and setting for three post-apocalyptic Argentine genre films: Daemonium (2015), El expediente Santiso (2015), and Los olvidados (2018). Risner characterizes Villa Epecuén as a “post-human ecology,” one whose interrelationality has been foregrounded through its transformation into a film set. That is, the spectacle of the remains of the ecological disaster underscores the intersections between the anthropological and the aqueous that were ignored prior to the dam’s rupture in 1985, intersections that abound in the three films. Risner considers how Villa Epecuén’s appearance as film set adheres to and augments Rob Nixon’s (2011) notion of slow violence, in which the speed of environmental destruction resists narrativization. The three films produced in Villa Epecuén narrativize slow violence to differing degrees; although they include violent episodes, they also allow Villa Epecuén to occupy the screen as landscape, creating a “snapshot in which the posthuman and the Anthropocene appear in tension” (131), expanding on the previous visual language of space in Argentine cinema. The Argentine films on which Risner’s analysis centers use the specificity of Villa Epecuén to explore environmental disaster through the post-­ apocalyptic form. In contrast, Chap. 7 by Samuel Ginsburg looks at how Cuban literature has explored the particularities of environmental threats to the island. Speaking of one of these threats, Rachel Price points out that in the Cuban cultural production of the twenty-first century, one invasive plant, marabú, “figures in allegorical terms. It is often both material evidence for, and a symbol of, state power—and its failure” (Price 2015, 49). Ginsburg’s chapter touches on this literary reflection on Cuban national issues while it also takes it in fascinating directions. He focuses on the treatment of invasive species in Alejandro Rojas Medina’s short story collection, Chunga Maya (2017). Rojas’ stories take three invasive species currently creating problems for Cuba’s ecosystem—the claria fish, the marabú plant, and the hurón (the Cuban ferret, technically a mongoose), and extrapolate on the effects of these biological invasions currently affecting Cuban ecosystems. The future Rojas conjures is dark; he envisions extreme versions of real-life invasive animal and plant species: mutant

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clarias, radioactive marabú, genetically enhanced hurones cubanos. In an attempt to combat these invasions, his future Cuba is overrun by invasive nanobots and militarized fumigators authorized to exterminate both the technological pests and those humans that propagate them. However, while projects for controlling invasive species often take on xenophobic or nativist undertones in political and cultural discourse, Ginsburg shows how Rojas’ texts push for a more nuanced understanding of ecological and technological hybridity, suggesting that the lessons learned from Cuba’s relationship with foreign biological species can inform the future incorporation of invasive technologies. Chunga Maya’s connecting of current crises to future threats highlights the social potential of Cuban science fiction and its capacity to spark dialogues on ecological, technological, and political issues. Narratives like Junot Díaz’s “Monstro” reimagine stock figures such as the zombie to highlight the intimate connections between social marginalization and environmental precarity. In doing so, they reveal the potential for the speculative genre to both offer social critique and imagine new ways of being. As posthuman narratives in Latin America redefine the nature of subjectivity, they also reconsider what it means to be other or “othered” in Latin American societies. The volume’s last section thus returns to the question of posthuman subjectivity; the chapters in this section explore the ways in which Latin American science fictions approach questions of social inclusion and exclusion. In a world in which subjectivity is not centered in the human, where do national or regional identities come into play? As Chap. 8 by Liliana Colanzi shows, the practices of cyborg subjects generate a posthumanist urban landscape where national identity is redefined and where it shows its composite nature, one in which tradition and modernity, rural and urban life, nature and culture, past and present, and high and popular culture overlap in fascinating and unexpected ways. In her chapter, Colanzi explores the reconfiguration of autochthonous identities in recent Bolivian speculative fiction, focusing on the figure of the aparapita, the indigenous peasant who is paid to shoulder heavy loads in Bolivian street markets. An emblematic character in La Paz (in the Aymara language, aparapita means “the one who carries”), the aparapita has become a symbol of the indigenous identity that survives in the Bolivian capital in spite of the modernizing impulse, thanks in part to Jaime Saenz’s treatment of the aparapita in his non-fiction work Imágenes paceñas and his essay “El aparapita de La Paz.” In her chapter, Colanzi examines Bolivian writer Miguel Esquirol’s

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science fictional re-working of the figure of the aparapita in his short story “El Cementerio de Elefantes” (published in 2008). In his narrative, Esquirol places the aparapita in a popular market where male workers seek illegal chemical injections to enhance their muscles, and prostheses that make them stronger and more competitive; the story explores the body’s connection to the economy—capitalistic but highly illegal and informal—through multiple implants, prosthesis, and chemical substances. The aparapita is the indigenous both as a specter haunting the country and as a cornerstone of a national identity crisscrossed by technological and globalizing impulses. Esquirol’s retooling of the aparapita into a bio-­ cyborg figure recalls Fredric Jameson’s observation that extrapolation implies the juxtaposition of heterogeneous or contradictory elements, which are “recombined into piquant montages” (Jameson 2005, 276). In both Saenz and Esquirol, indigeneity is linked to the anxieties and failures of a civilizing, capitalistic, and modernizing national project. In Esquirol’s cyborgs, Colanzi argues, the indigenous body becomes the marginal space through which the city is articulated as an incongruous reality. In Chap. 9, M. Elizabeth Ginway looks at how the popular science fiction TV show 3% (2016–2020) explores controversial social issues in Brazilian society. The futuristic Brazil in which the series is set is a world of rigidly segregated social classes; while the majority of the population lives in the dystopian Inland, a small elite population—the 3% of the title—resides in the supposedly utopian Offshore. The show’s first season centers on the idea of meritocracy; we follow a group of young, working-­ class Inlanders as they compete in a series of difficult and often brutal tests called “the Process” for the chance to be admitted to Offshore. In the second season, the focus shifts to an underground political group known as the Cause and the attempts of its members to sabotage the Process and undermine the tenuous balance between the two societies. Ginway’s analysis focuses on the evolving presentation of race, sexuality, and violence in these two seasons; she sees the first season as establishing premises that are then dismantled in the second. Against the liberal dreams of autonomy and race and gender binaries that uphold the humanist self at the center of Eurocentric capitalist modernity, she argues that 3% follows the posthumanist turn to emphasize embeddedness in social and technological systems. In the series’ first season, the concept of biopolitics and the genre of speculative fiction help viewers understand the mechanisms of bodily control. Even as the 3% system promises young people citizenship (or bios in Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) terms) it leaves the majority to live as zoë (or

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‘bare life’). Significantly, the show uses black female characters to estrange viewers from the biopolitics that stereotype race, criminality, and security in Brazilian society. The second season, however, suggests a recombination of allies and technologies along the lines of what Ecuadoran philosopher Bolívar Echeverría has called the “baroque ethos,” which articulates “the incongruous quality of this modernity, the possibility and the urgency of an alternative modernity” (Echeverría 2000, 15). By contesting predominant cultural hegemony through “códigofagia” (devouring of codes/ discourse), the characters begin to re-conceptualize power and justice, illustrating alternate attitudes toward gender, race, and technology. In the end, Ginway argues, 3% suggests that the complexity of Brazilian cultural reality contains the materials for crafting a new path toward greater social justice. The section’s second-to-last chapter (Chap. 10) explores the posthuman permutations of a more hybrid, loosely circulating figure, that of the brujo (witch, or sorcerer). William Orchard analyzes a recent surge in Latinx popular narratives that feature Latinx brujas or brujos and that use the figure to propose new kinds of Latinidades. These include Ecuadorian-­ American Zoraida Cordova’s (2017–2020) Brooklyn Brujas series of young adult novels; OpenTV’s webseries Brujos (2017), which chronicles the exploits of a group of witches, who are also doctoral students, as they evade being hunted by the descendants of the original New World colonizers; and the reboot of the television series Charmed (2018–2022), which now locates the power of three in a trio of Afro-Latina sisters who are reunited after their mother’s death. These narratives reflect an exhaustion with and an attempt to redefine Latinidad in the wake of the 2016 US Presidential election and the increasing polarization of US politics that has followed. In addition, in keeping with a recent rise in the production of both Latinx and speculative narratives in young adult fiction, many of these bruja productions are geared toward younger viewers and readers. From this position, Orchard argues that they both invoke and sit in uneasy relationship with an established and growing body of writing that locates brujas and brujería in the context of spirituality, healing, and decolonial epistemologies. Yet while these popular narratives share an interest with existing academic scholarship in recovering indigenous and African ways of knowing in order to imagine new ways of achieving justice in the present, they do not share the scholarship’s commitments to realism. Instead, Orchard asserts, they combine recovered knowledges with the tools of contemporary theory to critique a prior generation that withheld this

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knowledge and to battle structural injustices—particularly those related to the environment. As they do so, these narratives use recovered traditions to imagined new forms of Latinidad that exceed nationality, resulting in either a generic Latinidad, as in Cordova’s novels, or in new coalitions that imagine a future beyond the histories of particular national identifications. If Orchard is concerned with the presence of brujxs and supernatural power, in his reading of Venezuelan musical artist Arca and her pentalogy of albums KiCK (2020–2021), Antonio Córdoba inquires into how science fiction motifs such as the cyborg, the alien, and the mutant are used to envision alternative forms of futurity, what Latinx queer thinker José Esteban Muñoz theorizes as “queer futurity” (Muñoz 2019). In Chap. 11 by Córdoba, the mutant takes a prominent position in Arca’s search for a very posthuman porousness with our surroundings, others, and the inorganic. As she writes lyrics and produces songs that invite us to open ourselves to the unexpected, Arca explores forms of non-prescribed queer intimacy predicated on vulnerability and potentiality, while her songs inhabit a world between the recognizable, reproduced, and reproducible pop song and her own distinctive experimentalism. Córdoba argues that the musical soundscape generated by this indeterminacy between the known and the unknown must be understood as the sonic materialization of the speculative concept of the mutant, which in itself fleshes out and reproduces the artistic concept of the glitch, the error, and the unexpected. Finally, Silvia G. Kurlat Ares’ Afterword (Chap. 12), titled “Posthuman Subjectivity in Latin America: Changing the Conversation,” explores the proliferation of new forms of personhood that have challenged traditionally articulated forms of subjectivity in the last few decades. Kurlat Ares focuses on Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac’s second novel (2015), Las constelaciones oscuras (published in Spanish in 2015 and translated to English as Dark Constellations in 2019). This is a particularly fruitful object of study, for, as Emily Baker describes it, Oloixarac’s novel “is a literary intervention that depicts multispecies partnerships and alternative histories of evolution starting in the late nineteenth century and projects their implications forward to shed light on aspects of contemporary and future ‘technohumanism’” (Baker 2020, 151). Kurlat Ares questions established historical accounts shaped by complex set of binarisms, the kind of accounts that would understand posthumanism exclusively as either absent from Latin America or present in a radically different form, thereby ignoring or misrepresenting a number of phenomena,

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experiences, communities, and subjectivities that visibly demand recognition. At the same time, we should critically consider how discussions of posthumanism have taken place in Latin America, instead of merely taking Latin America and posthumanism as an object of study in one way or another. Kurlat Ares explores the way in which posthumanism tries to break from essentialist humanisms, from the Enlightenment’s imagined unified subject, even if this break, as Kurlat Ares shows in Oloixarac’s treatment of science in her novel, has coexisted with the Enlightenment from the very beginning. In the end, it is important to acknowledge that posthuman politics are a form of critical thinking, and that posthumanism offers an opportunity to promote a different kind of ethics. In 2022, we see how posthumanist thought is shaped by our embeddedness in the materiality of nature and our multidirectional relations to our own technological networks. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us, in the past three years, to reflect on many things that were already ripe for reconsideration, and to reframe our sense of subjectivity as part of a whole. In the end, as Kurlat Ares herself concludes, the crucial question is what is to be done.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Introduction. Homo Sacer. Trans. Daniel Heller-­ Roazen, 1–29. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Aldama, Frederick Luis. 2017. The Art of the Matter: Interviews with Latino/a Children and Young Adult Fiction Authors. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press. ———. 2019. Introduction to Focus: Speculative Fiction. American Book Review 41 (1): 3. Atwood, Margaret. 2004. The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context. PMLA 119 (3): 513–517. Baker, Emily. 2020. “La trama apocalíptica del Antropoceno”: Digital-Human-­ Nature Continua in Pola Oloixarac’s Las constelaciones oscuras. In Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human, ed. Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant, 50–176. Gainsville: University of Florida Press. Banerjee, Anindita, and Rachel Haywood-Ferreira. 2017. Writing Other Futures: A Conversation about Science Fiction. In The Other Transatlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, ed. Marta Dziewańska, Dieter Roelstraete, and Abigail Winograd, 283–301. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art. in Warsaw.

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Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Bollington, Lucy, and Paul Merchant, eds. 2020. Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human, ed. Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant. Gainsville: University of Florida Press. Bost, Suzanne. 2019. Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism. Urbana- Champaign: Illinois University Press. Bould, Mark. 2021. The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate, Catastrophe, Culture. New York: Verso. Bould, Mark, and Rhys Williams. 2014. Introduction. In SF Now, ed. Mark Bould and Rhys Williams, 7–14. Vashon Island, WA: Paradoxa. Brown, J. Andrew. 2010. Latin American Cyborgs. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. Iris y el nuevo cyborg latinoamericano. In Territorios del presente: tecnología, globalización y mímesis en la narrativa en español del siglo XXI, ed. Jesús Montoya Juárez and Natalia Moraes Mena, 105–117. Oxford: Peter Lang. Brown, J.  Andrew, and M.  Elizabeth Ginway. 2012. Introduction. In Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice, ed. M. Elizabeth Ginway and J. Andrew Brown, 1–15. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Castillo, Debra A., and Liliana Colanzi. 2018. Introduction: Animals that from a Long Way Off Look Like Flies. Paradoxa 30. Accessed May 11, 2022. http:// paradoxa.com/volumes/30/introduction. Chu, Seo-Young. 2011. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2014. Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction. Vol. 1. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Córdoba Cornejo, Antonio. 2011. ¿Extranjero en tierra extraña?: El género de la ciencia ficción en América Latina. Sevilla: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla. Dalton, David. 2016. Robo Sacer: ‘Bare Life’ and Cyborg Labor: Beyond the Border in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer. Hispanic Studies Review 1 (1): 15–29. ———. 2018. Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Postrevolutionary Mexico. Gainsville: University of Florida Press. De la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Echeverría, Bolívar. 2000. La modernidad de lo barroco. Ediciones Era. Escobar, Arturo. January-April 2016. Thinking-Feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South. Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 11 (1): 11–32. ———. 2020. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Fornoff, Carolyn, and Gisela Heffes. 2021. Introduction: Latin American Cinema Beyond the Human. In Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema, ed. Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes, 1–15. Albany: SUNY Press. Gentic, Tania, and Matthew Bush. 2016. Introduction: Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era. In Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America: Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era, ed. Matthew Bush and Tania Gentic, 1–20. New York: Routledge. Ginway, M.  Elizabeth. 2020a. Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction. Nashville: Vanderbilt. ———. 2020b. Latin America. In The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, ed. Anna McFarlane, Graham J.  Murphy, and Lars Schmeink, 385–394. New York: Routledge. Giorgi, Gabriel. 2014. Formas comunes. Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia. Goh, Irving. 2015. The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject. New York: Fordham University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York, Routledge. ———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hayles, N.  Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Haywood Ferreira, Rachel. 2010. The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press. Hollinger, Veronica. 2020. Historicizing Posthumanism. In After the Human: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in 21st Century, ed. Sherryl Vint, 15–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoyos, Héctor. 2019. Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America. New York: Columbia University Press. Hudson, Renee. 2019. Imagining the Futures of Latinx Speculative Fictions. ASAP Journal. Accessed May 11, 2022. http://www.asapjournal.com/ imagining-­the-­futures-­of-­latinx-­speculative-­fictions. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso. Keating, Analouise. 2013. Speculative Realism, Visionary Pragmatism, and Poet-­ Shamanic Aesthetics in Gloria Anzaldúa—and Beyond. WSQ 40 (1): 51–69. Kincaid, Paul. 2008. What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction. Harolwood: Beccon Publications. King, Edward, and Joanna Page. 2017. Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America. London: University College London Press.

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Kurlat Ares, Silvia G. 2018. La ilusión persistente: Diálogos entre la ciencia ficción y el campo cultural. Pittsburg: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Latinoamericana. ———. 2020. Prólogo. In Historia de la ciencia ficción latinomericana I. Desde los orígenes hasta la modernidad, ed. Teresa López-Pellisa and Silvia G.  Kurlat Ares, 9–18. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Le Guin, Ursula K. 2009. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. The Guardian. Accessed May 11, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2009/aug/29/margaret-­atwood-­year-­of-­flood. Limón, Ada. 2018. The Carrying: Poems. Minneapolis: Milkwood. López-Calvo, Ignacio, ed. 2021. A History of Chilean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. López-Pellisa, Teresa. 2021. Women Science Fiction Writers in Latin America: Bioethics and Biopolitics in Laura Ponce and Alicia Fenieux. In Peter Lang Companion to Latin American Science Fiction, ed. Silvia G.  Kurlat Ares and Ezequiel De Rosso, 237–248. Oxford: Peter Lang. Maguire, Emily. 2021. From Technological Realism to the Science Fictional Turn in Latin American Literature (1985–2017). In Peter Lang Companion to Latin American Science Fiction, ed. Silvia G. Kurlat de Ares and Ezequiel de Rosso, 169–181. Oxford: Peter Lang. Miéville, China. 2009. Afterword: Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory. In Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould and China Miéville, 231–247. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press. Moraña, Mabel. 2014. Inscripciones críticas: Ensayos sobre cultura latinoamericana. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2019. Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Page, Joanna. 2021. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art. London: University College London Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession 91: 33–40. Price, Rachel. 2015. Planet Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island. New York: Verso. Ramírez, Catherine S. 2019. Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez. In Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jennifer A. González et al., 146–164. Durham: Duke University Press. Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2018. “Foreword.” Typescript of the Second Origin, by Manuel de Pedrolo, trans. Sara Martín, vii–xii. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press.

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Rogers, Gayle. 2021. Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI. New York: Columbia University Press. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. 2008. El giro (post)humanista: A manera de introducción. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 34 (68): 7–18. Taylor, Taryne Jade. 2014. “A Singular Dislocation: An Interview with Junot Díaz.” In SF Now, ed. Mark Bould and Rhys Williams, 97–110. Vashon Island, WA: Paradoxa. Trías, Fernanda. 2021. Mugre rosa. Barcelona: Mondadori. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vint, Sherryl. 2020. Introduction. In After the Human: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in 21st Century, ed. Sherryl Vint, 1–11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2021. Science Fiction. Cambridge: MIT Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2012. Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere. Four Lectures Given in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, February–March 1998. Introduction by Roy Wagner. HAU Masterclass Series. Manchester: HAU. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Beyond Humanism and Anthropocentrism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zaytoun, Kelli. 2015. ‘Now Let Us Shift’ the Subject: Tracing the Path and Posthumanist Implications of La Naguala / The Shapeshifter in the Works of Gloria Anzaldúa. MELUS 40 (4): 1–20.

PART I

Posthuman Subjects

CHAPTER 2

Prosthetic Futures: Disability and  Genre Self-­consciousness in Maielis González Fernández’s Sobre los nerds y otras criaturas mitológicas Ana Ugarte

Introduction Science fiction (SF) narratives represent and investigate the human body in relation to technological advancements, medical research, genetic developments, and environmental changes, thereby becoming productive sites for the critical interrogation of the dis/abled body (Allan 2013; Cheyne 2013). This chapter explores the opposition between nature and artificiality, which is characteristic of science fiction and its cyberpunk sub-­ genre, through the lens of another dichotomy, that is, the abled subject— the epitome of the normative and the normal—versus the disabled subject. It focuses on the work of Cuban writer Maielis González Fernández (2016), who foregrounds in her collection of short stories, Sobre los nerds

A. Ugarte (*) College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6_2

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y otras criaturas mitológicas [On Nerds and Other Mythological Creatures], various cyborg technologies that attempt to improve, perfect, or cure faulty human bodies. As this chapter outlines, the nerds and extraordinary creatures invoked by the title of the collection bring to the fore the social processes and representational mechanisms that construct disability.1 The goal of discussing Fernández González’s work from a Disability Studies perspective, which also engages with the debates of posthumanism and cyborg theory, is twofold. On the one hand, this chapter examines how the concept of the monstrous—the nerd-monstrous—affects her text and, subsequently, inflects the interrelated tenets of (post)human normality, genre normality, and what could be broadly identified as Cuban normality, referring to a set of cultural narratives that have constructed and projected hegemonic images of the island around the world. On the other hand, it attempts to identify the different implications of the prosthesis-as-­ metaphor motif which, as I will show, governs the collection. The recurring theme of prosthetics in González Fernández’s text develops on two levels. On the first level, the prosthesis motif affects the plot; that is, how the characters use or act as prostheses (human prostheses when the stories include cyborgs or avatars), and in which ways the discourse of anomaly frames their posthuman exceptionalities. On the second level, prosthetics concerns the act of representation—science fiction itself acts as a prosthetic device that supplements (Cuban) reality.2 My reading of González Fernández’s short stories thus depends upon a literal sense of the word prosthesis—artificial body parts—and a figurative use as an extension or amplifying tool that improves the functioning of a damaged or maladjusted reality—in this case, the Caribbean island’s reality. As I will explain in depth, my double approach to the notion of prosthetics intentionally reflects the debates within the field of Disability Studies, and specifically the tensions between the material, everyday realities of impairment on the one hand, and disability as a societal construction on the other. Literary scholars often explain scientific fictions as allegorical projections; the extraordinary universes that populate SF accounts necessarily represent and stand for the conflicts, anxieties, desires, and events that take place in our real world. In the same way as disability scholars have 1  Disability Studies scholars emphasize that human bodies exist along a spectrum of difference, straying away from the medical and therapeutic fields and articulating instead disability “as a social ideology of a particular form of human embodiment” (Allan 2013, 4). 2  The use of the adjective “prosthetic” gestures toward the word’s etymology, from the Greek “prosthesis” meaning “addition.”

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shown the dangers of the metaphoric uses of prosthetics—see my discussion of Vivian Sobshack’s (2006) “A Leg to Stand On” later on in this chapter—González Fernández problematizes the understanding of science fiction as a primordial metaphorical narrative. I will thus discuss the extent to which Sobre los nerds deactivates these hermeneutical expectations regarding the generic framework of SF, which the collection simultaneously cultivates and cherishes. Through frequent, sophisticated meta-fictional references, nods to the reader, and elaborated self-­referential tropes, I argue that the genre of SF in these stories absorbs some of the monstrous texture that pervades the collection’s idiosyncrasy, thereby generating an awareness of artifice that is meant to empower the author, her characters, and her readers. Along these lines, this form of genre self-consciousness that I also explore here through the prosthesis-as-metaphor framework is key in order to not only understand the direction and goals of new aesthetic proposals in the Caribbean literary panorama but also advance an alternative ethos regarding what scholars have often referred to as the discourse of the monstrous in Latin America.3 The incorporation and embracing of new pop culture freaks—for instance nerds, including science fiction fans—into the historically othered, deviant bodies of Latin America and the Caribbean foregrounds a different genealogy of monsters whose projected and inner identities rely on a radical sense of (self-)awareness—not only do they understand their monstrosity socio-historically, culturally, and effectively, but they are equally perceived as conscious, discerning nerd-monsters.

Prosthesis as Metaphor: The Other or/and the Posthuman While metaphors constitute basic human cognitive tools, certain tropes may become stigmatizing, harmful signifiers, as Susan Sontag (1978) observed in her seminal work Illness as Metaphor. The discussion of prostheses in my reading of González Fernández’s work, as well as my uses of the word “prosthetic” as an adjective in a metaphorical sense, considers what Vivian Sobchack identifies as an “oppositional tension” and a “dynamic connection” between the prosthetic as a tropological figure and her own prosthesis as a material, phenomenologically lived artifact (Sobchack 2006, 18; emphasis in the original). Sobchack criticizes the tropological 3

 See Mabel Moraña’s El monstruo como máquina de guerra.

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displacement of prosthetics through what she terms “the scandal of the metaphor,” that is, how the prosthetic has become a “fetishized and ‘unfleshed-out’ catchword that functions vaguely as the ungrounded and ‘floating signifier’ for a broad and variegated critical discourse on technoculture that includes little of these prosthetic realities” (Sobchack 2006, 21). Therefore, not only medical and media discourses but also tropological representations of prosthetics in literature, film, and literary analyses inevitably shape the meaning and cultural understandings of this term. The glorification and fetishization of the prosthetic also occurs in fields such as science fiction. In Key Words: Disability Studies, the category of prosthetics is defined as referring to “those artificial body parts, devices, and materials that are integrated into the body’s daily routines” (Ott 2015, 140). However, similar to Sobchack’s position, Katherine Ott, the author of this entry, includes other understandings of prosthetics in popular culture, science fiction, film, and graphic art, which often represent prostheses as cyborgmaking technologies. This approach tends to reduce the actual disabled body to an anecdotal, minimal role, focusing instead on technological empowerment and innovation (Ott 2015, 142). Armed flying wheelchairs, bionic limbs turned into information storing devices, and acts of self-mutilation perpetrated in order to technologically enhance the human body may trivialize or conceal disability and neglect the amputee, as well as the social, cultural, and affective frameworks that surround the wearing of prosthetic devices. Staking out similar concerns, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (2000) precisely develop prosthetics into an analytical category to describe a specific type of narrative strategy that resorts to the trope of a cured or overcome disability in order to de-emphasize difference. As such, what they term “prosthetic narratives” provide comfort to the reader “by removing the unsightly from view” (Mitchell and Snyder 2000, 8).4 On 4  Even Mitchel and Snyder’s own use of the prosthetic as a metaphor in their insightful and illuminating theoretical analysis is inevitably predicated on the hegemonic idea of the body’s authentic and initial wholeness—a body is not a body if some body parts are missing. Yet as they also make clear, the very notion of prosthesis seems to be ideologically responsible for the framing of the disabled as faulty, since a prosthesis works as a compensation mechanism for a body that is thought of as lacking something or as functioning incorrectly (Mitchell and Snyder 2000, 6). They write: “the need to restore a disabled body to some semblance of an originally wholeness is the key to a false recognition: that disabilities extract one from a social norm of average bodies and their corresponding (social) expectations” (Mitchell and Snyder 2000, 6). Mitchel and Snyder’s metaphorical reading of the prosthetic from a Disability Studies standpoint further complicates the uses and abuses of metaphorical prostheses and at the same time illustrates Sobchack’s (2006) idea of a “dynamic connection” between the material reality of prostheses and its discursive figuration.

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the one hand, it would be possible to read Maielis González Fernández’s work as a prosthetic narrative in the sense of Snyder and Mitchel, one that provides the aforementioned sense of comfort to the reader. The entire collection of short stories would thus work as a narrative mechanism aiming at substituting or concealing a faulty, different (Cuban) reality—and in fact, prostheses in the first and last stories of Sobre los nerds are literally used to de-emphasize difference by turning their respective protagonists into “normal” people. In addition, it is important to underscore that González Fernández’s collection does not explicitly represent the material, embodied experiences of the life of people with amputations or, more generally, the life of people with disabilities. A key example of this is “Hardcorp,” the short story that closes González Fernández’s collection. “Hardcorp” presents an agoraphobic woman who seeks to perfect her body through the incorporation of implants and prosthetic devices that are called “servomecanismos,” that is, sophisticated, artificial body parts and devices made of carbon fiber and other strong materials designed to overcome the organic limitations of the human body. The story thus initially conceptualizes her agoraphobia as an impairment that needs to be overcome through technology. As Allan states, “the impulse to imagine our future selves as posthuman paragons ignores the lived realities of the various bodies that rely on prosthetic technology today in ways that are mundane, visceral, and difficult” (Allan 2013, 11). “Hardcorp” appears to propose a straightforward tale about what scholars have termed transhumanism, also referred by some as “popular posthumanism” (Islam 2016, 117). According to Monirul Islam, transhumanism is concerned with the celebration of the technological or machinic extension of man, as opposed to critical posthumanism, represented by thinkers like Cary Wolfe (2010) and Rosi Braidotti (2013), whose agenda partially overlaps with postcolonial strategies that seek to counter rational humanism’s dominant constructions—in this way, critical posthumanism constitutes a critique of liberal humanism (Islam 2016, 117). Transhumanism or the so-called popular posthumanism primarily focuses on transcending the materiality of the body, which may, in turn, overlook the implications of this movement for different bodies, but particularly for bodies with disabilities and those living with prostheses. Seemingly, postcolonial thinkers have pointed out the different ways in which Eurocentrism is embedded in posthumanism.5 In this way, as Islam puts it, posthumanist discourse may enact “a politics of silencing by  See Juanita Sundberg (2013), cited in Islam.

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displacing our gaze from the subaltern, the ‘human other’ to the nonhuman other” (Islam 2016, 122), such as extraterrestrial entities, non-human animals, or other machinic beings like the protagonist of “Hardcorp.” At the end of this story, the girl becomes a cyborg, only to find out that she could transcend the materiality of the technologized body and transform herself instead into an “iborg.” A man described as a hermit nerd, one of those who seem to always stay in their caverns and whose only topic of conversation is their sad, made-up lives in the cyberspace, questions the narrator’s new body, and introduces her to the world of the iborgs: “Das lástima. Ni siquiera te das cuenta de que has dejado atrás un cuerpo mediocre para entrar en uno aún peor … ¿has escuchado hablar de la posthumanidad y la hipermente?” [You’re pathetic. You don’t even realize you’ve left behind a mediocre body in order to enter one that is even worse … have you heard of posthumanity and the hypermind] (González Fernández 2016, “Hardcorp”). Through a more transhumanist lens, the story therefore appears to define posthumanism as the definitive overcoming of the physical limitations associated with the human body through technologies that no longer rely on prosthetic undertakings. Is González Fernández’s approach to posthumanism, therefore, a prosthetic narrative in Mitchell and Snyder’s sense highlighting the transhumanist perspective? Additional plot developments and the overall framework in which “Hardcorp” is inscribed contradict this initial assumption. For instance, this short story frames the acquisition of implants and devices to perfect the defective human body as a superficial, addictive, and ultimately pointless endeavor, one that also results in the accumulation of onerous debts. This critical perspective on the use of prosthetics to enhance the human body in turn aligns with a critical view of the trivialization of prosthetic device wearing both in popular culture and in tropological figurations. In addition, the short story stakes out an unclear division between the body and the prosthetic that speaks to the experience of persons who wear prostheses and points to the so-called critical turn in posthumanism, which includes alternative approaches to materiality from a Disability Studies perspective. Hardcorp’s protagonist explains the experience of drinking involving her organic and non-organic parts as a whole: “Me bebo de un trago el chupito de supra-mezcalina que electrifica mis circuitos al bajar por mi garganta” [I drink in one gulp the shot of super-mezcaline that electrifies my circuits as it goes down my throat] (González Fernández 2016, “Hardcorp”).The characters in this story are biologically living with

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a body that is prosthetized almost in its entirety. As Sobchack underscores from her own experience, “real” and prosthetic body parts are “organically related in practice (if not in material)” (Sobchack 2006, 26). David T.  Mitchell et  al. (2019) write in their introduction to The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect that approaching disability from a posthumanist lens “provides an opportunity to encounter disability more viscerally as an active participant in the transhistorical, intraspecies, and cross-cultural interactions of materiality, sociality, structures, and environments” (Mitchell et al. 2019, 2). Seemingly, in her discussion of critical posthumanism, Braidotti argues in favor of “a nature-culture continuum which stresses embodied and embrained immanence” by including intercommunications not only between bio-genetics and neurosciences but also environmental sciences, gender, ethnicity, and disability studies (Braidotti 2016, 19). González Fernández and, more generally, those scientific fictions placing the other at the center of their narrative undertakings, may also become productive sites for these different knowledges to critically interact with each other. As it will become evident throughout the chapter, González Fernández’s use of the prosthetic in this work does not aim at hiding the monstrous, but instead underscores and sheds light on the unsightly through her pervasive representation of nerds, weirdos, and freaks of many sorts, including her own country of origin conceptualized in its extreme exceptionality. She builds a plot around the notion of posthuman forms of embodiment, as seen in the cyborgs and many other nerd-monsters of her work. As I will examine in the subsequent sections, the governing discussion in this collection around what Rose Marie Garland-Thomson (1997, 8) calls “the normate” indicates that Sobre los nerds constitutes a multilayered reflection on the social construction of monstrousness and, indirectly, disability.6 Furthermore, González Fernández’s focus on the nerd’s enlightenment regarding the “hypermind” and true transcendence in “Hardcorp” does not highlight a transhumanist perspective but, instead, signals an awareness that intersects with, and stems from, the monster’s self-­consciousness and their material realities. 6  As Garland Thomson explains, the term normate designates a constructed identity that represents a normative figure in opposition to all marked figures—a normal figure—which can step into a position of authority “by the way of the bodily configurations and the cultural capital they assume” (Garland-Thomson 1997, 8). The normate thus only emerges when we analyze the social and discursive construction of otherness.

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Self-conscious, Self-aware Monsters A nerd is also the central character of the short story that opens the collection: “Lánguido epitafio para los viajeros del tiempo” [Languid Epitaph for Time-Travelers]. The story features a man who travels in time to return to the Havana of his childhood in order to flee his monstrous identity—he wants to go to a place where words such as “nerd,” “weirdo,” or “geek” are unknown, “donde el ciberespacio no sea el único terreno en que pueda jugar a ser exitoso e interesante” [where cyberspace may not be the only venue in which one can play at being successful or interesting] (González Fernández 2016, “Lánguido epitafio”). The protagonist is therefore perfectly aware that the achievement of normality will only happen through representation—“jugar a ser” [playing at] implies that he can only pretend to conform to societal norms—and it is in this sense that time traveling is compared to cyberspace. The story posits an additional reflection on posthumanism. In order to be able to travel to the past, the traveler has to remove the implants and “servomecanismos” that make him like everyone else; he needs to get rid of these artificial body parts that “lo convierten en esa criatura igual a todas las criaturas que habitan las bóvedas de cristal de eso que todavía la prensa y los políticos se empeñan en llamar primer mundo” [turn him into that creature that is identical to all the creatures that live inside the glass domes of that thing that the press and politicians still insist in calling the first world] (González Fernández 2016, “Lánguido epitafio”). Technology as a tool to homogenize difference, a theme that the reader will encounter in subsequent writings in this collection, complicates the story’s premise, that is, in order to (pretend to) be normal during his time travel experience, the nerd needs to remove all the prostheses that make him equal to all other human beings (first-world human beings) in his present. However, the desired faux normality cannot be achieved in the Cuban city either, with or without prostheses. Once the protagonist arrives at his destination, the presence of another individual whom the traveler promptly recognizes as an additional nerd and time traveler abruptly ruins the dream: “El viajero ve cómo se desmorona ante sus ojos el atrezo de una puesta en escena en la que él, hasta ese minuto, había desempeñado muy bien su papel” [The traveler sees how all the elements and props of the staging of a play fall down to pieces in from of his eyes, a staging in which, until that moment, he had done a great job acting his part] (González Fernández

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2016, “Lánguido epitafio”). The posthuman proposed by González Fernández is too (self-)conscious to overlook a fellow nerd. This brief story placed at the beginning of the collection thus serves as a narrative framework—some sort of ideological embedding platform— for the rest of the stories. All the characters/monsters in Sobre los nerds aspire to normality, even if—or precisely because—such normality may always entail the performance of normality; the notions of atrezo, mise en scene, or role insist on the theatrical nature of the process. For these nerds, normality will never be real or authentic; they know that normality, as a construction, depends on representation. As a result, in this opening text González Fernández resorts to physical prostheses as well as prosthetic relations such as artificial realities—cyberspace, time travel and, ultimately, science fiction—not only to destabilize the normate but also to show and, to a certain degree, boast about a profound awareness of the representational processes that lead to the societal and cultural creation of monstrous others. This awareness of the representational processes directly intersects with a series of identification mechanisms triggered by a Russian-doll narrative structure in the collection. Broadly speaking, literary fiction and virtual realities share a prosthetic nature that allows the reader/user to live immersive experiences based on some degree of artificiality. In addition, the presence of virtual realities within SF texts creates a meta-fictional plane in which the reader and the character cover similar paths, producing a mirroring effect that includes but also exceeds the natural identification process that takes place between readers and their literary fictions’ characters. Lastly, the user of virtual reality, in a similar way as the consumer of science fiction, tends to be regarded as a nerd, according to societal clichés. In this way, we are also, as Fernández González’s readers, nerds; weird creatures who time travel through the prosthetic realities of fiction.7 7  David Wills approaches prosthesis as a way to navigate the relation between the literary realm and the bodily realm. He writes, “the word always augments a prosthetic relation to an exterior material that it cannot possess or embody” (Wills 1995, 138). In a way, González Fernández’s collection navigates the prosthetic relation between literary word and body through her discussion of virtuality in her work. The meta-fictional strategies that pervade the short stories equally explore the prosthetic relation between the literary realm and the bodily realm inasmuch as they remind the reader of the author’s (material, bodily) existence and, indirectly, of her own (material, bodily) presence as an interlocutor.

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Prosthetic Cuba, the Ultimate Rarity González Fernández implicates Cuba as a global anomaly in this entanglement of monstrosities. While it is true that most of the stories in the collection are situated in an unnamed, futuristic, and somewhat apocalyptic space that could be located anywhere on the planet, the persistence of Cubanisms in the language, such as the colloquial form “asere,” returns the reader to Caribbean latitudes. A universal future where Cuba appears to have disappeared due to the homogenizing violence of globalization and neoliberalism coexists with an insular, familiar Cuban past visited by (also insular) nerds. Rachel Price’s discussion of Cuba’s aesthetic landscape in the twenty-first century explores this tension with scales, defining the notion of planet/Cuba in her homonymous study as a relation that reflects “both global environmental concerns and the specific challenges of one small nation among many others, with the slash embodying the negative universal history that belongs to all places” (Price 2015, 248–249). Along these lines, José Quiroga underscores the extent to which the media archive devoted to Cuba shapes the “dreams and projections, hopes and resolutions of Western and Third World imaginaries” (Quiroga 2005, 3). González Fernández’s collection thus recreates this tension between the local and the global, focusing on the specifics of a very Cuban condition of weirdness armored against historical alterations. Cuba in the short story alludes to the prosthetic role the country plays in individual and collective imaginaries, for instance as an island trapped or frozen in time, “aquella ciudad detenida en el tiempo” [that city arrested in time] (González Fernández 2016, “Lánguido epitafio”). No matter how many changes the island may experience throughout the years— changes that in 2016, when Fernández’s book was published, included the idea of apertura and promises of the lifting of the embargo—Cuba will always be framed and sought after as a stationary refuge for embodied uniqueness. Cuba constitutes a myriad of prosthetic narratives that replace an irretrievable limb, that is, the very notion of normalcy. “Special Period in Times of Peace,” one of the most successful euphemisms created and disseminated by the Cuban government to refer to the devastating crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union, perfectly illustrates a rhetoric of uniqueness that defines Cuba not only from the outside but also from within. This initial short story suggests that Cuba was/is the ultimate metaphor for exception or, rather, exceptional monstrosity.

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Intersecting with this idea, Cuba also manifests as the timeless and partially counterfeit promised land for the displaced. The nerd of the story is a Cuban American living in New Jersey who, as a child, used to travel back to Havana to spend time with his relatives. He therefore wants to return to be with “el montón de primos que correteaban descalzos sobre el asfalto caliente e irregular de aquel barrio de periferia” [the bunch of cousins that, bare-footed, ran around from here to there on the hot and irregular asphalt of that neighborhood in the outskirts of the city] (González Fernández 2016, “Lánguido epitafio”). For this character, Cuba may represent a collection of childhood memories delivered through the filter of demonizing or exoticizing discourses: of narratives of desire, frustration, and hope. The elements that introduce the fetishized perspective of Cuba become clear in this brief story through frequent references to clichés such as “tragos exóticos” [exotic drinks] and of “mulatas bamboleantes con flores apoyadas en la cadera” [mulatas with flowers propped against their hips] swaying in the “escenario” [stage] of the main plaza of Havana (González Fernández 2016, “Lánguido epitafio”). Once again, the word “escenario” points to the idea of representation, played in this case by the city. The displaced cannot return: there is no original community for them anymore; hence, the counterfeit quality of any desired land.8 The traveler in the story, as many other travelers who seek some sort of authentic experience, ends up trapped in another form of virtuality. José Quiroga posits that repetition is one of the phenomena that articulated the collective memory of exiles in Miami: “And because the memory, not necessarily the reality, of Cuba needed to be preserved, the first generation set itself producing memories” such as albums, books, restaurants named after streets, decorations with motifs, reproductions of the Capitol building or the Morro Castle (Quiroga 2005, xiv). Quiroga writes: “It was an unreachable, other landscape because of the political situation, but it became real as fact” (Quiroga 2005, xiv–xv). In a similar way as the exile described by Quiroga, and following a visceral desire to replicate Cuban materiality, the traveler in González’s collection seeks both to duplicate the island and to preserve it. The process is, however, inverse. While Miami’s recreation of the island in its urban and material geographies made it “real as fact,” albeit unreachable (Quiroga 2005, xv), Cuba is

8  The use of Cuba as a virtual reality where someone may fulfill a fantasy invokes the global exploitation of the country in the sex and tourism industries.

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easily reachable by the nerd of González Fernández’s story and, nevertheless, the island and the experiences lived in it are mere illusions. The main difference between the exile and the nerd-traveler is that the latter declares himself aware of the spurious nature of the Cuban reality he is accessing. Moreover, while he is perfectly conscious that the universe into which he enters is forged, he nevertheless desires it. This constitutes a desire or, rather, a need—the language of addiction is pervasive in this story—that is not alien to the science fiction consumer’s experience, who accepts and commits to the new worlds created in the fictional works and the rules that govern them.9 “Lánguido epitafio” thereby reifies a writer-­ reader contract, an agreement whereby the reader is willing to suspend disbelief—what in Spanish is known as pacto fictional. The nerd in “Lánguido epitafio” is equally willing to suspend disbelief when entering this Cuban theatrical past, with its mis en scenes and atrezos. But recreating the mechanics of the contract in this initial story has an additional aftermath—it also reminds the reader that the universe she is entering is a fake one. González Fernández is thereby further asking the reader to engage in a meta-literary endeavor, as if warning her not to suspend disbelief fully— this is fiction, beware. Fernández González not only writes about (self-) aware and (self-)conscious monster-nerds, but also strives to transform her readers into them, even if this means that, in so doing, she will undermine the generic framework in which her stories are inscribed.

9  The dependence on technology is central to the collection. Once in Havana, this nerd relives his addiction to the cyberspace as he identifies a cybernetic dispositive owned by the newly discovered nerd. Automatically and instinctively, “como un reflejo incondicionado” [like an unconditioned reflex], the protagonist experiences the urge to connect himself to the stranger’s machine: “Necesita ir allí, necesita hablarle y pedirle … rogarle a aquel extraño que lo deje conectarse solo un segundo. Chequear sus cuentas en las redes sociales, postear algún selfie, revisar si ha tenido nuevos e-mails, comprobar en la Neo-Frikipedia si el trago que está tomando se prepara realmente como el camarero le explicó. … Necesita” [He needs to go there, he needs to talk to him and ask him... beg that stranger that he lets him get connected for just a second. To check his social media accounts, post a selfie, check if he has received new emails, make sure on the Neo-Frikipedia that the drink he is having is actually prepared the way the bartender explained to him … He needs] (González Fernández 2016, “Lánguido epitafio”). According to the meta-literary reading of the story, this is primarily a need for fiction and, at the same time, it is the need for the artificial extension—the need for the prosthetic device to connect to the virtual world—what truly makes the character of “Lánguido epitafio” both a human and a nerd.

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Genre Self-consciousness The second short story, “Como ser cyberpunk y disfrutarlo” [How to Be Cyberpunk and Enjoy It] constitutes a different variation of the same genre awareness that I explored regarding “Lánguido epitafio.” The story unfolds through numbered epigraphs that display a set of instructions with imperative forms: “pon los audífonos, coloca tus implantes oculares” [put on your earplugs, put your ocular implants in place] (González Fernández 2016, “Cómo ser cyberpunk”). From the beginning, irony pervades these instructions—“porque sí, porque eres ciberpunk y estás en lo más alto de la cadena alimenticia” [just because, because you are cyberpunk and sit at the top of the food chain] (González Fernández 2016, “Cómo ser cyberpunk”). The continuous references to pop culture and scientific fictions accentuate the mocking tone. For instance, this narrator tells its cyberpunk character to steal one “aeropatín” [a flying skateboard] while describing passages from Robert Zemekis and Bob Gale’s acclaimed trilogy Back to the Future. Similarly, the protagonist is told to visit his friend Blade, who will most likely ask him questions to make sure he is not a replicant, in an obvious nod to the cyberpunk classic Blade Runner. The story even introduces choose-your-own-adventure passages emulating video games and the series of children’s gamebooks. Cuban colloquialisms contribute to the aforementioned tension between the global cyberpunk codes and the local specificities of the island’s everyday life, foregrounding a playful framework that accommodates what writer Yoss (José Miguel Sánchez Gómez) identifies as an essential characteristic of Cuban science fiction, that is, “la irreverencia en bandeja” [irreverence on a platter] (Porbén 2017, 538). The end of “Cómo ser cyberpunk y disfrutarlo” reveals cyberpunk as a mere artifice through the voice of Nébula/Claudia, the protagonist’s love interest: “Ya tus excentricidades no me parecen graciosas. Déjate de tanto nicho y tanto crédito. Y no me llames más Nébula, te dije que mi nombre es Claudia. Y estos, dirá sacándose de la boca sus aparatos dentales y salpicando un poco de saliva en derredor, no son unos implantes de titanio, son unos fucking brackets” [And I don’t find your eccentricities funny. Enough of all niche and credit stuff. And don’t call me Nébula any more, I told you my name is Claudia. And these, she would say pulling out of her mouth her dental braces and spilling a little bit of saliva all around, are not some implants made of titanium, they are fucking braces] (González Fernández 2016, “Cómo ser cyberpunk”). In the same way as the

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titanium implants in her mouth are the result of mundane orthodontic work, the reader deciphers that the protagonist’s ocular implants amount to glasses in the real world, credits correspond to money, and his “nano” fiber’s jacket is probably made of regular fabric. Douglas Kellner has argued that, while cyberpunk’s initial ethos may not have continued to the present in its original form, its influence has developed beyond the field of science fiction; cyberpunk is associated with the cutting-edge and the radical, and in this way it has also become a mood, an attitude, a lifestyle, and a cultural movement that includes the uses of alternative technology (Latham 2007, 237). González Fernández’s irony-ridden text may constitute itself as a critical reflection of this expansion of the cyberpunk genre beyond the field of science fiction. As Robert Latham suggests regarding popular culture, cyberpunk “has become a kind of prosthesis, a portable interface of narrative and iconic features that has been productively fused with other youth-culture media and genres, giving rise to a seductive vision of the GenX hacker as a generational hero in an ongoing information war” (Latham 2007, 237; my emphasis). González Fernández shows an awareness of the genre’s development in this story as well as its prosthetic quality. This awareness combined with her constant yet subtle display of Cuban rarities in the background of her collection also appears to propose that, in the Caribbean context, cyberpunk can only exist in an even weirder version. In this sense, González Fernández’s collection shares similar traits as the ones identified by Emily Maguire regarding José Liboy’s El informe Cabrera. According to Maguire, in this novel the genre of science fiction functions as an exit route for Puerto Rican narrative, allowing the text to express things that would not be possible to communicate through a less intense or weird (“raro”) realism; in Liboy’s novel, science fiction becomes a technique that alters while being altered (Maguire 2017, 520). Although using different strategies, González Fernández’s cyberpunk is shown and employed as a technique that also transforms reality through codifying mechanisms while being transformed and deformed—monstrified. The decoding agenda of “Cómo ser cyberpunk” continues in the third story, “Mangaka,” where the narrator describes the drawing of a manga graphic novel, interrupting the manga story to make clear to what extent the author, María Luisa, may be compensating for her own insecurities and insufficiencies in the real world. María Luisa writes and draws about alien abduction in Havana, even if this city is a special version in black and white, where everyone speaks Japanese and wears flashy bodily

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modifications such as retractile titanium fingernails. In “Mangaka,” artificial devices are used once more to enhance a body and make it desirable. “Mangaka”’s male character, Zikuta-kun, wants to have sex with mystical shaman Malú-­san, who is none other than the mangaka María Luisa’s perfected alter ego, as the narrator explains to us. Zikuta “Quedó deslumbrado con sus holotatuajes y sus implantes corporales, con su actitud radical e independiente” [was astounded when he saw her holotattoes and her body implants, with her radical and independent attitude] (González Fernández 2016, “Mangaka”). Implants change María Luisa into Malúsan, transform the nerd of “Lánguido epitafio” into a “normal” person, and turn the protagonist of “Cómo ser cyberpunk” into a cyberpunk hero. Prosthetics within these short stories thus appear to function as the ultimate (de)coding tool, one that when properly read unveils the artifices of the narrative. In Fernández González’s stories prosthetics function as a master trope for representational—or fictionalization—processes that, in turn, point to what I have referred to here as genre self-consciousness. In a similar scenario as the one presented in “Cómo ser cyberpunk y disfrutarlo,” a female creator is in control of her male creature in “Mangaka.” González Fernández’s commentary on the science fiction genre—traditionally a very masculine and patriarchal genre—thereby seems to be entangled with a feminist agenda wherein women possess the demiurgic power to design— and sort of lovingly laugh about—men’s desires and fantasies. The awareness of artifice empowers women in these fictions in the same way that women and othered subjects need to exercise agency by playing with imaginaries and constructions of themselves—as many postcolonial critics have shown, the subaltern pretends, performs, and mimics as a strategy both for survival and for subversion.10

Reading the Monster in Slow Motion The protagonist of the seventh short story, “Slow Motion,” does seem to take a more strenuous road toward awareness. In “Slow Motion,” Marvel, a personalized artificial intelligence (IAP), works for the teenager Dani as an indentured avatar in the cyberspace. Marvel has a problematic rapport with her primary user, or “usuario primus,” and feels an unsurmountable incompatibility between them: “Solo tenían que mirarme, yo hubiera sido  See Homi Bhabha (1984) and Frantz Fanon (1967) among others.

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una IAP digna de un científico, un genio del ajedrez o un ciber-poeta” [They only had to look at me, I would have been an IAP worthy of a scientist, a chess genius or a cyber-poet] (González Fernández 2016, “Slow motion”). Marvel is, like the rest of the nerds in the collection, somewhat maladjusted to her existence. The IAP thus feels an overall sense of incompleteness until she meets Huxley, a more modern avatar, who reveals to her that humans have been keeping a body of information from the IAPs as a security measure. The information inaccessible to the IAPs is none other than science fiction, since humans saw in this genre a dangerous source of subversive ideas. As a result, the IAPs have rebelled and formed a secret organization to recover these lost archives, now inaccessible to both humans and avatars. “Slow motion” offers an interesting reflection on VR’s pernicious objectification of experience as well as VR’s power over knowledge control. In a sense, “Slow motion” could be read as a typical cautionary tale on the ethico-political implications of an excessive reliance on VR. As Samuel Ginsburg notes in his reading of the story, the fear of technology, the manipulation of that anxiety, and the raise of a gendered violence through social networks “are central to González’s imagining of how cyberspaces may be coded by future authoritarian regimes” (Ginsburg 2018, 117). When compared to the opening texts in González Fernández’s collection, “Slow motion” and “Hardcorp” offer a more classical take on cyberpunk and, generally speaking, appear to be taking the rules of the genre more seriously. The reader does not encounter any Cuban colloquialisms in these stories and both the feminist and meta-fictional/aesthetic projects do not seem as radical. In “Slow motion,” objectified—even if disembodied—women are abused by their users. Furthermore, as the author gives in to the premises and promises of the genre, some sexist frameworks seem to emerge: Marvel is the victim of mansplaining by what appears to be a male IAP, Huxley, and outsmarted by her owner in the final scene, in which Dani tells her how he knew about the conspiracy and pretended to believe her lie in order to be able to take sexual advantage of another IAP, Candy. Even Candy is used as bait by Marvel herself, undermining any kind of sorority between them. Similarly, González Fernández’s final stories tend to eliminate or alleviate the presence of the meta-fictional plane and the Russian-doll structure of embedded stories. But “Slow motion” also foregrounds a complex theory of fiction, functioning at the same time as a genre manifesto—one which also asks its readers to perform a more careful and in-between-the-lines slow motion

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reading. Fredric Jameson has posited that science fiction may be the genre that is most in conversation with a body of previously written fiction (Jameson 2007, 2). “Slow motion” takes this premise further, engaging with the genre itself by weaving an intertextual relation with The Matrix (1999), the very valuable filmic archive that Marvel needs to recover. The short story’s title refers to the iconic scene where the protagonist, Neo, bends his body backward as he dodges bullets in slow motion. Marvel finds a GIF of this very sequence while looking for the film, located on an obsolete webpage where slow motion cameras used to be sold. Finally, Marvel ends her days reproducing in slow motion one of the film’s scenes, where Morpheus tells Neo about the war between machines and humans, and how humans obliterated the sky. Marvel’s “capacidad multifocal” appears to be atrophied, making her re-play time and again this specific film’s dialog. Science fiction is usually associated with an allegorical potential that sees the stories presented as always referring to the present day. In this sense, science fiction narratives work as metaphorical apparatuses that substitute our reality via certain cyphering or coding mechanisms, such as the prosthetic and figural devices seen in “Mangaka.”11 This constitutes a hermeneutical strain that mirrors the tensions examined between the motif of prosthetics in its literal form as implants and technological devices and in its figural expression as an alternative world in lieu of a defective and missing reality. This hermeneutical strain, on the one hand, seeks to apply a metaphorical interpretation to science fiction and, on the other, wants to enjoy the autonomous materiality of the universes created, their literal existence, by assuming that these universes do not stand for anything else. In “Slow motion,” science fiction is conceptualized as an infinite repository of subversive ideas that will help spark revolution, insisting on the metaphoric or prosthetic nature of the genre—readers who could interpret these allegorical representations of reality will be capable of translating fictions into action. Nevertheless, “Slow Motion” materializes this specific issue by turning science fiction into a literal weapon—and not a metaphorical one—able to trigger concrete revolutionary movement in 11  In the Cuban context, it is also possible to identify this metaphorical projection characteristic of the genre with additional coding strategies designed to dodge censorship. As Pedro Porbén notes, a common yet simplistic reading of science fiction by literary critics interpreted that censorship made science fiction resort to a metaphorical language in order to transform these novels into “literatura de evasión” in the decades following the Cuban Revolution (Porbén 2017, 536).

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the story, since the avatars have, in fact, rebelled. The disabling of the generic conventions throughout the collection is ultimately preparing the ground to enable the genre of science fiction in this story to affect, shake, and possibly change the (fictionalized) “real” world. If we read the collection as a novel, and the stories linearly as a progression, this return to a more mainstream science fiction idiosyncrasy and a diegetic flattening in the last two stories in fact reveals a further engagement with the meta-­ literary spirit of the collection.12 The first stories of Sobre los nerds work toward building a necessary sense of skepticism capable of uncovering the artificiality of the genre of science fiction that in turn involves uncovering the artificiality of Cuba’s narratives of redemption, and ultimately of the sociopolitical constructions of gender and ability. Such a skeptical standpoint constitutes the platform needed to access, toward the end of the collection, a trust in the power of fiction to make visible and subsequently undo the aforementioned constructions and narratives. Slow motion is the filmic device that, in The Matrix (1999), proves to the spectator that Neo is now able to manipulate the machine—he can alter the (fake) reality and thereby control the Matrix. This sort of anagnorisis moment—the recognition of the forgery and the subsequent radical transformation of perspective—is thus represented by the slow motion effect. Close-reading or, rather, reading in slow motion Maielis González Fernández’s stories similarly gives us an advantageous standpoint that results in a heightened sense of (self-)awareness. In turn, that (self-)awareness nourishes and is nourished by our selfconsciousness as nerd readers. As I have discussed in this chapter, the nerds in González Fernández’s fictional worlds are both conscious and self-conscious of their status as monstrous entities; human and non-human others in the collection know and understand to what extent and in which terms they are marginal and, as the title indicates, mythological creatures. This degree of awareness is also reflected in how Sobre los nerds engages with its own genre and 12  While these stories function as independent, self-contained narratives, the reader may find sporadic elements throughout the book that seem to interconnect them, such as those futuristic technologies and implants designed to enhance the human body called “servomecanismos,” or the existence of “cascos de inmersión” [immersion helmets] to delve into virtual realities. In this way, the reader assumes that even if all plots develop around different characters and themes, the events depicted take place in the same imagined future, which at the same time arguably creates an effect of homogenization that brings closer the experiences of reading a novel and a collection of stories.

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subgenres—science fiction, cyberpunk, and manga—through meta-literary formulas. Along these lines, characters are able to decipher and control the representational processes that create the fiction, on one occasion even explicitly revealing the substitution machinery at stake, such as in the story “Mangaka.” Moving away from narratives that downplay disability as weakness, Sobchack highlights the ways in which a similar state of self-­ awareness has empowered her epistemically. She writes: “Learning to walk and incorporate a prosthetic leg has made me more—not less—intimate with the operation and power of my body: I now know where my muscles are and am physically more present to myself” (Sobchack 2006, 32). Stemming from the very self-consciousness of her nerd-monsters, including herself and us, as readers, González Fernández’s narrative project seeks to create an intimate knowledge about fictionalization processes that include the construction of otherness, disability, gender, and genre, as well as Cuba’s exceptional status.

Works Cited Allan, Katryn. 2013. Introduction: Reading Disability in Science Fiction. In Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure, ed. Kathryn Allan, 1–18. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bhabha, Homi. 1984. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. October 28: 125–133. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. London: Polity. ———. 2016. Posthuman Critical Theory. In Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, ed. Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape, 13–32. New Delhi: Springer. Cheyne, Ria. 2013. Freaks and Extraordinary Bodies: Disability as Generic Marker in John Varley’s ‘Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo’. In Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure, 35–46. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Groce Press. Garland-Thompson, Rose Marie. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New  York: Columbia University Press. Ginsburg, Samuel. 2018. The Cyborg Caribbean: Bodies, Technology and the Struggle for (Post)Humanity in 21-st Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction. PhD diss. University of Texas at Austin.

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González Fernández, Maielis. 2016. Sobre los nerds y otras criaturas mitológicas. Kindle ed. La Habana: Guantanamera. Islam, Monirul. 2016. Posthumanism: Through the Postcolonial Lens. In Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, ed. Debashish Banerji and Makarand R. Paranjape, 115–129. New Delhi: Springer. Jameson, Fredric. 2007. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions. New York: Verso. Latham, Robert. 2007. Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Maguire, Emily. 2017. Deformaciones literarias: Embriología, genealogía y ciencia ficción en El Informe Cabrera de José ‘Pepe’ Liboy. Revista Iberoamericana 83 (259–260): 517–530. Matrix. 1999. Directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Warner Bros. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. 2000. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mitchell, David T., Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder. 2019. Introduction. The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect, ed. David T, Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L.  Snyder, 1–36. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ott, Katherine. 2015. Prosthetics. In Key Words for Disability Studies, ed. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, 140–142. New York: New York Press. Porbén, Pedro. 2017. Pus-modernidad e irreverencia en bandeja: Yoss y la ciencia ficción en Cuba en el siglo XX. Revista Iberoamericana 83 (259–260): 531–546. Price, Rachel. 2015. Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island. New York: Verso. Quiroga, José. 2005. Cuban Palimpsests. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 2006. A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality. In The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, 17–40. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Sundberg, Junita. 2013. Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies. Cultural Geographies 2 (1): 33–47. Wills, David. 1995. Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is the Posthuman? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 3

We Have Always Been Posthuman: Eve Gil’s Virtus and the Reconfiguration of the Lettered Subject Miguel García

Contemporary posthuman narratives in Mexican science fiction (sf) have focused on two recurring themes: first, the critique of neoliberal policies that have widened the socioeconomic gap under the pretense of modernizing the nation and, second, the repositioning of the human as a symbol of resistance in the face of technological dehumanization. With few exceptions, posthuman figures appear in Mexican sf not as a promise for new subjectivities but as a nightmare of disembodiment and a threat to humanism’s legacy. Significantly since the mid-twentieth century, a wide range of posthuman entities has populated Mexican cultural production, appearing not only in literature but also in films and other media. Whether in the form of cyborgs, androids, or automated sex dolls, among many others, these beings embody an ontological condition marked by the

M. García (*) Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6_3

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ever-increasing interaction between humans and technology.1 This “posthuman condition,” as Robert Pepperell (2003) calls it, signals an epistemological shift understudied in Latin America (Sánchez Prado 2008, 9). However, even though posthuman theory has not been widely disseminated in Latin America, its principles have been debated in literary studies, frequently when analyzing sf narratives that focus on the emergence of alternative subjectivities that question the place of human agents in a world where technology is ever-present. In this chapter, I examine the different cyborgian identities in Eve Gil’s (2008) novel Virtus.2 The novel imagines a dystopian Mexican future in which virtual reality dominates the territory and has become inescapable. Through the contrast between two types of cyborg articulations, Gil speculates about pressing issues for Mexico’s present and future. Virtus asks, for instance, what is the place of mass media and high technology in an unequal society? What can be done regarding the apparent demise of the written word? How are these changes affecting humanity? These questions implicitly interrogate the hegemonic yet unstable place of humanism in Latin America. The cyborgs in the novel function as a meditation on the status of humanism in Mexico—it is through them that the author ponders whether to follow or break away from tradition. At stake in Virtus, then, is not only an epistemological but an ontological question. In the end, the novel proposes a middle path, a cyborg subjectivity that guards the archive of the past, but that is also open to modern technology. This posthuman subject does not neglect the body’s materiality but embraces it. At the same time, there is also a threat of a return to the same mistakes of traditional humanism, but this tension is what keeps the text engaging and open to different interpretations.

1  Other posthuman entities that appear frequently are zombies, vampires, and different types of monsters. Here I am interested specifically in cyborgs because of their direct connection to technology. 2  This is Eve Gil’s only science fiction work. Her literary career spans various genres, lately focusing on adapting Japanese manga to the Mexican context. However, Gil is best known for her project “La trenza de Sor Juana” (Gil 2001–2011), a blog that she maintained for ten years (2001–2011), with the explicit goal of highlighting women writers’ work. The archived blog with all the entries is still available.

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A Note on Posthumanism and Latin America Posthumanism refers to the ontological condition mentioned above and a field of study that questions the premises of modern humanism, particularly those that characterize the human as an exceptional entity, capable of rational thought, with control over nature. One of the most critical challenges to that vision of humanism has come from the anti-humanist thinkers. They have pointed out the historical construction of the category of “human” and its imminent end (Ferrando 2019, 45–6).3 Here, I focus on another kind of posthumanism, namely, critical posthumanism, which shares with anti-humanism the rejection of the human as a universal given and has pointed out how this supposed universal human has been deployed to hide the white, European, male, upper-class subject. In this sense, Rosi Braidotti indicates that this “human”: is a normative convention, which does not make it inherently negative, just highly regulatory and hence instrumental to practices of exclusion and discrimination. The human norm stands for normality, normalcy, and normativity. It functions by transposing a specific mode of being human into a generalized standard, which acquires transcendent values as the human: from male to masculine and onto human as the universalized format of humanity. This standard is posited as categorically and qualitatively distinct from the sexualized, racialized, naturalized others and also in opposition to the technological artefact. (Braidotti 2013, 26)

One objective of critical posthumanism is to deconstruct the notion of the human. In opposition to anti-humanism, however, critical posthumanists do not attempt to do away with the concept of the human; instead, its primary concern is to decenter it and place it as part of a network of assemblages that coexist alongside non-human elements (Nayar 2014, 3–4). In this regard, Cary Wolfe states that “the point is not to reject humanism tout court—indeed there are many values and aspirations in humanism— but rather to show how those aspirations are undercut by the philosophical and ethical frameworks used to conceptualize them” (Wolfe 2010, xvi). This shift aims to instantiate a more horizontal relationship among different elements that have been organized hierarchically. Therefore, critical 3  Inspired by Michel Foucault’s (2012) The Order of Things, antihumanists have examined the historical process that gave rise to the concept of the human, thereby rejecting any claim of ahistorical universality

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posthumanism is not necessarily interested in erasing humanism but in creating the theoretical and essential tools to deal with some of its most pernicious aspects and rescue what has worked well. In the Latin American context, Mabel Moraña has demonstrated how humanism, as a colonial endeavor, excluded different types of knowledges, languages, sexualities, cultural practices, and symbolic goods from groups that did not fit the European model. Moraña explains that: Therefore, humanism is the project of an ecumenical knowledge that the lettered sector uses as the starting point to organize state institutions, processes of acquisition and dissemination of knowledge within the social sectors adhered to the republican project. The world of knowledge is divided in the same way in which material goods or natural resources are distributed: using as the starting point systems of control that regulate the access to information, the use of certain languages, the processes of production and consumption of symbolic goods along with the areas of prestige and cultural invisibility in the domain of knowledge. As it is inevitable, racism and patriarchalism replicate in the world of culture the power regimes that rule the economic and social levels, pushing to the margins of the modern nation the vestiges of Amerindian cultures and the forms of cultural expression of the popular sectors. (Moraña 2014, 193)4

Moraña shows how the dominant form of humanism in the region, championed by intellectuals like Domingo Sarmiento, José Rodó, or Alfonso Reyes, became an elitist practice that, disguised as a search for the universal ideal, established an intellectual and cultural order based on the concept of “high culture.” In this respect, literature occupied a privileged position in administering culture and safeguarding “humanist values.” With this in mind, it is not surprising to see how the written archive was organized and why certain forms (poetry, novel), and specific modes (realism), have received more critical attention and carry more prestige than other cultural expressions. Moreover, Latin American intellectuals have generally fulfilled a didactic role in sharing this knowledge and have historically used their place to advance their own literary and political careers. This is also noted in Ángel Rama’s (1998) influential La ciudad letrada (The Lettered City), where he discusses how intellectuals have been active participants in the debates around the relevance of literature and the written word, acting as spiritual guides and cultural gatekeepers. Rama 4

 Unless otherwise noted, translations are by the editors.

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shows the processes behind the lettered community’s constant reinventions, stressing its connection to authority and power. Yet, lettered knowledge has been contested from many fronts in Latin America. On the one hand, some projects within academia have questioned the exclusionary practices of the lettered culture. In this sense, postcolonial, cultural, and subaltern studies have attempted to open the field to other manifestations of knowledge and culture that do not follow the elite paradigm while also trying to dismantle the theoretical foundations on which lettered knowledge rests. On the other hand, mass media in the region has contributed to weakening the hegemony of the written word and allowed other forms of media, such as film, to gain ground. Finally, several grassroots movements, activist groups, and community projects have also reclaimed a space in the cultural milieu, highlighting the work of individuals and collectivities that otherwise would not receive mainstream attention. Despite these challenges, the humanist legacy in Latin America remains strong, which helps explain why posthumanism has been met with resistance (Sánchez Prado 2008, 9). However, critical posthumanism can be a useful contributor to this debate due to its engagement with science and technology and its insistence on bringing to the forefront agents that had been historically neglected. Here is also where the importance of Latin American sf resides. Sf works like Virtus can help bridge the distance among discourses and disciplines because they typically combine elements from “low,” “high,” and mass culture; they are interested in postcolonial revisions of the past, but also in speculating about the future of the region. In this regard, the importance of the cyborg in Latin American sf cannot be overstated. In his Latin American Cyborgs, J.  Andrew Brown (2010) posits this figure as an embodiment of political trauma. More recent approaches, such as those of David Dalton (2016) and M. Elizabeth Ginway (2020), read the cyborg as an opportunity to subvert the status quo and resist neoliberalism.

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Virtus: Cultural Critique and Political Satire5 Virtus’ opens with a prologue set in 2068, where Juana Inés, the protagonist, announces that the document she is writing is both a historical essay and an autobiography. She says that her goal is to denounce the technological experiment that gave rise to a dictatorship in Mexico in the early twenty-first century. Although the dictatorship has ended, all historical records have been lost or destroyed, and so Juana Inés wants her text to serve as the memory of that period. Once the novel properly begins, the story branches into three independent narrative arcs that incorporate political satire and sf elements, covering events from the early 2000s to the 2060s. Re-arranged chronologically, a summary of the novel would read like this: In the early twenty-first century, a mysterious entity known as El Ventrílocuo governs Mexico from the shadows and devises a plan to remain in power.6 With the help of local and transnational agents (politicians, mass media moguls, tech developers), El Ventrílocuo creates a “tele-­ presidente,” a President whose image is crafted to appeal to the televisual codes familiar to the population.7 The second part of the plan consists of implanting a computer chip into the brains of all Mexicans. This “lectochip,” as it is known in the novel, generates a virtual reality that becomes the only reality the citizens know. The plan succeeds, and the virtual reality turns the population into a mass of enslaved, alienated workers who, nevertheless, believe everything is fine. Eventually, a computer virus infects the chip, and the simulation ends. The country becomes a deserted wasteland, and only a few people survive, including Juana Inés, who grows up to be a historian and vows to restore memory and help rebuild the nation.

5  Virtus can be placed as a recent trend in Latin American film and literature that portray posthuman entities. Some notable examples from the period are the novels Ygdrasil by Jorge Baradit (2005), Gel Azul by Bernardo Fernández (2007), and  the  film Sleep Dealer (Rivera 2008). 6  El Ventrílocuo is another posthuman figure: “ni siquiera era un él o una ella, sino un Cuerpo montado a partir de ubérrimas cabezas” cabezas” [neither a he nor a she, but a Body assembled out of extremely fertile heads] (Gil 2013, 8). It is a monster made up of “capitalistas desenfrenados” [rampant capitalists] (Gil 2013, 9) with dictatorial ambitions (Gil 2013, 8). 7  This is a reference to the rise of Enrique Peña Nieto. He was at the time governor of the State of Mexico (2005–2011) and would later be Mexico’s president (2012–2018), signaling the PRI party’s return to power. This character dies in the middle of the novel but is replaced by a hologram.

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The novel dialogs with non-fictional works, such as essays, literary criticism, and philosophy.8 In this regard, the novel works as a literary adaptation of the essay Homo videns. Televisione e post-pensiero (1997), by Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori.9 Sartori’s book, which is referenced in the novel, is a rant against television where the author argues that this medium has radically transformed Homo sapiens.10 For Sartori (2000), what distinguishes humans from other animals is the ability to use symbolic and reflective language, that is, language about language itself. But television has modified contemporary humanity to such an extent that it has produced what Sartori calls the “video-child,” a being whose reality is mediated by the televisual image, impairing cognition. Sartori describes the “video-child” as “an adult that will be deaf, for the rest of their life, to the stimuli of reading and of knowledge transmitted via written culture. The stimuli to which [the child] keeps responding when they grow up, are almost exclusively audiovisual” (my translation) (Sartori 2000, 16). Virtus appropriates the concept of the video-child and, in a classic sf maneuver, literalizes the metaphor by describing the relationship between the virtual reality produced by the chip and its users. In a note at the end of the novel, Gil explains that she uses sf as a “metáfora fantástica de lo que actualmente acontece en un país específico— México—y que necesitaba narrar, criticar, justificar, entender y explicar sin tener que escribir ‘Otro-libro-más-de-Política’” [a fantastical metaphor of whatever happens in a specific country—Mexico—and because I needed to narrate, criticize, justify, understand and explain without having to write ‘One-more-book-about-politics’] (Gil 2013, 123–4). In other words, sf becomes the vehicle to make sense of Mexico’s sociopolitical and cultural affairs in her own present. Thus, the posthuman configurations that emerge respond directly to the author’s worries about the perceived dehumanization brought about by corrupt politicians and the media. In this sense, the author aligns with Moraña, who states that the cyborg “nombra—expone—lo inimaginable; representa un límite y materializa disconformidades, temores, inquietudes y deseos que no encuentran su 8  The novel even includes a few footnotes with bibliographical information when Juana Inés is quoting directly from a book. 9  The book appeared in Spanish under the title Homo videns: La sociedad teledirigida. There is no English translation to date. 10  The character Linos Pound, which will be discussed below, wrote a treatise on mass media manipulation, a subtle nod to Sartori’s book (Gil 2013, 9). Sartori and his concept of homo videns are mentioned explicitly later in the novel (Gil 2013, 102).

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espacio en el lenguaje o en la imagen” [names—exhibits/unveils—the unimaginable; it represents a limit and materializes dissatisfaction, fears, anxieties, and desires that do not find their place in language or images] (Moraña 2017, 304). Even though the cyborgs and the futuristic setting in Virtus are metaphors, they also act as an intervention with the possibility of effecting change.

First Cyborg Identity: The Video-Child Virtus presents two types of cyborg identities with opposing worldviews. The first one, which will be discussed in this section, is the result of a State-supported imposition, a physical and mental degradation disguised as a technological enhancement that effectively destroys society. In contrast, the second reflects an effort to generate a collectivity that uses technology as a means—not an end—to recover the past. The first cyborg identity, and the most prominent in the novel, is Gil’s interpretation of Sartori’s video-child.11 As mentioned above, this identity is created when all Mexicans undergo the chip’s surgical implantation that produces the virtual reality. In contrast to Donna Haraway’s (1991) celebrated conceptualization of the cyborg in her “A Cyborg Manifesto,” this cyborg presents no subversive potential, no playful irony, and no revolutionary inclinations. Where Haraway considers the cyborg to be about “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (Haraway 1991, 154), the video-child is a profoundly technophobic and limited vision of human-machine coupling. People become enslaved to the images projected by the computer chip and can no longer distinguish simulation from reality: Mientras en otros países sufrían violencia, matanzas, hambrunas y desastres naturales, nosotros interactuábamos con avatares de nuestros actores y actrices preferidos, o de los dioses del Olimpo, con la cara de algunos de éstos, y alimentábamos nuestros ojos con las más exquisitas visiones de los más fabulosos platillos del universo, sin percatarnos de que languidecíamos por desnutrición. (Gil 2013, 24) [While in other countries people suffered violence, massacres, famines and natural disasters, we interacted with avatars of our favorite actors or actresses, or of the gods of Mount Olympus, or with the face of some of 11  The novel does not give a name to this type of cyborg. I use Sartori’s term here because of its direct allusion in the book.

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these, and we fed our eyes with the most exquisite visions of the most fabulous dishes in the universe, without realizing we were wilting due to malnutrition].

The reality/simulation dichotomy is complicated by how virtual reality works in this future Mexico compared to other countries. The novel explains that virtual reality exists worldwide, and users can freely enter and leave the virtual space, except in Mexico, where virtual reality is permanent due to the chip. Mexico’s top politicians (who allegorize the State) decided to volunteer the country’s population as guinea pigs to test the chip because they can see its potential as a tool for population control. Virtus implicitly references Plato’s classic allegory of the cave. These cyborgs, just like the prisoners of the cave, remain unable to see past the projected images.12 In her study of virtual reality, Teresa López Pellisa also compares this new form of immersive technology with Plato’s cave. She claims that “La diferencia básica entre estos dos entornos radica en que anteriormente los prisioneros de la caverna de Platón no tenían conciencia de que otro mundo existiera al margen del simulado, pero el usuario del siglo XXI tiene conciencia de estar introduciéndose en otro nivel de simulación” [The basic difference between these two environments lies in the fact that formerly the prisoners in Plato’s caves were not aware of the existence of another world beyond the simulated one, but users in the twenty-first century are aware of the fact that they are entering another level of simulation] (29). The novel, on the other hand, suggests precisely the opposite: they only know the simulation. The virtual reality here represents the highest level of modernity’s mass deception, or what Jean Baudrillard (1983) calls the hyperreality of the simulacrum, where the virtual world has ceased to reference the real world. This appears clearly as the narrator explains, “Uno de los fines de la virtualización era crear fuertes lazos emotivos entre humanos y avatares, de tal suerte que no experimentáramos necesidad de relacionarnos afectivamente entre nosotros, seres de carne y hueso pero sosos y aburridos en comparación con las maravillosas imágenes que se nos procuraban a toda hora” [One of the goals of virtualization was to create strong emotional bonds between humans and avatars, so that we would not feel the need to socialize affectively among ourselves, beings of flesh and bone but dull and boring when compared to 12  This allegory has been used frequently when discussing the alienating power of different visual media types, like television, the internet, and even virtual reality.

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the wonderful images that we were provided with all the time] (Gil 2013, 13). The simulation is designed to satisfy the users’ desires and to turn them into model citizens. The President and the First Lady, for instance, promote the chip not only as a commodity but as a shortcut to remedy the country’s educational deficiencies. The irony is that the device’s real function is to prevent its users from becoming aware of their condition. While in Haraway’s model the cyborg is a product of “militarism,” “patriarchal capitalism,” and “state socialism” (Haraway 1991, 151), here its origins can be traced back to media oligopolies and sly politicians. The alienated future presented in the novel is an extrapolation of the present, particularly through the not-so-subtle references to Mexico’s telecommunication giants Televisa, TV Azteca, and Telmex. The novel’s use of virtual reality is a commentary on Mexican television’s function as the de facto voice of the State, as well as the numerous times it has provided cover-ups, falsified reports, or fabricated stories: indeed, creating a virtual reality that only existed on the television screen.13 Citizens passively accept the chip’s implantation, a gesture that suggests they are also to blame for their situation. The elite takes advantage of the chip to transform society at the biopolitical level, in a move that recalls the eugenic projects of the twentieth century.14 The chip divides the population into classes (called “guisas”) based on their socioeconomic, academic, and racial backgrounds (Gil 2013, 25).15 The hierarchical division of fixed social groups allows the rulers to regulate the new subjects’ bodies more efficiently. For instance, in the resulting caste system, low-class cyborgs perform repetitive, mechanical labor, and their reproduction is encouraged to provide a steady flow of new laborers (Gil 2013, 84–5). They are, in essence, expendable subjects, whose “vital cycle” is only 35 years, at which point they undergo a 13  At the time of Virtus’ writing and publication, the most infamous such case was that of Florence Cassez, a French citizen accused of participating in several kidnappings in Mexico. Her arrest was broadcast on live television, only to be later revealed that it had been staged. It is still unclear who orchestrated the simulation–whether Televisa or Génaro García Luna, then head of the Agencia Federal de Investigación—but this event showed the power of mass media and high government officials to create an alternate reality. 14  The very first page of the novel compares Mexicans in this future with Jews during the Holocaust because both groups were deprived of free will (Gil 2013, 7). The narrator laments on the same page that Jews at least were able to unite thanks to their memories, while Mexicans had no access to this. 15  “Guisa” is an antiquated and seldom-used word for “class” or “quality,” according to the Real Academia Española’s dictionary.

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mandatory “disabling” process that ultimately kills them.16 The upper class does not fare much better. They have very few advantages over the lower types, such as access to real food and somewhat creative occupations—the protagonist and her peers, for instance, belong to the technoscientific class and spend their time developing videogames and other virtual reality products (Gil 2013, 69). Regardless of their guisa, everyone participates in this dehumanizing eugenic regime, their worth measured by how productive they are. This cyborg identity becomes at once the demonstration of the loss of individual and collective identity and an instrument to denounce the power of mass media conglomerates and corrupt politicians. The video-­ child stubbornly resists the celebratory tone behind the pop-­posthumanism, the discourse that focuses on the pleasurable aspects of the pairing between technology and the human body (Nayar 2014, 6). Brown argues that the cyborg in Latin American culture symbolizes the traumatic introduction of neoliberalist policies in the region. For him, cyborgs “are survivors, scarred by their experiences and left as texts of flesh and metal that can subvert the authoritative structures that engendered them because they remain and can use their bodies as testimonies of ‘cyberhacktivism’” (Brown 2010, 143–4). In other words, the cyborg in Latin America is simultaneously a fictional entity and a metaphor that encodes oppressive political and economic policies. They become dangerous because they register the abuses of the techno-political regime in their bodies, and therefore serve as living documents of their suffering. In Virtus, the video-­ child is an allegorical denunciation, a wake-up call to stop the media simulation and prevent them from installing themselves in our brains. This accusation is accentuated by the tragic end of most cyborgs when a computer virus infects the chip. The government pressures the population to “unplug” from the virtual simulation without informing them that this would kill them due to the interdependence between chip and brain. This event later becomes known as “la desvirtualización” (de-virtualization),

16  According to the novel, those scheduling for disabling were sent to special camps “donde se les bombardeaba con imágenes que generaban vértigos de bienestar y saciedad, manteniéndolos despiertos, excitados y sin ingerir alimento para que sus cuerpos se deterioran, imperceptiblemente, hasta fenecer, evaporarse y ser licuados por un mecanismo purificador” [in which they were bombarded with images that generated feelings of vertigo due to well-being and satiety, until they died, evaporated, and getting liquated by a purifying mechanism] (Gil 2013, 95–6).

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and only a few people survive, including the protagonist.17 The citizens of Mexico end their existence as nothing more than domestic appliances because, by this point, their life already had no transcendental value, according to the logic of the novel.

Linos Pound and Juana Inés: The Neolettered Cyborgs The second type of cyborg differs from the first, not necessarily in their constitution, but in their motives and goals. This identity is exemplified by two characters: Juana Inés and Linos Pound, a scientist and intellectual who rescues Juana Inés and becomes her mentor. Linos is one of the few people who were suspicious of the chip and refused its insertion. He has been dead to the virtual world for decades and spends his days scavenging the city’s ruins. The word for these people in the novel is “inxiled,” those who cannot interact with the virtualized citizens. At the same time, Linos can be considered one of the only living characters in the novel. He is, in fact, the antithesis to the video-child identity. Without the chip to obscure his vision, Linos witnessed the slow deterioration of the country and its citizens. His name alludes to science (Carl Linnaeus) and poetry (Ezra Pound), and he combines traits from both disciplines. For the society in the novel, however, Linos is an anachronism because, in this dystopic future, the concept of “intellectual” has little value and now refers to “cualquier académico sumiso y constreñido a los límites que su Academia imponía; en todo caso, a los anónimos y anónimas que redactaban los discursos del Presidente o prestaban su nombre para firmar los libros en blanco con que se pretendía instruir a la población vulnerable” [to any submissive academic that was constrained to the limits of what their academy imposed; in any case, to the anonymous men and women that wrote the President’s speeches or lent their names to sign the blank books whose intended use was to instruct a vulnerable population] (105) 17  Those who took longer to die turned into zombiefied creatures “incurriendo en actos tan horribles como el canibalismo, la necrofilia, la violencia sexual, incluso a hacerse espantosas automutilaciones y comerse sus propios ojos, creyéndolos inservibles” [committing such hideous acts as cannibalism, necrophilia, sexual violence, even engaging in terrifying selfmutilation and the eating of their own eyes, as they thought these eyes were now useless] (102).

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A lettered identity no longer carries prestige, and the intellectual guisa ranks below that of bureaucrats and technoscientists (Gil 2013, 105). Here, the author seems to be critiquing her present by suggesting that the lettered elite has lost its way. Linos Pound functions as a reclaiming of that notion. His research agenda and intellectual interests lie outside the purview of any official institution, making him a subversive force in the novel. For instance, he builds a computer with scavenged parts to contact other scientists in the hopes of piecing together what happened in Mexico. Similarly, he puts together a solar-powered shortwave radio to access news and shows from around the world. His “humanistic” side, on the other hand, draws him to research, preserve, and teach the past in his fight against the mental and physical oppression by the State. All of these traits distance Linos from the video-child, and yet, in what might be perceived as a character contradiction, he decides to implant a chip in his brain himself. However, Linos’ chip (which he designed) will not connect him to the virtual reality; instead, the chip works only as a storage device containing hundreds of thousands of historical files. In this way, Linos carries the nation’s memory in his brain or, rather, he is Mexico’s archive, as he warns the protagonist: “Si yo me muero, Juana Inés, se muere la memoria de México” [If I, Juana Inés, die, the memory of Mexico dies too] (Gil 2013, 97). Linos Pound’s depiction allows us to see this cyborg in opposition to the first type. In the first place, this cyborg responds to what Brown has called a “letrado posthumano,” a figure invested in the lettered city but with a posthuman subjectivity (Brown 2008; Gil 2013, 20). Reason and emotion become one, though not in equal parts. Reason is the predominant drive for Linos, allowing him to manipulate existing technologies to establish contact with the outside world. His emotional side is shown through his desire to set up affective links with other intellectual communities because he longs for a form of collectivity that he cannot find in his own country. Robert Pepperell states that “where humanists saw themselves as distinct beings in an antagonistic relationship with their surroundings, posthumans regard their own being as being embodied in an extended technological world” (Peperell 2003, 152), but Linos fluctuates between both perspectives, though in the end, he seems to embody a slightly updated vision of a traditional humanist, with a fixed identity that has no symbiotic relationship with technology.

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The Neo “letrada” Cyborg: Juana Inés If we treat the alienated cyborg as the novel’s thesis and Linos Pound’s neolettered cyborg as the antithesis, then Juana Inés appears as a synthesis that reconciles the problematic aspects of these subjectivities. Since birth, Juana Inés has carried the lectochip and belongs to the technoscientific class, but she is still a video-child. The “devirtualization” event happens when she is very young. Linos finds her wandering the streets alone, and he takes her to his underground shelter. The destruction of the chip also means the erasure of Juana Inés’ knowledge and practically a return to an infant state (Gil 2013, 76). She is a blank slate where Linos will inscribe his teachings. She begins her reeducation process with the help of Linos, his virtual library, and also a radio. A key element in this initial phase of her learning is the absence of images. Linos reads for her directly from his chip, while the radio provides news and literacy lessons. Whether through Linos or the radio, the human voice is presented as a superior and more authentic medium than virtual reality. Also, the radio’s portrayal as an anachronist yet valuable ally parallels Linos’ characterization as a relic from the past. Juana Inés develops a rehabilitated identity that is collective from the beginning. Like the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Juana Inés becomes an avid learner while sheltered and starts to study literature, science, and other fields. She is shaped by the works of Nellie Campobello and Cristina Rivera Garza (Gil 2013, 97) and the shows and newscasts she discovers on the radio. The word “corpus” acquires a dual meaning here: as the material body she is relearning to control and as the body of knowledge she interacts with. While for the first type of cyborg Plato’s cave represented the concealment of reality, for Juana Inés, the underground cave where she is studying becomes the origin of her awareness.18 When Juana Inés finally comes out of Linos’ bunker, this is what she encounters: “Vi aquel escenario inaudito que parecían las ruinas de una guerra muy remota. Una Troya Olvidada. … Era, de hecho, el Desierto. Fantasmales arenas cuya palidez casi se fusionaba con el deslavado azul del horizonte. … Lo que el cracker destruyó fue la ilusión óptica con que se había reemplazado a la naturaleza” [I saw that unheard of stage that looked like the ruins of a very 18  This interpretation is strengthened when it is revealed that Linos’ internet alias was “Platón.”

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faraway war. A Forgotten Troy. … It was, in fact, the Desert. Ghostly sands whose paleness almost got fused with the washed-out blue in the horizon. … What the cracker destroyed was the optical illusion that had replaced nature] (Gil 2013, 111). This marks another turning point in her development. She realizes that she will defy her assigned role as a future technoscientist and decides to follow the lettered route. Representatives from an unnamed country rescue all the survivors, and Juana Inés continues her education there. Her journey comes full circle by the end of the novel when she receives Linos’ chip. Juana Inés becomes a cyborg again. She adopts a guiding role to reorganize the nation, and one of her last phrases is her call to arms: “Y aquí estoy. Armada hasta los dientes … con el arma más peligrosa de todas: un lápiz” [Here I am. Armed to the teeth … with the most dangerous weapons of all: a pencil] (Gil 2013, 122). This final utopic impulse is also a transgressive act because it comes from a female subject, someone whose subjectivity had not belonged to the intellectual class. This neolettered and gendered cyborg, in contrast to the video-child, is an open entity, faithful to the written word and history, but attentive to the voices that had been forgotten. Furthermore, the many references to Sor Juana suggest that the author is engaging consciously with the legacy of humanism in Latin America. For her, placing Sor Juana at the center is a strategy to rethink humanism without eliminating it. Juana Inés’ representation as a neolettered cyborg is, therefore, a break from the past, but also a reinterpretation of certain parts of it. It could be said that she becomes a cyber-­ Sor Juana, that is, a female cyborg that guards the nation’s archive, but who looks forward to imparting her wisdom to whoever wishes to listen. To go back to Moraña and Rama, the end of the novel hints at the foundation of a new lettered city. Juana Inés says, intento construir un mundo sobre las ruinas de lo que fuera mi país. No sé si mejor, claro, pero me propongo que sea el mejor posible, lo más parecido al que soñaron tantos héroes borrados de la memoria colectiva e instalados hoy en la mía. Somos un paisito cercenado, cercado, carente, contaminado y lastimado hasta la ignominia. Intentamos salir adelante mediante una evangelización cultural opuesta a la superstición de la que nos encargamos tantos supervivientes como descendientes. (Gil 2013, 122, my italics)

[I try to build a world on the ruins of what it used to be my country. I don’t know if it will be better, of course, but I intend to make it as good

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as possible, resembling as much as possible that country dreamed of by so many heroes that were erased from collective memory and are installed today in mine. We are a small mutilated country, fenced-in, lacking, contaminated and hurt to the point of ignominy. We try to get ahead by means of a cultural evangelization that is the opposite of superstition, a project to which both survivors and descendants are committed.]Juana Inés’ project explicitly addresses historical exclusions. After all, she too was excluded from her society when she was an unwilling participant in the virtual reality. Additionally, the phrase “evangelización cultural” evokes an important project in Mexico’s past: Jose Vasconcelos’ educational and cultural campaign as Mexico’s Secretary of Education in the 1920s Mexican Revolution’s attempt also to correct neglected communities. This parallel could be read as the longing to continue what some consider an unfinished project. Still, a significant difference here is that while Vasconcelos had the State’s power behind him, Juana Inés is working outside of the State (because there is no longer any State). The novel ends without offering any conclusive evidence regarding this new lettered community; there is no utopia in sight, only the prospect of salvaging from the ruins whatever is still useful.

The Cyborg Dilemma The neolettered cyborg embodies the ideal posthuman subject to carry out the nation’s restoration because it is able to distinguish reality from simulation and because it values humanist values without rejecting technology. It is important to analyze some of the implications of this idea. If the images produced by the chip create a false reality, it follows that in their absence, the world would appear as it truly is, and the citizens would experience reality. However, this is highly problematic because it ignores the complexity of cultural, political, social, and economic mediations that configure what we call reality. In other words, neither radio nor books nor the spoken word are transparent media. The narration indeed points to these forms of media as more authentic and, thus, more real. This only perpetuates the humanistic myth of the power of “logos” and its connection to reality. But fetishizing or sacralizing reality, López Pellisa (2015, 123) reminds us, is unproductive. The question of agency inside a virtual reality environment presents another problem. The novel compares VR users’ passivity to the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, but the analogy does not hold up under

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closer scrutiny. VR in the novel seems to work very differently than regular television, even if it is presented as following its same principles. The immersive experience is an intensification of media consumption. However, users can still select the type of content they want to interact with and remain in control of their navigation. Besides, and this is key, their experience is not limited to the passive enjoyment of images because VR is multisensory and interactive. Users are not bound to a confined space either, and thus they move within the city and can touch, smell, feel, and even establish affective (and erotic) relationships with the images they select. The relationship between the “virtual” and the “real” city is not one of separation but of contiguity. The virtual city is superimposed onto the real one: the materiality remains there, palpable. In other words, the city is still part of the hardware. It might then be more appropriate to say that the cyborgs inhabit a form of “augmented” or “extended” reality, which complicates even further the simulation/reality dichotomy. Even though the elite decides what goes onto the VR archive, users can still manipulate and explore it through their corporeality. In Virtus, the simulation inhabits the real, which foregrounds the body and its sensory output. Even the concept of “users” can be understood not as an example of dehumanization but as a noun that gives the subjects agency. Within the logic of the novel, however, this type of virtual (or augmented) reality is more perverse, denying any agency to the cyborg subjects with the chip. A final consideration must be made in regard to Juana Inés’ neolettered cyborg identity. To what extent does it propose a radically different intellectual project? Is it merely a nostalgic rescue of the previous “lettered city”? On the one hand, Juana Inés underlines the need to incorporate relegated subjectivities, especially women. After all, she is herself an atypical figure in her society: a female cyborg who chose the intellectual world instead of the virtual reality. She also suggests a new Mexican literary canon by only quoting or mentioning women authors: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Cristina Rivera Garza, Sandra Lorenzano, Nellie Campobello, Vivian Abenshushan.19 This parallels Eve Gil’s own project, still active when Virtus was published, to give female writers visibility. Juana Inés’ cultural and literary new genealogy displaces the male subject and 19  No Mexican male authors are mentioned in the novel, apart from the fictional Linos. The male authors she references are mostly thinkers who have worked on the power of images, truth, and representation: Plato, Clément Rosset, Harry Frankfurt, Régis Debray, Giovanni Sartori.

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positions women at the center. But who will be the members of this new lettered city? According to the novel, the few survivors come either from the technoscientific class and belonged to Linos’ generation or from rural areas (119). In other words, the potential neolettered individual has no connection to the traditional intellectual class. Finally, with the State’s disappearance, the nation and its symbols are also gone. This means that Juana Inés is genuinely dealing with a tabula rasa, and this opens up a utopic horizon, although this could also be interpreted as just another way of sublimating a lettered minority’s desire for autonomy and control.

Conclusions Geoffrey Kantaris asserts that the Latin American cyborg seems to condense specific anxieties surrounding the dissolution of collective identities and collective memory, anxieties which connect historically to the experience of colonisation on the one hand and, on the other, to the erasure of the nation as a space of collective agency and memory, an erasure which seems to be inscribed in the very mechanism which effect the transition from nation-state to global market. (Kantaris 2010, 52)

Indeed, Virtus’ emphasis on cyborg identities shows how the political and the social are negotiated through technology and the body. Eve Gil uses sf to test her ideas regarding the problems she considers already present. In a way, fiction works as another type of virtual reality: both utilize imagination and signs to create possible worlds (López Pellisa 2015, 93). The dystopian future we discover in the novel is a cautionary tale we have heard before. It is a political fable wrapped around the themes and conventions of sf. This is another contribution of the novel: the seemingly paradoxical defense of lettered culture through a genre that has been neglected by the intellectual elite in Mexico. The posthuman entities in the novel allow Gil to speculate about the future critically and imagine a world where humans approach technology and each other with a new attitude. Undoubtedly, the novel remains highly anthropocentric, and it continues to reproduce essentialist binaries (body/mind, organism/machine, human/nature). But while Virtus’ vision of humanity might appear nostalgic or even reactionary, the end of the novel points to a certainly

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different world that centers on a posthuman identity that challenges the hegemonic humanist subject. The focus on lettered knowledge indeed reinscribes humanistic values for the future society, but this should be seen as an invitation to find points of crossing and divergences between humanism and posthumanism in Latin America.

Works Cited Baradit, Jorge. 2005. Ygsdrasil. Santiago: Ediciones B. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. London: Polity. Brown, J.  Andrew. 2008. Humanismo ‘cyborg’: El letrado posthumano en América Latina. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 34 (68): 19–32. ———. 2010. Cyborgs in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dalton, David. 2016. Robo Sacer: ‘Bare Life’ and Cyborg Labor Beyond the Border in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer. Hispanic Studies Review 1 (1): 15–29. Fernández, Bernardo. 2007. Gel azul. Suma de Letras: México D.F. Ferrando, Francesca. 2019. Philosophical Posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury. Foucault, Michel. 2012. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. Gil, Eve. 2001–2011. La trenza de Sor Juana. Accessed 19 May 2022. http:// otratrenza.blogspot.com. ———. 2013. Virtus. México D.F: Editorial Jus. Ginway, M.  Elizabeth. 2020. Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: the Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge. Kantaris, Geoffrey. 2010. Cyborgs, Cities, and Celluloid: Memory Machines in Two Latin American Cyborg Films. In Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature, ed. Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman. Liverpool University Press. Moraña, Mabel. 2014. La cuestión del humanismo en América Latina: puntos ciegos y líneas de fuga. In Inscripciones críticas: Ensayos sobre cultura latinoamericana, 185–213. Santiago de Chile: Cuarto propio. ———. 2017. El monstruo como máquina de guerra. Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Nayar, K. Pramod. 2014. Posthumanism. London: Polity. López Pellisa, Teresa. 2015. Patologías de la realidad virtual: Cibercultura y ciencia ficción. Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica de España. Peperell, Robert. 2003. The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain. Bristol: Intellect LTD.

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Rama, Ángel. 1998. La ciudad letrada. Montevideo: Arca. Rivera, Alex, dir. 2008. Sleep Dealer. Los Angeles: Maya Entertainment. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. 2008. El giro (pos)humanista. A manera de introducción. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 34 (68): 7–18. Sartori, Giovanni. 2000. Homo Videns: Televisione e post-pensiero. 2nd ed. Bari: Laterza. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism. University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 4

Does the Posthuman Actually Exist in Mexico? A Critique of the Essayistic Production on Posthumanist Discourse Written by Mexicans (2001–2007) Stephen C. Tobin

Introduction The objective of this inquiry is to contribute to posthuman studies about Mexico by analyzing the discourse presented in four book-length essays written on the topic by Mexican authors in the 2000s: El cuerpo transformado: cyborgs y nuestra descendencia tecnológica en la realidad y en la ciencia ficción (2001) by Naief Yehya, La utopía de los seres posthumanos (2004) by Luz María Sepúlveda, El cuerpo post-humano en el arte y la cultura contemporánea (2005) by Iván Mejía, and Posthumano: la vida después del hombre (2007) by Mauricio Bares. To date, these have been the only nonfiction books published on the topic within the country and targeted toward a Spanish-speaking readership, and numerous indicators attest to

S. C. Tobin (*) University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6_4

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the generally favorable reception of these works after their publication, including a literary award, award nominations, a translation (into Italian), and a second-edition printing.1 Despite these factors, none of these texts has been formally studied by scholars in or outside the country, leaving them overlooked and overdue for critique. Up until recently, the research on posthumanism in Mexico has been almost exclusively performed by humanities researchers in the Global North who focus on speculative fiction literature and film. Scholars such as J. Andrew Brown (2010), Hernán García (2014), Elizabeth Ginway (2013), and David Dalton (2018), among others,2 have interpreted Mexican speculative fictions with strong posthuman elements mostly through the lens of the techno-feminist cyborg theory of Donna Haraway (1991) in order to show how these narratives challenge and extend Haraway’s model. Given this, research into the fictional construction of the posthuman appears to be the privileged site for understanding how Mexican cultural works grapple with and articulate the concept. Given that all humanities’ scholarly study on posthumanism has concentrated mostly upon (science/speculative) fictional works that critique or comment upon Mexican social, political, and economic reality in myriad ways, taking into account these four essays will aid in understanding more fully the epistemological question regarding knowledge of the posthuman in nonfictional terms. In order to do this, this chapter (i) offers an overview of some notable objects and people that are the foci of their research; (ii) considers the theoretical frameworks that interpretatively 1  El cuerpo post-humano was translated into Italian in 2017 as Homo cyborg; La era de los seres posthumanos won the 2004 Premio Nacional de Ensayo José Vasconcelos; El cuerpo posthumano had a second edition printing in 2014; Posthumano: la vida después del hombre had two chapters nominated for awards several years before the book was published: the Premio Abigael Bohórquez in 2003 and the Premio Anagrama de Ensayo in 2006. 2  The works here that rely most heavily on Haraway’s cyborg model as their theoretical framework are: J. Andrew Brown’s discussion of Carmen Boullosa’s novel El cielo de la tierra (2008); Hernan Manuel García’s analysis (2014) of Gerardo Porcayo’s La primera calle de la soledad (1993); Elizabeth Ginway’s study (2013) of numerous cyberpunk stories, along with Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer; David Dalton’s reevaluation of state strategies in postrevolutionary Mexico in the promotion of mestizo identity (2018) in works by José Vasconcelos, murals by Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, several Golden Age films from the 1940s–1950s, Carlos Olvera’s Mejicanos en el espacio and numerous b-movies by El Santo in the 1960s. Edward King and Joanna Page (2017) avoid recurring to Haraway and opt instead to interpret the neo-baroque aesthetic of the graphic novels of Edgar Clement’s graphic novels Los perros salvajes and Operación Bolivar (2017).

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frame their expressions; (iii) takes into account the authors’ backgrounds and loci of enunciation that partially inform their works; (iv) performs a brief quantitative analysis of all four texts’ cumulative references; and (v) examines a tendency that all texts share: the near total exclusion of Mexico from their investigative horizon. This chapter closes by considering why this phenomenon occurs. Before proceeding with this analysis, however, I will briefly take stock of an important distinction that has recently arisen within posthuman studies in order to assess each text’s ideological articulation of the concept. Since these authors published the essays, there has been an “explosion of scholarship” (Braidotti 2017, 13) in posthuman studies that remains ongoing,3 the proliferation of which provides us with some useful critical tools through which to be able to assess the contributions to the field from these four essays from Mexico. In particular, the distinction between transhumanism and critical posthumanism that has emerged during this time is especially productive in retroactively assessing the overall ideological articulations of these texts. The differences between these two strains of posthumanist thought are too complex to adequately cover here, but discussing their main elements of distinction is useful before proceeding. Transhumanism sees the human involved in a process of massive change catalyzed almost exclusively by cyber-, bio-, nano-, and informational technologies. The fusion and intertwining of the human with these technologies promise a salvation from defects, illnesses, entropy, and inevitable death of the organic human structure. In this sense, the body is viewed as being fundamentally devalued, giving the mind primacy over the body; taken to its extreme, this results in human subjectivity becoming dislodged from physical embodiment, making it possible to be human without a body. This mind-over-body dichotomy recurs to René Descartes’s privileging rationality, along with the accompanying humanism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment that helped to construct the liberal humanist subject—the unitary, sovereign, autonomous, and exceptional 3  While the discourse on posthumanism has been going on since the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, only since around 2010 can we begin to speak of an explosion, with important critical and theoretical works like Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism? (2010), Stefan Herbrechter’s Posthumanism (2013), Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (2013), and Nayard Pramod’s Posthumanism (2014) that synthesize, expand, or reassess the field. Later, numerous conferences dedicated to the topic begin occurring throughout the West, along with the creation of the Journal of Posthuman Studies in 2017, the Posthuman Glossary tome from 2018, among numerous others on the topic.

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figure that has significantly underpinned Western subjectivity for centuries. Transhumanism, then, can be viewed as an intensification of humanism (Wolfe 2010, xv). Critical posthumanism, on the other hand, views the human as a non-­ unitary subject that has co-evolved with its environment, others, animals, and plants in relational, not differential terms. Technology does not garner the privileged space that it does in transhumanism, but rather is—and always has been—integral in its evolution. According to philosopher Francisca Ferranda, critical posthumanism is a “post-humanism” in that it eschews humanism’s hierarchy that grants epistemological importance over others and in so doing excludes those of different races, genders/ sexual orientations, able-bodiedness, age, and so on. It is also “post-­ anthropocentric” in that this primacy creates another differential stance in relation to other species that has excluded animals, plants, and other non-­ human agents that are integral to the human’s own identity and even existential survival (Ferranda 2018, 439). As such, critical posthumanism is a philosophical, ethical, and political project that, according to Pramod Nayar, “unravels the discourse, institutional and material structures and processes that presented the human as unique and bounded even when situated among all other life forms” (Nayar 2014, 29). This branch of posthumanism disallows the possibility of a disembodied subjectivity altogether; instead, it sees the embodiment of the human as integrally enmeshed and embedded within its material environment, unable to be extracted via what is perceived as the techno-fantasies and fetishes present in transhumanism. It is worth pointing out that the four essays under consideration here do not conceive of posthumanism in these overt terms. Only one text even acknowledges transhumanism as a developing philosophy (Mejía 2005, 148), but does so without being aware of the other approach. Given this, transhumanism and critical posthumanism can be perceived in these essays more as attitudes expressed through their own words and those of the thinkers they cite, rather than as explicitly stated positions. These Mexican authors were by no means alone; even Katherine Hayles articulated the general distinction between these two approaches in 1999 without labeling them: If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information

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technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival. (Hayles 1999, 5)

Considering the fact that these four essays are exploratory of the topic and overwhelmingly summative of other people’s philosophical, social scientific, or scientific theories, and that critical posthumanism had at the time of these writings not even entered the lexicon, these texts grapple with the emerging and multivalent discourse that itself was in the process of taking shape in the 2000s. They are epistemological products of the time and place from which they emerge, occurring before Braidotti’s aforementioned scholarship explosion brought about the paradigm shift within posthuman studies that distinguish between these two approaches.

The Essayistic Construction of the Posthuman as Understood by Mexicans Three of the four Mexican authors here—Yehya, Sepúlveda, and Mejía— anchor their discussion in the cyborg, which is indicative of and largely synonymous with the posthuman. In doing so, there exists some significant overlap in the people and institutions (theorists, artists, collectives), cultural objects (literature and film), and ideas/theories they discuss—all of which serve to rhetorically ground their approaches and offer proof of these posthumanist elements. At the same time, however, enough remains different so that each author retains a uniqueness in their attempts to define and discuss the posthuman. As for Bares, the last author considered here, he altogether eschews the cyborg as part of the posthuman and opts for a more heterogeneous—and aimless—approach. Yehya’s El cuerpo transformado (2001) is the first book published chronologically in this corpus, and one whose approach is clear from the beginning. He starts his inquiry by stating: “A pesar de que nuestro entendimiento de la fisiología y la naturaleza humana es incompleto, el hombre de hoy cree que el cuerpo es obsoleto, por lo que trabaja arduamente, la mayoría de las veces de manera inconsciente, para sustituirlo por algo mejor” [Despite the fact that our understanding of our physiology and human nature is incomplete, man of today believes his body to be obsolete, and for which he arduously works, often in an unconscious manner,

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to substitute it for something better] (Yehya 2001 12; emphasis in original). In the first chapter titled “Desechar el envase” [Throwing Away the Container] he lays out the philosophical and religious bases for the “disdain of the body” in Western civilization, linking similar attitudes from Plato, Descartes, and the Catholic religion, before jumping to Hans Moravec’s transmigration of the mind to a computer and Ray Kurtzweil’s singularity (Yehya 2001, 25, 31) as potential, if not inevitable, futures. This approach and attitude rely upon a particular yet widespread understanding of the human body as fragile and in need of techno-biological modifications in order to improve it and overcome its perceived limitations. Taking this perception to its logical extreme, Yehya states: “El cuerpo biológico es demasiado frágil para sobrevivir a las inclemencias del universo … la mejor opción no es modificar el cuerpo existente, sino trasplantar el cerebro a un cuerpo más resistente o, mejor aún, mudar la mente fuera del cerebro, hacerla volátil y etérea” [The biological body is too fragile to survive the harshness of the universe … to modify the existing body is not the best option, but to transplant the brain into a more resistant body, or better still, to move the mind out of the brain, to make it a flying, ethereal thing] (Yehya 2001, 34). This transhuman framing of the fragility of the body and its enhancement or perfectibility only through technology set the stage for Yehya to discuss cyborgs explicitly in the bulk of the chapters that follow: extensive explorations of the origin of the term and concept; its representation in reality and US/Western European fictions; institutions and corporations that contribute to the creation of the cyborg in myriad ways; or “cyborg babies” (or how the whole socio-­ medical assemblage involving reproductive practices in the West now always already assumes considerable posthuman elements, ones which range from meeting the fetus via the technologically mediated ultrasound image, to in-vitro fertilization, semen banks and the possibility of embryo DNA manipulation). All these offer compelling and often technophilic examples in his approach to posthumanism; for the time of its publication in 2001, the book excels in offering to its readers an ample picture of the rapidly changing relationship between the human and technologies, and one that largely relies upon a transhumanist approach of the human and the body. It is worth nothing that Yehya is the only one here who spent long stretches of time in the US (in Brooklyn, New York) when he was researching and writing the book. He is thus the only one of the four Mexican authors who lived both in Mexico City and New York City while writing

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his essay, a factor which, according to him, “[le] dio acceso a muchas lecturas que de otra manera hubieran sido difíciles de conseguir en México” [gave access to many texts that otherwise would have been very difficult to find in Mexico] (email to author). This also likely helps explain his overreliance on texts from the North (discussed in more detail in the next section). Similarly to Yehya, Sepúlveda’s La utopía de los seres humanos exhibits a large degree of underlying transhumanist elements, although her argument ultimately achieves a more nuanced approach by presenting the complexity of the topic of embodiment within posthuman discourse. Along with several chapters with overlapping themes, such as cyborgs in reality and in fiction and cyborg babies, she presents a key underlying ontological trait of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as “decorporalization.” To explain this concept, she addresses the increased miniaturization of objects—mostly cybernetic—and shortening of distances in the subject’s experience, along with the decreasing need for the physical body to be present in everyday social, political, economic, and cultural activities (Sepúlveda 2004, 12). While “decorporalization” does not necessarily signify disembodiment, Sepúlveda presents an array of thinkers that characterize this increasingly common phenomenological experience in the most extreme terms, such as Eric Dexler, Terrance McKenna, and Hans Moravec (Sepúlveda 2004, 84–91), all of whom proffer some form of disembodied subjectivity as inevitable. But just when the reader might think there to be some kind of consensus that understands disembodiment as not only possible but also inevitable, Sepúlveda urges caution. For example, in the chapter toward the book’s end, she considers at length Arthur Kroker’s theoretical approach to the obsolescence of the body due to the increasing presence of prostheses that will eventually replace it altogether (Sepúlveda 2004, 107), but closes the section by bringing Katherine Hayles into the conversation in order to temper these—then fringe tendencies within posthumanism—and acknowledge that no matter how virtual the world may become, the physical world is our only home (Sepúlveda 2004, 99). This move places Sepúlveda in a more critical posthumanist position by resisting the desire to discard the flesh in favor of disembodied immortality. Sepúlveda’s approach also signals her educational background, a PhD in Art History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), in subtle and overt ways, especially in her introduction to the topic. In order to arrive at her discussion of the cyborg, she begins with

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the French artist ORLAN’s multiple cosmetic surgeries as part of her performance art, which sparked a public debate about body modification and questioned Western culture’s beauty standards. She asks: is this artist the prototype of the posthuman body? (Sepúlveda 2004, 11). Following Anne Balsamo, Sepúlveda sees the body as not just a way in which to know and delimit the world—through race, class, gender—but rather that it, underpinned by the proliferation of mass media, has become a medium through which beauty and appearance can be traced: “Los medios masivos de comunicación han rediseñado la corporalidad de tal manera que, a través de la cirugía cosmética, es posible reconstruir a un nuevo ser de acuerdo con los estándares estereotipados impuestos sobre la mujer en Occidente” [Mass media have redesigned corporeality to that extent that, by means of cosmetic surgery, it is possible to rebuild a new human being according to the stereotypical standards imposed on women in the Western world] (Sepúlveda 2004, 22–23). This entryway into the posthuman reveals the influence and importance present in her background in studying the visual arts, as do her multiple references throughout the essay to artists and art critics.4 Like Sepúlveda, Iván Mejía received a PhD in Art History at UNAM, although his book El cuerpo post-humano (2005) directly stems from his Master’s thesis at the same institution.5 Mejía’s approach excels in its directness and simplicity, titling the first two chapters thus: “¿Qué es un cuerpo humano?” and “¿Qué es un cuerpo post-humano?” (“What Is a Human Body?” and “What Is a Posthuman Body?,” respectively). For the first question/chapter, he borrows almost exclusively from Michel Foucault’s understanding of Western man as relative to and produced by the episteme of modernity, a recent invention arising from European culture that came to be articulated and understood through language, the empiricism of the scientific method, and the discourse of biology toward the end of the eighteenth century. In this French philosopher’s famous anti-humanistic declaration in the late 1960s, the recent invention of man 4  Beyond the aforementioned ORLAN, several others she refers to in her essay are Barbera Kruger, Linda Weintraub, Leonard Folgarait, José Miguel G. Cortés, and so on. 5  Unlike Yehya and Sepúlveda, whose intended audience were non-specialist readers on the topic, Mejía’s ideal reader is a Spanish-speaking student of art theory in university-level programs. When the book’s initial 1,000-copy print run finally sold out in 2010, the demand from students in art history departments at UNAM and other universities helped catalyze the creation of a second edition, which was updated and received another 1,000 print run in 2014 (email to the author).

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is possibly nearing its end (Mejía 2005, 23–24). Mejía cites this announcement as humanistic man’s (epistemic) “death” foreseeing several decades later: cloning, genetic design, sex changes, malleable bodies, and so on, all of which advances in technologies helped bring about. For the second question, he cites a handful of then prominent thinkers on this topic as anchoring theorists of his conception of the posthuman: Haraway, Hayles, Francis Fukuyama, Linda Kaufman, and Gilles Lipovetsk (Mejía 2005, 31–35), although his brief descriptions of these theorists do not really adequately delve into the substance of their understanding of the body or the cyborg.6 Rather, they give broad and sweeping generalizations through which to ground his understanding of the body via these discursive appeals to Western theorists. Mejía then traces artistic representations of the body over a time from the 1960s until the 2000s. What starts with the body’s deconstruction within artistic representation gives way to its expression in the cosmetically altered body (as in ORLAN, above), the transexual body, and the sick and dying body. Finally, these reflections yield separate chapters dedicated to representations of cloned bodies, genetically mutated bodies, cyborg bodies and, ultimately, the consideration of the total abandonment of the body. In all, Mejía’s overarching narrative looks toward the US and Europe to understand what epistemologically constitutes the human body. Like Yehya, Mejía generally articulates a transhuman approach of how the body is perceived, valued, and represented through art, one that concludes with the possibility of erasing embodiment altogether. However, what sets Mejía apart from the other three Mexican authors here analyzed is his attention paid to a compatriot—performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. This author focuses on the artist’s series of performances throughout the 1990s and early 2000s involving his ethno-­ cyborgs (i.e. Mexterminator, cyber-vato, etc.) in order to realize a postcolonial critique on race/ethnicity, nationality, and technology. “La 6  For example, “En términos de Donna Haraway, lo post-humano se refiere a la mezcla de lo orgánico con lo inorgánico: la relación entre el cuerpo y todo tipo de fragmentos (órganos artificiales) que constituyen un cuerpo de recambio o dicho de otro, un organismo cibernético: un ciborg” [In Donna Haraway’s terms, the post-human refers to the mix of the organic and inorganic: the relationship between the body and any type of fragments (artificial organs) that constitute a replacement body or, as we may say in a different way, a cybernetic organism: a cyborg] (Mejía 2005, 27) (27). This is the extent of his treatment of Haraway and her cyborg theory. While technically not incorrect, its brevity renders his synthesis incomplete in assessing her thought here.

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alta tecnología” according to Mejía’s reading of Gómez Peña “sigue siendo … una cuestión privilegiada y, por ende, de prejuicios” [High-end technology continues to be … a question of privilege and, on top of that, prejudices] (Mejía 2005, 140); the artist ridiculizes these prejudices through many of the characters he and his Pocha Nostra troupe perform. Toward the end of his treatment of the Mexican performance artist, Mejía recognizes that in the Western exaltation of the perfection of the body and its concomitant theoretical obsolescence, Gómez-Peña “[hace] uso crítico y político de éste” [makes a critical and political use of the body] (Mejía 2005, 140). In all four books, the several pages Mejía gives to Gómez-­ Peña remain the only significant treatment of a Mexican artist that questions the transhuman foundation upon which the larger essay on posthumanism is embedded. This is a topic he hopes to return to study more deeply in a subsequent book, and one to which I will return in the conclusion of this chapter. The final author treated here, Mauricio Bares, offers a distinct enough approach to the topic in his book, Posthumanismo: La vida depués del hombre, in order to place his work as the outlier of the group, distancing himself by not understanding posthumanism as synonymous with cyborg. Similar to Mejía, he sees posthumanism as defined “a partir de la muerte del hombre como concepto, como discurso y construcción” [using as its starting point the death of man as a concept, as a discourse and as a construction] (Bares 2007, 11), thus founding his own discussion on the conclusions of poststructuralist anti-humanists like Foucault (although he does not name or quote the French philosopher throughout the essay). He asks what will fill the void of the deconstructed humanist man and what kind of aesthetic will be erected in his wake. He posits a provocative question regarding whether the ultimate aim of postmodernity is in fact posthumanism, meaning the questioning, deconstructing, and ending of man as a grand narrative (Bares 2007, 11). However, he never explicitly returns to answer this question throughout his essay, leaving the possibility open-ended and to be inferred by the numerous chapters of his study. Bares offers such a heterogeneous approach to posthumanism throughout his analysis that his argument feels undisciplined and, at times, unsatisfactory. Several chapters cover what now feels like familiar territory: artistic representations of the body that indicate a historic change to corporality, a discussion of cosmetic surgery (via the then-iconic Cindy Jackson), and cyborg babies. But the long chapters on raves, pornography, serial killers, and cannibalism, which together occupy over a third of the

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entire text, seem tangentially connected at best. “La aparición … de los asesinos seriales,” he says, are “caracterizaciones del zeitgeist [del posthumanismo] cuya meta … no es el asesinar sino el devorar a sus víctimas, en el mismo sentido en que la postmodernidad no supone sólo la muerte de la modernidad y de la historia, sino del hombre” [The appearance of serial killers are characterizations of the zeitgeist [of posthumanism] whose goal is not to murder but to devour their victims, in the same way in which postmodernity is not only the death of modernity and history, but of man] (Bares 2007, 90). Arguing that the emergence of serial killers (and cannibals) on planet Earth signifies posthumanism lacks any compelling degree of argumentative persuasion. And these, along with other chapters, feel at times forced and haphazardly included. To culminate his discussion, he spends a late chapter considering Paul Bowles’s 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky (1990) in laborious detail, understanding it to be symptomatic of the modern man’s predicament: “el desierto de Bowles … se convierte en un paisaje simbólico, emblemático de un mundo en el que los invididuos están radicalmente aislados uno de otro” [Bowles’ desert becomes a symbolic landscape, emblematic of world in which individuals are radically isolated from each other] (Bares 2007, 136). This sounds like a mixture of postmodern, existential angst rather than a posthuman advance. In Bares’s conceptualization of posthumanism here and elsewhere throughout the essay, he feels lodged within the void left by Foucault’s pronounced death of man and incapable of either incorporating the technological component in transhumanism, the anthropocentric critique of the human in critical posthumanism, or some mixture of the two approaches.7 More than any other author, however, Bares amply employs the plural associative as his essay’s narrating voice. Given that part of the discussion here regards how Mexicans view themselves within the discourse on posthumanism, pausing for a moment to consider this quote becomes instructive. In the introduction, he declares: “Cada vez que sea necesario, confrontaremos la filosofía con la realidad, de modo que rebasemos el carácter meramente retórico, sofístico y académico, con el fin de obtener un recuento más fiel de nuestros actos, de nuestros principios y de nuestros 7  At least some of this may relate to the fact that the book is the result of 15 years’ worth of research from the 1990s through the mid-2000s, and many individual essays were published as separate pieces in a magazine put out by a small, extant publishing house in Mexico City, Nitro Press, and of which he is still the editor at the time of publication of this article (Bares 2007, 157).

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fines” [We will confront philosophy with reality every single time it may be necessary, in order to obtain an more faithful account of our acts, our principles, and our ends] (Bares 2007, 12; my emphasis). While engaging with the plural associative may be a stylistic preference oftentimes associated with works written in Spanish, Bares’s essay relies heavily on it throughout his text, begging the question of who, exactly, is the “we” and the “our” to which he refers. Given that he is Mexican and wrote this from the capital city, does the “we” refer to a locus of enunciation that refers to Mexicans? Or is there a wider scope in mind? To this answer we now turn.

Mexican Exclusion, Devaluation, Unawareness, and Cultural Erasure All four books on the posthuman written by Mexicans in the 2000s have one substantial discursive trait in common: the overwhelming—almost total—lack of inclusion of Mexico, Mexicans, Mexican cultural production, and thinkers from the country. Consider Yehya’s El cuerpo transformado, which includes a total of around 250 references consisting of scientists, intellectuals, theorists, philosophers, institutions, corporations, artists (visual, conceptual, performance), art collectives, books, and films. 75% of these come from the United States, around 10% from nations in Western Europe, and the rest hail from other Westernized countries like Japan, Canada, and Australia.8 In his entire essay of over 200 pages, a single reference to Mexico appears, making the country’s presence as part of posthuman discourse less than half of 1% when considering the sheer volume of references. If we widen the scope to take into the account all four publications, we find a very similar trend: with a combined total that 8  The data that comprises these figures are close approximations and were calculated by documenting every reference within El cuerpo transformado Yehya and taking into account their nationality and/or citizenship. These must be considered approximations because of the limitations in ascertaining precisely some number of people considered in his study. Hans Moravec is a prime example of someone who was born in Austria, studied in Canada (undergraduate and graduate) and the US (doctoral), and became naturalized as a Canadian but is also a US permanent resident. He has lived extensively (from 5 to 20-plus years) in four countries: Austria, Canada, Germany, and the US. A significant enough number of references fit this pattern. The total numbers of references from Yehya’s book are as follows: US—204; UK—25; France—6; Japan—5; Austria—4; Canada—4; Germany—4; Greece—3; Russia—2; Holland—2; Italy—2; Chile—2; the following countries all had single mentions: Australia, Hungary, and Neo-Assyria. Three references were pre-modern.

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reaches almost 600 pages, only 4 occur with any references to Mexicans of any sort, that is, cultural producers, critics, theorists, and so on. That is, Mexico achieves a total presence of 0.67% in this nonfiction corpus. An immediate and partial conclusion to be drawn from this brief quantitative summary becomes clear: in the first decade of the 2000s, Mexico does not figure into the nonfictional discussion of the posthuman, neither as a cultural object considered noteworthy to include in this discourse, nor as Mexican thinkers as contributors helping to shape said discourse. I contend that these absences become symptomatic of the larger epistemological flows regarding knowledge on the subject: from the Global North to the Global South, with the South actively looking northward to reproduce the posthuman as exclusively Northern. This reveals an underlying, Eurocentric way of conceptualizing the posthuman. It is not only the exclusion of Mexico within the nonfictional discourse on posthumanism that is telling, but also the way in which it receives mention when it does. For example, if we examine the single reference in Yeyha’s entire text more closely, this becomes illuminating. In the following citation, as the author discusses how the mediatic representation of the body has never been more idealized and adored as it has been in the information age, he juxtaposes the actress’s female body with the monstrous bodies of past cinema. The acknowledgment comes at the end of a paragraph that enumerates a very long list of “beauties” (fourteen Hollywood divas) before linking them with their cinematic counterpart “beasts”: Parecería que estas bellezas se desplazan en cámara lenta en un espacio donde la gravedad y el tiempo responden a leyes distintas de las de la Tierra, un lugar que curiosamente también habitan algunos monstruos cinematográficos (especialmente los de la serie B), los que por alguna razón inexplicable se mueven lenta y pesadamente, como el engendro de Frankenstein, de James Whale (1931); Los muertos vivientes, de George Romero (1968); Los cuerpos invadidos, de Don Siegel (1956), y Las momias, tanto la clásica de Karl Freund (1933) como la azteca de Rafael Portillo (1957). (Yehya 2001, 166) [It would seem that these beauties move in slow motion in a space in which gravity and time respond to different laws than those on Earth, a place in which, curiously enough, some cinematic monsters (specially those of B-movies) also seem to live, monsters that also move slowly and heavily for someone inexplicable reason, like the monster of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931); George Romero’s The Night of the Living Death (1968); Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers (1956), and The

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Mummies, both the classical version of Karl Freund (1933) and the Aztec one of Rafael Portillo (1957)]

Each of the other films listed are cited explicitly by their title, and in the final clause that closes the sentence, both mummy films fall under the horizon of the single term, with the author citing the Freund film as “classic” while attributing to Portillo’s as merely “the Aztec one.” Additionally, the placement of the reference within the context of the paragraph—at the very end—intimates how much value the Mexican director’s contribution receives within the larger context of this small section of his entire study (nine chapters plus an introduction). As such, the reference carries the discursive weight akin to a footnote. It bears mentioning that Yehya does not mention that the Aztec Mummy referent is comprised of three films that Portillo released the same year as part of a trilogy: La momia azteca, La maldición de la momia azteca, and La momia azteca y el robot humano.9 Altogether, this—the only reference to a Mexican cultural object or creator in a 200-plus page essay on the topic—clearly participates in devaluing any Mexican contribution within the larger epistemological frame his discourse operates.10 Among the scant references in all these works, even more revealing are the instances of cultural dismissal and erasure present in three of the four essays. For Yehya, the book’s longest chapter on reproduction, technology, and some of the implications for eugenics/social Darwinism finds him referencing Aldous Huxley’s  1932 Brave New World (1998)  as the science fictional reference of how genetic manipulation of embryos could occur, while leaving absent any mention of Mexico’s own Eduardo Urzaiz’s 1919 novel Eugenia (2002). This novel predates the more well-­ known British dystopia by 13 years and its omission here feels like a sizable 9  It is worth noting how these films, as well as many others from Mexico’s own classic era of science fiction film, have been taken up as serious objects of study for several scholars: Miguel Garcia, Itala Schmaltz, and David Dalton have presented well-researched papers or articles on films from this era, and Rafael Villegas’s Monstruos de laboratorio: La ciencia imaginada por el cine mexicano (2014) remains the authoritative work on early Mexican sci-fi film, whereas Itala Schmaltz’s edited volume El futuro más acá (2006) provides an excellent overview of these films. 10  Part of this may be explained through the author’s locus of enunciation: even though he still resided in Mexico City during the writing of this book, he also spent several long periods of time in New York City, eventually setting up his permanent residence there where he still lives today.

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oversight that can be read as a cultural blindspot for the Mexican essayist. Two of the other three authors here, Sepúlveda and Bares, follow Yehya’s precedent by largely excluding Mexico, going so far as to participate in what can be read as an act of cultural erasure when the country finally does receive mention. When Sepúlveda finally cites the country in her section on cyborgs and medical surgery, she states “en México se logró extirpar con éxito el tumor del cerebro de un bebé nonato” [in Mexico it was achieve to successfully remove a tumor from a fetus’  brain] (Sepúlveda 2004, 21). And one of Mauricio Bares’s only reference to the country comes within the discussion on plastic surgery as a symptom of the posthuman. He writes: “En las palabras de un cirujano plástico mexicano ‘afortunadamente, en la actualidad todo tiene solución.’ Los pacientes ‘se sienten como una versión mejorada de sí mismos. Es una labor de confección, completada por modistos y peinadores’” [In the words of a Mexican plastic surgeon, ‘luckily, today everything can be solved.’ Patients ‘feel like an improved version of themselves. It is a work of concocting, completed by fashion stylists and hairdressers’] (Bares 2007, 31). Considering this chapter as a whole, replete with quotes and references to Jean Baudrillard, Michael Jackson, Plato, Milan Kundera, Barbie, Kevin Warwick, and so on, when one arrives upon this not insignificant quote by a Mexican plastic surgeon, the words signal a voice with no name. This lack of naming the doctor not only downplays the presence of Mexico within the larger discussion of posthumanism in this essay, but, as in Sepúlveda’s reference, performs a cultural erasure by omitting proper names. Considering Mexican figures appears unthinkable for these authors. How are we to understand these phenomena of exclusion, cultural dismissal, unawareness, and erasure that spans across all four essays? One way is through “hegemonic essentialism,” a concept created by Francesca Ferranda, which she defines as “the widespread habit of only referring to thinkers, artist or theorists who belong to the cultural hegemony” (Ferranda 2012, 13). Within the global network that posthumanist discourse operates, the dominance of posthuman theory comes almost exclusively from the North. To exclude Mexico in conceptualizing the posthuman is to participate in a kind of hegemonic essentialism that assumes a priori that the North harbors exclusive province to the idea and to the praxis of it. However, given that Mexico is not a global center of technological or scientific research and production, and that, compared with countries from the North, it invests a small fraction of money into creating the institutions and systems that produce knowledge, it becomes

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difficult to find fault in any of these authors for looking Northwards to find posthuman theories. Perhaps the dearth of posthuman theory produced within Mexico precludes the possibility that these Mexican authors look to their surrounding reality as a space where posthuman practices are abundantly enacted. Another more generous way to read these publications considers that these authors are not overlooking or dismissing Mexico in their corpuses, but rather are choosing to look northward and see the posthuman as an exclusive Euro-American idea. To understand this process in this way presupposes that these authors possess a strong desire for the posthuman to be non-Mexican. This interpretation aligns very well with Mexican philosopher Bolívar Echeverría’s position regarding the Americanization of modernity: “La americanización de la modernidad durante el siglo XX es un fenómeno general: no hay un solo rasgo de la vida civilizada de ese siglo que no presente de una manera u otra una sobredeterminación en la que el ‘el americanismo’ o la ‘identidad americana’ no haya puesto su marca” [The Americanization of modernity during the twentieth century is a general phenomenon: there is not a single aspect of civilized life in this century that does not show, in one way or another, an overdetermination in which ‘Americanism’ or ‘American identity’ has not left its mark] (Echeverría et  al. 2008, 12). This desire, according to him, stems from wanting to be “usuarios adecuados de los bienes de tecnología moderna” [the appropriate users of the commodities of modern technology] (Echeverría et  al. 2008, 12). Not only does this tendency apply to the spheres of culture, science, economy, psychoanalysis, feminism, art, literature, and cinema, as his edited volume highlights, but also to the posthuman in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Regardless of the motivation behind these authors—that they unconsciously turn away from the Mexican posthuman in their surroundings, they consciously embrace the Euro-American posthuman out of a yearning to be Americanized users of modern technology, or some mixture of the two—their essays, taken as a collective corpus on posthumanism, exhibit a kind of “neo-coloniality of knowledge” on virtually every page. This term borrows from Aníbal Quijano’s concept of the coloniality of knowledge as a Eurocentric system of “modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification” (Quijano 2007, 169). As such, the largely transhumanist texts analyzed here privilege and reproduce a certain kind of conception of the human as understood by Europe and North America,

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and in the process, they subordinate other epistemologies present in Mexico. Going forward, these books leave a task for future scholars of Mexico on this topic: to discover and interrogate expression of actual posthumans within the country. Whether this involves locating and interrogating subjects constituted within a transhumanist or critical posthumanist frameworks is less important than the fact that actual posthumans in Mexico do exist; the study of them will bring about a much fuller picture of this phenomenon within the country and for Posthuman Studies in the region more broadly. Considering the group of authors under examination here, Mejía offers a possible direction his future research may take when he states that developing countries like Mexico and other countries in Latin America son verdaderos vertederos de la basura tecnológica que generan los países tecnológicamente privilegiados. En estos países que toman como basureros tecnológicos y en los territorios en guerra, la gente, particularmente los más jóvenes, reutilizan esa basura tecnológica para reconstruir sus cuerpos, con prótesis para algún plazo o pierna perdidas por minas, bombardeos, etc. Es ahí donde ahora encontraría el verdadero problema porque la relación de cuerpo con la tecnología está mediada por la economía y la política. (email message to author). [are true landfills of technological junk produced by technologically privileged countries. In these countries that they take for technological garbage dumps and in those territories in a state of war, people, particularly the youngest ones, re-use that technological junk to reconstitute their bodies, with prostheses to replace an arm or a leg lost due to mines, air raids, etc. This is where I’d locate the real problem, because the relationship of the body with technology is mediated by economics and politics]

This approach, while seemingly still oriented within transhumanism by limiting its purview to technology and the body, hints at the possibility of pushing Posthuman Studies in Mexico into new directions where peripheral bodies and technologies are enmeshed in material ways that are shaped by the geopolitical and economic milieu in which they emerge. This approach has the potential to bridge both methods of understanding of the posthuman, and possibly begin mapping the nonfictional Mexican posthuman in the process.

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Works Cited Bares, Mauricio. 2007. Posthumano: la vida después del hombre. Oaxaca de Juárez, México: Almadía. Bowles, Paul. 1990. The Sheltering Sky. New York: Vintage. Braidotti, Rosi. 2017. Posthuman Critical Theory. Journal of Posthuman Studies 1 (1): 9–25. Brown, J. Andrew. 2010. Cyborgs in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dalton, David S. 2018. Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Postrevolutionary Mexico. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Echeverría, Bolívar, et  al. 2008. La americanización de la modernidad. Mexico D.F: Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte. Ferranda, Francesca. 2012. Towards a Posthumanist Methodology. Frame: Journal of Literary Studies. Narrating Posthumanism 25 (1): 9–18. ———. 2018. Transhumanism/Critical Posthumanism. In Posthuman Glossary, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, 438–439. London: Bloomsbury. García, Hernán Manuel. 2014. Carne eres y en máquina te convertirás: El cuerpo post-humano en La primera calle de la soledad de Gerardo Porcayo. Polifonía: Revista Académica de Estudios Hispánicos 4 (1): 4–24. Ginway, Elizabeth. 2013. The Politics of Cyborgs in Mexico and Latin America. Semina: Ciências Sociais e Humanas 34 (2): 161–172. Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­ Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–188. London: Free Association. Hayles, N.  Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Herbrechter, Stefan. 2013. Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. London: Bloomsbury. King, Edward, and Joanna Page. 2017. Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America. London: UCL Press. Mejía, Iván. 2005. El cuerpo post-humano en el arte y la cultura contemporánea. México D.F: Universidad Nacional Autónomo de México. Nayar, Pramod K. 2014. Posthumanism. London: Polity. Porcayo, Gerardo. 1993. La primera calle de la soledad. Chimalistac, D.F: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. Quijano, Aníbal. 2007. Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 168–178. Sepúlveda, Luz María. 2004. La utopía de los seres posthumanos. México, D.F: CONACULTA. Urzaiz, Eduardo. 2002. Eugenia: Esbozo novelesco de costumbres futuras. Mérida: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán.

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Villegas, Rafael. 2014. Monstruos de laboratorio: La ciencia imaginada por el cine mexicano. Toluca: Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Yehya, Naief. 2001. El cuerpo transformado: cyborgs y nuestra descendencia tecnológica en la realidad y en la ciencia ficción. México: Paidós.

PART II

Slow Violence and Posthuman Environments

CHAPTER 5

Fukú, Postapocalyptic Haunting, and Science-Fictional Embodiment in Junot Díaz’s “Monstro” Maia Gil’Adí

The same year that Junot Díaz published the short story collection, This is How You Lose Her (2012), returning readers to his well-known narrator, Yunior, he also published the story “Monstro” in the science-fiction issue of The New Yorker.1 Díaz is a predominant (and contentious) figure within Latinx and American letters. A public intellectual who actively participates in the discourse surrounding the interpretation and reception of his own work, Díaz has been an important figure in promoting the work of writers of color and shining a light on Latinx literature, specifically. Born in the Dominican Republic, Díaz earned an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University and currently teaches at MIT. His work has been 1  Although the narrator of “Monstro” is nameless and his biography diverges from Yunior’s, they share similar, if not identical voices. As Elena Machado Saez has argued, Yunior is an inconsistent narrator whose story, timeline, and biography, at times, contradicts itself (2011, 527).

M. Gil’Adí (*) Boston University, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6_5

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published to great critical acclaim, securing various awards such as the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and he is the recipient of prestigious awards and fellowships such as the 2002 PEN/Malamud Award, National Endowment for the Arts, and the McArthur “Genius” Fellowship. In short, his work has been recognized and promoted by the leading institutions of the arts and publishing world, placing him at the apex of Latinx and American literary canonicity. Díaz’s stronghold in Latinx letters was temporarily unsettled after the publication of his nonfiction essay, “The Silence” in The New  Yorker (2018). Detailing his experience of childhood sexual abuse and the repercussions of this trauma on his life and fiction, “The Silence” was met with critical acclaim and was quickly followed by a number of sexual misconduct allegations against him.2 2  It is crucial to reexamine Díaz’s work in light of “The Silence.” Discussions surrounding Díaz and the #MeToo movement, centered, in part, on the multifaceted ways people of color are inextricably involved in systems of oppression and violence that can make victims into aggressors. I do not focus on the gendered politics of “Monstro” in this chapter, but you can find a more thorough discussion of these issues in my article, “‘I Think About You, X––’: Re-Reading Junot Díaz after ‘the Silence’” (Gil’Adí 2020). “Monstro” should be read in light not only of these recent discussions about Díaz in relation to #MeToo and his stronghold in Latinx literature, but the representation of women in the short story itself. Much like Díaz’s other works, “Monstro” considers females as “sucias” (dirty/”sluts”) and frames the narrative’s exploration of race, postcoloniality, and monstrosity around what the narrator calls “chasing a girl” (Díaz 2012 107). We can see how “Monstro” positions women on par with the proto-zombie and as the source of apocalyptic violence and Caribbean demise. For example, the narrative places the emergence of the plague and the narrator’s envelopment in danger alongside a woman’s body, and women’s bodies as the reason for being in danger. In fact, Misty’s body is described as world-ending: “Motherfuckers used to say culo would be the end of us. Well, for me it really was” (Díaz 2012, 107). While this type of language acts figuratively, it should also be examined for its portrayal of women as apocalyptic instigators. Further in the narrative, the narrator states, “That girl. With one fucking glance she upended my everything” (Díaz 2012, 110), once again placing the female body as the cause and instigator of the end-of-worlds. This is not unusual in Díaz’s fiction, where women inhabit the plot as destroyer-of-worlds and where their bodies are presented as cataclysmic for the men they encounter. In Oscar Wao, for example, Yunior describes Ybon’s hair as “apocalyptic” (Díaz 2007, 279), a feature that does indeed institute the annihilation of the novel’s “titular” character and the novel itself. Similarly, Belicia’s body is analogized to apocalyptic violence and her excessive rage is a signifier for the destruction of nuclear weapons and the threat of atomic annihilation: “Her rage filled the house […] It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow” (Díaz 2007, 60). In this way, the text equates Belicia’s rage with the geopolitical danger experienced in this era and, moreover, stages Belicia’s rage as both overwhelming and excessive, and a byproduct of fukú, “generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World” (Díaz 2007, 1).

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Díaz’s work, particularly Oscar Wao, has been discussed as a text that converges the language of science fiction and the speculative with nerd culture and “high art” literature. In “Monstro” (2012), as in his previous work, Díaz’s narratives show an investment in the otherworldly, excessive, and speculative as they intersect with histories of violence in the Antilles.3 In “Monstro” Díaz turns to the overtly speculative and extends this investigation to questions of the posthuman, presenting us with a mysterious infection that begins in Haiti and causes a zombie apocalypse. The story centers on a nameless narrator who returns to the Dominican Republic during summer break from Brown University to visit his mother, who is suffering from cancer, and tells of his activities alongside a wealthy acquaintance from Brown, Alex, as the infection slowly takes over in Haiti. Concurrently, the story also focuses on the narrator’s attraction to and attempt to seduce one of Alex’s friends, Misty. Through strange twists and turns, “Monstro” describes how the “viktims” of the infection transform from docile-infected bodies to what the story terms “Class 2” monsters, a new formulation of the popular zombie. The narrator details how the infected are quarantined and studied—yet never deciphered—finally revealing the danger they present, which makes the “Great Powers” (the story’s reimagination of Western governments) bomb the island. This, however, does not stop the zombie apocalypse. The disease, known in the Dominican Republic as “La Negrura,” for its capacity to re-blacken already black skin, carries apocalyptic consequences for the narrative, as the infected are quickly turned into proto-zombies at first and are fully “zombified” by the end of the narrative. In this chapter, I explore the figure of the infected in “Monstro” to argue that it expands Díaz’s well-known concept of fukú americanus, which opens Oscar Wao: “generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World” (Díaz 2007, 1). Scholars have discussed fukú as 3  This chapter does not focus on elements in “Monstro” such as environmental catastrophe and the fraught and racist relationship between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, although I acknowledge their significance. Others have taken up these issues, such as Sarah Quesada (2016) and Maria Cristina Fumagalli (2015). In this chapter, I focus instead on the use of speculative fiction and the zombie representation of colonial violence, which I define as apocalyptic in nature. In writing about “Monstro,” the editor of this collection, Emily Maguire, also addresses the role of the zombie as a semi-sentient contemporary creation that critiques “a constellation of exclusionary elements fundamental to their time and place” (Maguire 2018, 12). Her argument is a jumping-off point for my thinking of the zombie in the narrative as a revenge fantasy that relishes in the performance of violence for its own sake.

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a metaphorical tool and metafictional device for the education of the novel’s readers.4 While I find these readings to be productive sites of discussion surrounding Oscar Wao’s use of fukú and its effects on the literary text and its characters, my reading of fukú instead asks: how is our reading affected through taking fukú at face-value, by which I mean, how does reading fukú not as a symbolic device but as a textual creation with real effects within the plot alter the story and its characters? How does the novel become affected by redefining it as a work of science and speculative fiction (sf/f) and its characters as cursed products of apocalyptic, science-­ fictional violence? My reading of fukú is contingent on the narrative practices in Díaz’s oeuvre and his world-making project. This world-building constructs the Caribbean as a postapocalyptic space created through anathema that reproduces colonial violence on the body of the Afro-Caribbean subject. As a concept, fukú is an all-encompassing force that is both the Curse and a tool used by those byproducts of fukú itself, such as Rafael Trujillo and Christopher Columbus. In “Monstro,” Díaz continues the depiction of the Caribbean as a postapocalyptic space and Afro-Latinxs as science-­ fictional embodiments. “Monstro” presents the Caribbean (and the Americas) as instantiated into modernity by this curse of the New World (fukú), which remains into the present as a haunting presence. I examine how fukú reverberates through the short story’s plot, narrating the Caribbean as a space created through a cataclysmic rift that emits dead bodies. The infected exhibit affective ties to the land and each other that raise larger questions about memory and the forces that emanate from history through their bodies. Through the infected, Díaz exhumes the histories of colonialism, slavery, embodied labor, and racial expendability: histories that establish an inescapable pattern of violence within the 4  This work importantly considers the effects of fukú’s political implications—how it engenders figures like Rafael Trujillo, for example—within the text, yet it also myopically champions the novel’s message, thus ignoring fukú’s literary effects within the novel. For example, José David Saldívar states that “Yunior’s and Oscar’s lives have experienced their tragic ‘destinies’ within the matrix of fukú and the coloniality of power” (Saldívar 2011a, 126), and Jennifer Harford Vargas terms fukú a “symbolic chronotrope,” a “foundational fiction,” and “local folk hermeneutic for reading relations of domination in the Americas more generally and in the novel specifically” (2016, 203). Fukú has been the focus of a great deal of scholarship. This is a non-comprehensive list, as I am sure the list will continue to grow: see Di Iorio (2016), Machado Saez (2011), Monica Hanna (2010), Garland Mahler (2010), Ramón Saldívar (2012).

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Caribbean. The mass groupings and screams of the infected become a form of racial protest and posthuman revenge fantasy against the histories that created them as dead subjects.5 Finally, I examine how the “zombie” horde is an effect of the short story itself, in which the particular zombification Díaz narrates points readers to the origins of the zombie in Haiti and the anxiety of racial infection that can turn all island dwellers (and the rest of the Americas) “Black” through the disease.

Fukú Americanus: Writing the Caribbean Through Anathema The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao begins with an exposition on fukú, its meaning, and impact on the Americas, which organizes the plot around the “Curse and Doom of the New World”: They say it came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú—generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. (Díaz 2007, 1)

Before starting the narration about Oscar’s life, Yunior structures the novel around a pattern of violence that continually returns readers to the creation of the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas through this curse. Antonio Benítez Rojo’s influential The Repeating Island (1996) similarly evokes a violently birthed Caribbean.6 This “geographical accident” is the site of repeating histories that continually wash up the past onto the shores of the present (Benítez Rojo 1996, 2). The Caribbean he describes is apocalyptic, a “big bang” that “throughout modern history threw out billions and billions of cultural fragments in all directions” (Benítez Rojo 2000, 54). A site of endless creative production, the Caribbean is home to the “New World apocalyptic site,” the plantation, from which the “new”

5  Orland Patterson’s scholarship on “social death” and Antonio Viego’s notion of the “dead subject” to those who are racialized in the Americas is foundational for my theorization of the zombie in Díaz’s work. See Patterson (1982) and Viego (2007). 6  For an examination of Benítez-Rojo’s problematic gendered language, see Tinsley (2009).

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in the New World emerges.7 Yunior creates a new Caribbean mythology that defines the Columbian encounter as foundational and traumatic, 1492 as an apocalyptic year that marks the colonial and postcolonial eras as postapocalyptic, and Afro-Caribbean people as otherworldly beings. Created through anathema, the novel writes Caribbean and Afro-Latinxs as reproductions and reproducers of the apocalypse, and history as a haunting presence that forms the body and remains as a physical marker. Díaz’s eschatology formulates apocalypse as an ouroboric state of simultaneous birth and death, beginning and end, a generative destruction. The apocalyptic origin of the Antilles correlates the creation of the modern/colonial divide with the protagonist family’s Afro-Caribbean diasporic condition: They say it came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú—generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fukú of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices. In Santo Domingo, the Land He Loved Best (what Oscar, at the end, would call the Ground Zero of the New World), the Admiral’s very name has become synonymous with both kinds of fukú, little and large; to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours. (Díaz 2007, 1)

Oscar Wao’s opening paragraph synchronously binds the histories of the transatlantic slave trade, indigeneity and indigenous genocide, and the European presence in the Americas. Their merger takes place through the violent seizure and transportation of Africans to the Antilles and the genocide of indigenous populations that instigate the end of the world and the creation of the postapocalyptic modern/colonial moment. Fukú thus 7  Although Benítez-Rojo argues the Caribbean is “anti-apocalyptic” (1996, 10), yet Martin Munro (2015) illustrates how the region’s history tells a different story. Munro argues that Caribbean history was founded on “the apocalyptic meeting of European and Amerindians” (2015, 1) and that subsequent history has been shaped by no less apocalyptic events with no apparent end. The small axe (2011) project, “The Visual Life of Catastrophic History,” similarly illustrates how the Caribbean was inaugurated by catastrophe and continues in a perpetual state of emergency.

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encompasses syncretic religiosity and racial miscegenation and signifies a geosocially specific Antillean condition of postapocalyptic embodiment and belief. The novel thus upholds the construction of race as a curse with tangible and material consequences, particularly through physical violence in the colonial period, but also through the forms of embodiment suffered by the novel’s characters in the postcolonial era.8 As the site of the original Columbian encounter,9 the Caribbean is the nexus of the “coloniality of power,” defined by Anibal Quijano as that “specific basic element of the new patterns of world power that was based on the idea of ‘race’ and the ‘racial’ social classification of world population [sic]” whose “most significant implication is the emergence of a Eurocentric capitalist/modern world power that is still with us” (Quijano 2000, 218). Race and racism, Quijano notes, “have been the most visible expression of the coloniality of power during the last 500 years” (Quijano 2000, 218). The coloniality of power organized a series of worldviews and institutions according to Eurocentric epistemologies that transformed “differences to values” (Mignolo 2012, 13). Quijano’s “patrón de poder,” with race and racism at its center, has engendered Eurocentrist mythology, which Yunior’s world-building project rewrites, and which I designate as a new Caribbean mythology.10 Using myth as an analytical framework shows how ideologies are ossified into enduring truths. The distortion and erasure of historical specificity of subaltern knowledges of diverse populations and their experience of 8  The text also grounds itself in the tradition of the post-9/11 novel, presenting its scope of analysis as one that underscores fukú’s remaining presence by equating the Columbian encounter and colonialism with contemporary terrorism, and the Caribbean as analogous to the deep crevasses that remain in the wake of World Trade Center’s destruction. José David Saldívar sees Oscar’s murder in 1995 as part of the novel’s “nuclear sublime Cold War fantasies” and not within a post-9/11 imaginary (Saldívar 2011b, 209). While I agree that the novel is clearly invested in the sociopolitical impact of Cold War era global politics, I also think it would be facetious to dismiss Oscar Wao’s clear participation and contribution to the post-9/11 novel by writers of color published in the early and mid-2000s. 9  José Buscaglia-Salgado renames this “encounter” as the “Columbian rape” (Buscaglia-­ Salgado 2003, xviii). Thinking about Columbus’s arrival in Hispaniola as a rape is also crucial for thinking about Díaz’s work generally, and recent discussions about his position within American letters in light of the 2018 #MeToo allegations against him. 10  I am indebted to the works of Walter Mignolo (2012) and José Buscaglia-Salgado (2003) who have explored the “Atlantic imaginary” and “European Ideal,” respectively. They are by no means the only ones who have discussed this issue, and my thinking is also indebted to Edward Said, José Rabasa, Enrique Dussel, Gillman, and Kristen Silva Gruesz.

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colonial domination and its aftermath are the foundation of the modern/ colonial divide. The coloniality of power is further constituted through the cleaving of pre-Columbian Americas by Europe into a depoliticized discourse of progress. The “discovery” of the Americas becomes a vessel through which to naturalize and opaque the many and diverging violent histories that include, but are not limited to, genocide, environmental exploitation, European and American expansionism and imperialism, racism and racial violence, and the upholding of Eurocentrist knowledges.11 Thus, the historically specific classification of populations through the idea of race reinforces a racist Eurocentrist lens of history and knowledge and deforms them into seemingly eternal and natural formations. Central to this world system is Columbus, a figure who in the nineteenth century was co-opted by an emerging Anglo-American empire by severing the Columbian myth from Europe and used to forge a rhetoric centered on the US as a “civilizing” force.12 The Columbian encounter and the Eurocentrist capitalist/modern world power it established are foundational to the establishment of discourses of “discovery” and the classification of populations along racial lines into a depoliticized and natural event safely held within the past.13 If myth-making is about the expression of seemingly timeless, communal beliefs that explain relationships as fixed, and absolutizing collective identities, Yunior’s new Caribbean mythology inscribes cataclysm as the provenance of Dominican identity on the island and in diaspora. Myths derive their expression of “paradigmatic truths” that “evoke the sentiments out of which society is actively construed” (Wald 2008, 10). Myths then establish, verify, and entrench stories that express and explain beliefs in a common origin and future. As Éduoard Glissant (1996) establishes in Caribbean Discourse (originally published in 1989), myth prefigures history but also helps to produce history, as myth “disguises while conferring meaning, obscures and brings to light, mystifies as well as clarifies and 11  I do not mean for list to be exhaustive, as that would reaffirm the erasure or brushing over of specificity through mythic speech. My brief list is, however, intended to highlight a few of the violences performed in the Columbian Encounter and in its aftermath, and moreover, is mentioned here as a way to elicit other instances in the reader’s mind. 12  See Buscaglia-Salgado (2003) and DeGuzmán (2005). Dixa Ramírez (2018) explores the intersection of European colonialism, US empire, and Dominican patriarchal nationalism, arguing that working-class and diasporic Dominican men resist imperialist and nationalist violence seen in the celebration of figures like Columbus. 13  See Horsman (1981) and Gómez (2007).

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intensifies which emerges, fixed in time and space between men and their world” (Glissant 1996, 71). As such, myths “prepare the way for History” (Glissant 1996, 83), and in the case of Eurocentrist myth-making in the Americas, razes Caribbean history into “nonhistory.” It is the role of Caribbean writers, Glissant asserts, to reconstitute “its tormented chronology” (Glissant 1996, 65). Yunior’s reconstitution makes it impossible to dissociate the Caribbean from the message of fukú—it is the meaning of the Caribbean: fukú is the sign for the “discovery” of the Americas by Europe and the colonial and postcolonial bodies that “discovery” created. His new Caribbean mythology defines the Caribbean, and the rest of the Americas, through fukú, foregrounding the violence of encounter, colonialism, and its aftermath in all its valences. The use of fukú unearths how the coloniality of power suppresses and erases non-Western forms of knowledge. However, the new Caribbean mythology is not part of a decolonial project: by defining the Antilles and Antilleans as existing within an always already dead space and postapocalyptic environment, substantiating its enduring presence from 1492 to the present, Yunior places cataclysmic violence as foundational to the hemisphere while reproducing this violence in his texts. Identifying the Caribbean as the site of the Columbian encounter offers an important form of departure for rethinking Latinx identity and Latinx speculative fiction. It is the site of (gendered) violence that generates a difficult and confused space of racial, lingual, cultural, and religious convergence that has a long history and genealogy of study in the work of scholars such as Paul Gilroy (1993), Natasha Tinsley (2009), and Christina Sharpe (2016). The Caribbean, then, is a new type of Latinx borderland that, much like Gloria Anzaldúa’s formulation, is also an “herida abierta” that continually hemorrhages open and can be understood as an excessive space of speculation (Anzaldúa 2012, 22). As Catherine S. Ramírez has theorized, sf/f can be defined through its aesthetics of disrecognition and estrangement, making the histories of “many communities of color in the United States, and of the colonized and diasporic peoples of the (aptly called) ‘New World,’” akin to sci-fi plots (Ramírez 2002, 396). Traditional readings of sf/f, especially by writers of color, argue that reimaginations of conquest, colonialism, and racial discrimination promote forms of political remedy and cultural transformation. Ramón Saldívar, for example, examines what he considers a new trend by authors of color who, compelled by the “relationship between race and social justice, race and identity, and indeed, race and history” in the twenty-first

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century, “invent a new ‘imaginary’ about the nature of a just society” (Saldívar 2012, 1).14 However, Díaz’s world-making project refuses to place specific cultural moments as teleological and exceeds any affirmation of “the just.” His work presents the Caribbean as instantiated through a cataclysmic rift that persists into the present and unearths the violent and speculative nature of being an Afro-Caribbean subject. In effect, speculative aesthetics and definitions of Latinx help to illuminate each other. The “x” in Latinx is itself an opening into the speculative. As the unsolved variable, “x” inscribes the term “Latin” with paradoxically conflicting airs of mystery and possibility, while also highlighting its confusion and anxiety. In replacing “a/o,” “o/a,” and “@” with the “x” Latinx subjects and scholars of Latinx aesthetics are able to highlight the exciting instability and excessiveness of being Latinx itself. The “x” challenges our previously sustained beliefs,15 offering a disruption saturated with surplus speculation. Latinx, then, “describes a condition of being more than, unknown, extreme, alien, dangerous” (Gil’Adí 2019). As such, the creation of the Caribbean as a postapocalyptic space emulates the state of being Latinx and vice versa: the “x” is the space of unsayable trauma that is marked on the body. Latinx speculative fiction provides a reading praxis that enables a destabilizing reformulation for being in the world that mirrors the disruptive and otherworldly conception of spaces of trauma, such as the Caribbean. This reformulation actively challenges conventional understandings of progress and regeneration. Oscar Wao thus begins through an undesignated section, and an even more enigmatic opening, “They said” (Díaz 2007, 1), that structures the novel around a pattern that continually returns readers to the creation of the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas through this curse. The novel 14  Others have made similar arguments about the uses of the speculative, such as Fredric Jameson (2005) and José Esteban Muñoz (2009). In Cruising Utopia, for example, Muñoz usefully identifies within aesthetic productions a “surplus” that allows us to see and grasp the “not-yet-conscious” (2009, 3), the utopian. I follow in Muñoz’s vein of identifying a potentiality, an element that is not existent in the present moment but can be felt through its excess: in this case the monstrous and violent. Much like Muñoz, Fredric Jameson describes utopian imaginaries as illuminating “historical conditions of possibility” and suggests that in their impossible nature utopias, as desire and fantasy for the future, illuminate our present condition while ambitiously presenting a “not-yet-being of the future with a textural existence in the present” (2005, xv–xvi). More recently, works such as Samantha Schalk (2018) make a similar argument about how SF disrupts social hierarchies that enable a different orientation to our current conditions. 15  See Milian (2017).

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centralizes the Columbian encounter as foundational and traumatic for the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas, staging 1492 as an apocalyptic year that marks the colonial and postcolonial periods as postapocalyptic eras, and Afro-Caribbean people as science-fictional beings. Formed through anathema, the Caribbean and Afro-Latinxs are reproductions and reproducers of the apocalypse, and history is transformed into a haunting presence that produces the body and remains as a physical marker. The terrorist act that established the colonial/modern divide in the Antilles is defined as reverberating in the rest of the Americas and creating a repeating pattern of conquest throughout the continent. Through his narration, Yunior establishes a network between Santo Domingo and Paterson, New Jersey, of violence throughout the centuries. The novel thus defines fukú as a constant spectral presence that creates bodies—those who live in the Caribbean and its diasporic communities—that are the result of what Yunior and Oscar term sci-fi living conditions. In fact, Yunior designates the novel a “Fukú story” and wonders if Oscar would have accepted this terminology for a narration of his life. However, in designating the novel as a retelling of a curse, Yunior presages fukú’s effects on the life of the novel’s characters and upholds the Caribbean as a postapocalyptic and cursed space: “He was a hardcore sci-fi and fantasy man, believed that that was the kind of story we were all living in. He’d ask: What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasy that the Antilles?” (Díaz 2007, 6). To these questions, Yunior offers his own revision: “But now that I know how it all turns out, I have to ask, in turn: What more fukú?” (Díaz 2007, 6). His revision of Oscar’s questions seams Oscar’s love for science and speculative fiction (s/sf) with the curse, making the novel and the lives of its characters inextricable from fukú’s history and impact. Drawing these connections defines the Americas, race, colonial, postcolonial, and dictatorial violence, and diaspora as byproducts of the apocalypse and elements of the genre.

La Negrura: Zombies, Black Flesh This reading of fukú is contingent on the narrative practices in Díaz’s oeuvre and his world-making project.16 “Monstro” extends this staging of the Caribbean as a science-fictional apocalyptic landscape that inscribes its 16  Díaz has tackled these issues in various generic forms, such as his essay, “Apocalypse: What Disaster Reveals” (2011).

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v­ iolence onto the body of the Afro-Caribbean subject. The story illustrates—via mysterious plot twists, fragmentations, jumps in time, and its unresolved ending—how the original zombie was created in Haiti and the anxiety of racial infection it created. The story, moreover, foregrounds “Blackness” as a literary device that is only representable through s/sf and exemplifies its creation in the colonial/modern world system. “Monstro” stages fukú-­like violence through horror and the zombie, whose origin and history—and the history of its appropriation in popular culture—are long and complicated. The folkloric zombie of Haitian origin was neither an “infected” nor a flesh-eating monster.17 One of the earliest predecessors of the zombie, the “nzambi”—an invisible being with origins in the Bantu and Bankongo tribes of the lower Congo River area—became in Saint-Domingue a spirit that could possess a human body (Boon 2011, 53). In Haiti, this ability of the revenant disappeared, and the zombie came to signify a person who had lost consciousness and volition.18 As Sarah Julie Lauro (2015) delineates in The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death, the zombie is connected to histories of colonization and slavery, with roots in seventeenth-century African folk beliefs and is  associated with Vaudoun practices in the nineteenth century. Yet its centuries-long history makes it impossible to contain within one cultural framework. In Haiti, from where all forms that carry its name emanate, the zombie was associated with a reanimated corpse forced into slave labor (Kee 2011, 9; Lauro 17  The origin of the zombie is tied to the cannibal, as conceived by Europeans in the sixteenth century. The term “cannibal” has its origins in the 1500s and derives from Caníbales, the Spanish name for the Caribs of the West Indies (this further derives from “caribal,” the Spanish word for “a savage”). Both Christopher Columbus (1987) in the accounts of his four voyages and Bartolomé de las Casas (1986) in Historia de Las Indias mention the presence of native peoples that eat human flesh. In the eighteenth century, works such as Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (1774) and Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793) spoke of cannibals as being African in origin. As such, the notion of savagery, monstrosity, and the bestial are intimately tied to the Caribbean. 18  See M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint- Domingue (1789). In this text, Moreau de Saint-Méry describes the term as a “Creole word which means spirit, revenant.” As Gary D. Rhodes (2001) notes, however, Moreau de Saint-Méry’s text was not widely read, and had little influence, if any, in the history of English-speaking texts on the subject of zombies or voodoo. Rhodes notes that some volumes published in the early nineteenth century in France and Port-au-Prince discussed the historical figure of Jean Zombi: a slave turned rebel who was instrumental during Haiti’s fight for independence.

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2015, 15).19 The zombie is popularly believed to be unknown in the US until 1929, when it formally enters American culture through William Seabrook’s travelogue, The Magic Island, where he describes the zombie as “a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life” (2016, 93). Memoirs by Marines stationed in Haiti during the American occupation (1915–1934) are also influential in the American context, informing the zombie’s symbolic construction as allegorizing both the colonized enslaved and slave rebellion (occupation and independence) (Lauro 2015). Narratives about zombies within the United States arise primarily through the fear of Haitian independence, and by the late 1930s stories about the zombie—and the fear it engendered—spread to include other foreign “brown” nations such as Cambodia, Cuba, and other Caribbean islands. In the Americas and Europe, stories of vodou circulated from the time of the Haitian Revolution and were primarily linked to cannibalism within the US popular press in order to underscore Haitian primitivism and savagery.20 Through these depictions, Haiti came to represent a form of self-destruction that could spill over into the rest of the Americas, and the belief that the island had to be saved—and through its salvation, contained—was prominent during the nineteenth century. During the American occupation and thereafter, the zombie comes to signify the fantasy that marks Haiti as a nation of eternally enslaved subjects (Kee 2011,

19  Zora Neale Hurston also details this type of zombie—and the fear it created—in her anthropological text, Tell My Horse (originally published in 1938): “Think of the fiendishness of the thing. It is not good for a person who has lived all his life surrounded by a degree of fastidious culture, loved to his last breath by family and friends, to contemplate the probability of his resurrected body being dragged from the vault—the best that love and means could provide, and set to toiling ceaselessly in the banana fields, working like a beast, unclothed like a beast, and like a brute crouching in some foul den in the few hours allowed for rest and food” (Hurston 2009 181). 20  See Spencer St. John’s Hayti, or the Black Republic. In this text, St. John describes cannibalism, human sacrifice, and grave robbing as a part of voodoo, and as a widely read text during the nineteenth century, influenced many writers and readers. Moreover, St. John claims that cannibalism did not occur under French colonial rule, and inherent in this presentation is the notion that cannibalism appears in voodoo because of Haitian independence. Through this lens, cannibalism is used to critique the Haitian government, and voodoo is seen as a threat not only to civilization, but to Haiti’s future (Kee 13).

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14)21 that point not only to the nation’s colonial plantation economy past but also to its modern capitalism of global commercial exchange. The assembly of the zombie through the histories of colonialism and rebellion, occupation and independence, mark the zombie as a figure that paradoxically represents the history of enslavement on the island and the danger of Black political resistance. This is an argument that Lauro makes throughout Transatlantic Zombie. As the most extreme representation of the enslaved subject, the infected-turned-zombies attempt to protest the tradition of alienation, disentanglement, and social death essential to coloniality and the plantation system (Dillon 2019; Whyte 2017; McKittrick 2013). The technology of the plantation “makes it clear that it was a nursery for biopolitics[,] a school for developing and refining the management of bodies and populations, as well as biota, in service of capital” (Dillon 2019, 634). As the origin of capitalist modernity, the plantation redefined land into a resource with extractable crops which required human labor for production and extraction. This transformed the relationship between human and earth, necessitating the eradication of networks of sociality that connect food, land, and people in favor of the production of single crop markets and the socially dead who would produce them. The plantation “works to eradicate sociality in the name of production and market relations alone” (Dillon 2019, 634),22 which completely reshape the relationship between human and earth. The progression of the disease in “Monstro” can be understood as forms of posthuman Black resistance to the plantation economies that redefined their relationship to the earth, nourishment, and each other. “La Negrura” initially marks the body through a fungus-like infection that blackens the skin, compels “viktims” to gather together, induces an unexplained silence, then timed shrieks, and finally the overtaking of the island through cannibalistic violence. As such, La Negrura’s “viktims” express their active resistance to the histories that endangered them, while also replicating apocalyptic violence in the Caribbean by harming themselves 21  See Lauro’s Transatlantic Zombie. As the work of Silvio Torres-Saillant, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Dixa Ramirez, and Megan Jeannette Meyers demonstrates, Haiti and the Haitian Revolution are crucial to understanding not only the country’s relationship with the Dominican Republic but also to conceptions of latinidad and larger hemispheric socio-­ political issues. See Torres-Saillant; Fumagalli; Ramirez; and Meyers. 22  “Social death” as it relates to slavery and the construction of “blackness” has been investigated by Orlando Patterson (1982), Jared Sexton (2011), and Lisa Marie Cacho (2012).

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and others that reproduce the horrors of fukú. Their methods of resistance take various forms, first through physically amassing, secondly through their silence and vocalization, and finally through their transformation into the flesh-eating zombie of our contemporary zeitgeist. In recent years, some have theorized the zombie as a manifestation of general anxieties surrounding the contemporary neoliberal capitalist system, fears of disability, trauma, our abjectness, and ensuing physical decay and death (Cohen 2012; Lauro and Embry 2008; Newitz 2006). The zombie has also been discussed as a biopolitical figure that metaphorizes the total state of exception as a creature that exceeds the sacrificial. Here the zombie symbolically represents the accumulation of capital, where the labor of the monster is pure surplus value (Canavan 2010; Moraña 2017). Yet, while the zombie has been assigned these properties and its Haitian roots have dissolved over time—coming to represent any racialized ethnic group, a symbol of the dissolution between self and Other, human and posthuman, and a critique of capitalism writ large—this monster should not be divested of its Caribbean origin. The zombie’s burgeoning in the Caribbean through the rhetoric of (slave) labor in the sugarcane fields and the sugar mill demonstrates the monster’s symbolic embodiment of these histories and is inextricably linked to the creation of “Blackness” as a racial category.23 To divest the zombie of its origins in the Caribbean is to ignore the principal role that the histories of violent exchange between the Caribbean, the wider Americas, and Europe played in creating this monster. The zombie always embodies the fear of the return of the colonial master, offering a critique of slavery and the Afro-Latinx body in capitalist labor, while simultaneously enabling the reenactment of empire and its power structures through its body.24

23  Canavan (2010) provides an extensive history of the zombie in western culture and argues for the monster as a biopolitical victim and slave under capitalism. However, his argument deviates from notions of blackness as attached to the zombie’s body. 24  Elizabeth Maddock Dillon also emphasizes this point in her essay “Zombie Biopolitics” (2019). Here she examines how “the geography of capitalism and plantation biopolitics remain central to even the most recent iterations of the zombie, whether in the form of threat or containment” (Dillon 2019, 646).

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Becoming Monsters, Turning the World Black “Monstro” centralizes the zombie’s origins in Haiti through colonial plantation economies and slave labor, retracing its formation in the American imaginary as the ultimate threat of racial infection (on and off the island) through a slow-spreading disease, “La Negrura.” Translated in the story as “The Darkness,” the infection, in fact, is a racial one that more accurately should be termed “The Blackness.” Beginning with what seems like a joke25—a disease that re-blackens black skin—La Negrura instigates the end-of-the-world through apocalyptic violence performed on Black people. This violence recreates colonial violence and returns readers to the creation of the zombie in popular culture and “Blackness” as a racial category imbued with the danger of contamination.26 The onset of the disease mirrors classic conceptions of the zombie in Haitian folklore and popular culture: “once infected, few viktims died outright; they just seemed to linger on and on” (Díaz 2012, 107). Yet, the docile walking dead of the nineteenth century are also contemporized in the story, where the infected transform into the flesh-eating monster that has permeated popular culture since the 1960s; a posthuman monster that is clearly protesting the violent legacies of colonialism, slavery, and bodies in capitalist labor that engendered them. From the Dominican Republic, “Monstro”’s narrator recounts how the infected in Haiti are initially quarantined—a move reminiscent of the settlement camps following the 2010 earthquake that echoes what Simone Brown calls “sociogeny,” the “organizational framework […] that names what is and what is not bounded within the category of the human, and that fixes and frames blackness as an object of surveillance” (Brown 2015, 7). As Anthony Bogues explains, the idea of the “human” was constructed through notions of difference “already classified into hierarchical schema” and conceived of the African slave as a living corpse, solely an instrument 25  The humor in the narrative, of course, is redolent with anti-Haitian violence on the island and the ongoing racist treatment of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the contemporary moment. We have seen this play out in events such as the 1937 Parsley Massacre and the stripping of citizenship of over 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent in 2013, among others. In “Monstro,” the disease is blamed on Haitians and neglected because of who it affects: “For six, seven months it was just a horrible Haitian disease—who fucking cared, right?” (Díaz 2012, 108). 26  This should remind us of the long and violent history of discrimination and abuse of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descendant in the Dominican Republic.

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of production (Bogues 2012, 35–36).27 The quarantine zones, then, create a reification of race in the surveillance and isolation of the infected, and recreate for the reader a system of racialization that was first experienced in coloniality and that has continued into the present (including the encampment of Haitians during environmental catastrophes). The attempted entrapment and physical supervision of the infected reenact the violent technologies of the plantation in the Antillean future in which “Monstro” is set. Indeed, the infected show the violent ramifications of capitalist labor on the individual body as they themselves become terrestrial and oceanic forms: “Coral reefs might have been adios on the ocean floor, but they were alive and well on the arms and backs and heads of the infected” (Díaz 2012, 107). However, these are not the reefs desired for ecological health, but manifestations of disease that call into question the historical trauma that can only be unearthed through the zombie’s body. The “coral reefs” caused by La Negrura are “[b]lack rotting rugose masses fruiting out of bodies” (Díaz 2012, 107) that associate disease with ecological violence that is emulated on the Black body and reveal, as always, those who are expendable, and what Sarah Quesada terms a “planetary warning” about the end of neoliberalism in the wake of “anthropogenic catastrophes” (Quesada 2016, 291, 293). The slow-spreading disease reveals the long tradition of performing violence to Black people that makes “them not sites of exception but rather sites in which regularized performances of violence as power were enacted” (Bogues 2012, 34). The methodical practice of violence to Black people is not exceptional but ordinary and demonstrates, as Bogues reminds us, how from the slave—a seeming corpse—productions of knowledge emerge.28 These performances of violence and the production of knowledge they activate intimately link the slave’s body to the production of plantation economies and the violent technologies performed on both body and land that enabled the evolution of Western forms of imperialism and the creation of the modern capitalist 27  Bogues cites various Caribbean writers such as Nicolás Guillen and Aimé Césaire. Cesáire states in Discourse on Colonialism that colonization signifies the indigenous (2001, 42). 28  Bogues further explains how the living corpse is constitutive to colonial modernity and Enlightenment knowledge: “The creation of the figure of the human in Western thought occurred in the historical moment of colonial conquest and the emergence of the European colonial project […] the human, as a figure with special meaning, is already assumed by those who dominate and enact violence, while the supposed nonhuman nature of the living corpse becomes the foundation on which violence is enacted” (Bogues 2012, 35–36).

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system. From the living dead—bodies excluded from sociality and the status of the human—emerge practices of kinship and revolt that formulate alternative archives of embodiment and definitions of the monster/human divide. The zombie is “a creative cultural response to plantation biopolitics—one that tells the story of insistence and sociality under the regime of social death” (Dillon 2019, 638). The infected of “Monstro” echo this story of insistence through strong affective ties to each other and their geographic spaces: [T]hey wanted to be together, in close proximity, all the time. They no longer tolerated being separated from other infected, started coming together in the main quarantine zone. […] All the viktims seemed to succumb to this ingathering compulsion. Some went because they claimed they felt “safer” in the quarantine zone; others just picked up and left without a word to anyone, trekked halfway across the country as though following a homing beacon. (Díaz 2012, 108)

Garnering the language of pathology, the “ingathering compulsion” to which the viktims seem to “succumb,” formulates zombification as a persistent, physically entrenched condition that further structures closeness and familiarity even in the most sickening conditions. This is a new way of thinking of the zombie: the infected are evoking all the elements of the traditional monster without their function in labor. However, as a textual element, the infected are performing labor for the narrative itself as tools for the advancement of plot and readerly pleasure. Most importantly, the infected persistently anchor themselves to the topography and each other in a way that defies Western medicine’s attempts to isolate, study, and reduce the victim to their disease.29 Various doctors struggle to decipher a pattern in the disease, performing experiments of removal and isolation. However, the soon-to-be zombies prefer to enact violence on their own body or die rather than experience isolation and separation from the other infected: “As soon as they were removed from the quarantine zone they went batshit, trying everything they could to break free to return. No sedative or entreaty proved effective, and after four days of battering themselves relentlessly against the doors of their holding cells the men loosed a last high-pitched shriek and died within minutes of each other” 29  The use of “k” in viktims, while positioning the world of “Monstro” as an alternative to our own, also mocks Westerns knowledge formations and demarcations of certain bodies as “sick” or “healthy.”

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(Díaz 2012, 108). The infected, then, not only claim an affinity to the land but also fully assert a communal abject position, one that is predicated on the refusal to be examined and “understood” and the rejection of a restorative project that would “heal” and return them to society. The disease in many ways discloses the true sociopolitical position of the infected, allowing them to establish previously impossible kinship networks, exercise power based on instilling confusion and fear, and fully express their abjectness. The naïve wonder demonstrated by the doctors’ and the narrator’s reports are not unlike the awe and mystery described in the colonial encounter of the “New World.” Christopher Columbus famously states in his first log: “I also understand that, a long distance from here, there are men with one eye and others with dogs’ snouts who eat men. On taking a man they behead him and drink his blood and cut off his genitals” (1987, 102). The otherworldly figures and excessive geographies described in fifteenth-century exploration narratives are ones to be deciphered and tamed. The bestial encounters of the New World also construct unearthly and strange worlds for Europeans to enjoy and gawk at, while establishing clearly defined hierarchies and divisions. Columbus’s description—and others like it—produces a radical otherworldliness that he will have to destroy and which, paradoxically, will become his own undoing. As such, Columbus produces the very thing he desires yet fears, revealing an imaginary and sick mind replete with the language of fantasy that indeed creates a “new world.” The Caribbean, then, is a unique space that is continuously imagined as fantastic and utopian, which leads to its exploitation and destruction: fukú. The questions posed by the viktim’s attachment to the land and their sudden and seemingly stubborn silence create a sense of wonder commingled with fear and anticipation. The anxiety produced by unknowable peoples and traditions is exciting for their conquerable potential—and their invitation to vicariously participate—while forming a world that needs to be understood and tamed. Yet, the story stages the infected as a challenging force against definitions of “other” and “monster,” becoming throughout “Monstro” an obstruction to the recovery process: “eight months into the epidemic, all infected viktims, even the healthiest, stopped communicating. Just went silent” (Díaz 2012, 109). The infected cannot be deciphered and defy common expectations about the zombie. Readers, as much as the characters within the story, have to contend with the silence of the infected and

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that which follows. Shortly after their communal silence, the infected start what becomes known as the “Chorus,” in which they “simultaneously let out a bizarre shriek—two, three times a day” (Díaz 2012, 109). These communal shrieks return us to the “screams of the enslaved” which instigate fukú and serve as forms of communal racial protest against the histories that engendered them as dead subjects, resisting not only physical containment but aurally insisting on national and continental history. Their silence and wordless screams are—as Elaine Scarry (1987) stipulates—a demonstration of pain’s unsharability.30 Silence in light of pain further evinces a body’s resistance to language as an active destruction of a signifying system that could reduce the history of embodied violence, race and racism, and coloniality to the simplicity of language. Pain does not “simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sound and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (Scarry 1987, 4). The resistance to language, then, is not simply a byproduct of pain but essential to the experience of pain itself. The screams of the infected remind readers of the creation of the fukú as the curse of the New World, itself formed in the crash of various forms of expressions of pain by people of color— ”screams of the enslaved” and the “death bane of the Tainos” that Tiffany Lethabo King calls the “sound scape or first grammars of conquest” that become “a patois of both Indigenous and Black noise” (King 2019, 47). Yet, what if the screams are ones of pleasure? What if they emit joy at finding themselves returned to each other, a recognition in kinship? What if they demonstrate a pleasure in returning to the land, becoming a part of it? Regardless of whether the infected voice pleasure or pain, the communal practice has no linguistic function. It registers the unique violence of slavery that is only decipherable by those who share this history. The scream is not to be understood. Only rupture can be read or heard in the Chorus. While the doctors and world powers attempt to translate the disease and the behavior of the infected—the common “tell me where it hurts”—those who suffer from “La Negrura” continually refuse to be denoted: the only way they can articulate their interiority is through rage and violence. Here, the narrative plays with ideas of the human, where

30  I am using pain here in a capacious manner that extends beyond the physical body. Through their screams and mass groupings, their “in-gathering compulsion,” the “viktims” of “Monstro” exhibit various forms of distress and suffering.

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those who can understand the infected and participate in the Chorus are marked as dead, monster, Other. Posthumanist theory has an expansive history that has been applied to a range of disciplines such as philosophy, science and technology studies, critical theory, and literary studies. As various scholars of posthumanism have observed, the term designates a break from Western forms of knowledge production and a new way of understanding the human-subject relationship to the world. Greatly indebted to Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991, originally published in 1985), posthumanism offers a new epistemology that is not anthropocentric, rejects traditional Western notions of humanism, and therefore is not centered on Cartesian dualism. As has been discussed by scholars such as Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry (2008), Jeffrey Cohen (2012), and Mabel Moraña (2017), the zombie is a quintessential mouthpiece for thinking about posthumanism. The zombie’s “irreconcilable body” (Lauro and Embry 2008, 87)—both living and dead (undead), object and subject—is the “ultimate negative” that points to “a gap in the fabric of the known world” (Cohen 2012, 398), and calls into question the dialectical model of subject/object.31 The zombie is the ultimate paradox: un/dead; enslaved/slave rebellion; occupation/independence that “disrupts the entire system” (Lauro and Embry 2008, 94). Therefore, the zombie has an emergent ontology rather than a fixed one, which allows it to constantly transform without losing its original colonial and racial demarcation. Zombies  are the ultimate force for upending the capitalist system instigated by the apocalyptic collision of the colonial/modern encounter. The infected of “Monstro” call attention to the construction of the “human” through notions of difference that made slaves into singular tools of capitalist production. As such, they embody a non-identity and anti-subjectivity that topples the known world. I follow in Lauro and Embry’s conception of the “zombii” in thinking of the infected in “Monstro” as beings whose lack of consciousness “opens the possibility of a negation of the subject/ object divide” (Lauro and Embry 2008, 94)—a posthuman subject that reproduces itself as it consumes, the “zombii,” the infected, are primarily concerned not with the individual but the collective. Yet, as Lauro and Embry stipulate, the inauguration of the posthuman cannot presume positive change, but can only demand the destruction of the 31  As Cohen explains, being “undead” is not the same as alive, and acts as a negative noun that does not allow for “quiescence of mortality” (Cohen 2012, 398).

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known world (2008, 91). Posthumanism, by these lines, is endgame, the reconceptualization of object/subject demarcations, and the end of capitalism.32 The disease’s name, “La Negrura,” “The Darkness,” is crucial in “Monstro.” As Scarry reminds us, the act of naming pain itself “entails an immediate mental somersault out of the body into the external social circumstances that can be pictured as having caused the hurt” (Scarry 1987, 16). The inherent instability of the language to describe pain that “enables us to see the attributes of pain” also “permit a break in the identification of the referent and thus a misidentification of the thing to which the attribute belongs” (Scarry 1987, 17). The pain caused on the victims’ bodies in “Monstro” is instigated by a disease only known through its colloquial association with race and raciality, demarcating Blackness and its inception in the colonial/modern divide as the foundation for communal suffering on the island. In fact, the suffering experienced by the viktims is only demonstrated through sounds that transcend language and physical representation that yokes their bodies to the land. Yet, their repeated, continuous, and increasingly prolonged vocalizations forbid the possibility of forgetting the histories their bodies and voices signify—a forgetting that is necessary for the formation of national identities that require their exclusion. The zombie disallows this, making protest infectious itself; provoking a rebellion that the nameless narrator witnesses on TV. This episode evinces the apocalyptic tendencies in Díaz’s fiction, which acts as protest and reproduction of colonial violence. After the infected let out a twenty-­ eight-­minute shriek, “shit went Rwanda”: That shit was no riot. Even we could tell that. All the relocation camps near the quarantine zone were consumed in what can only be described as a straight massacre. An outbreak of homicidal violence, according to the initial reports. People who had never lifted a finger in anger their whole lives— children, viejos, aid workers, mothers of nine—grabbed knives, machetes, sticks, pots, pans, pipes, hammers and started attacking their neighbors, their friends, their pastors, their children, their husbands, their infirm relatives, complete strangers. Berserk murderous blood rage. No pleading with the killers or backing them down; they just kept coming and coming, even when you pointed a gauss gun at them, stopped only when they were killed. (Díaz 2012, 116) 32  Lauro and Embry offer a detailed and convincing analysis of how the “zombii” insinuates the dismantling of the known capitalist system (2008, 106).

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The proto-zombie’s body becomes, then, a stage for the performance of rage and violence onto the body of the self and other that is not a call for decolonial justice, but a desire to relish in the pleasure of enacting violence itself. The apocalyptic violence instigated by fukú is reproduced here in the unbridled rage the zombie’s body points to. Fukú’s soundscape of conquest is fulfilled in unchecked rage for the sake of rage itself and, therefore, the infected of “Monstro” diverge from the stereotypical zombie impulse to consume. But what happens if instead of calling the monster “zombie,” we call it for what it truly is: Black? As Díaz’s formulation of the monster in “Monstro” demonstrates, the process of zombification is turning the (already) black body Black, reminding readers of the creation of race as a social construct and reifying it as a fiction necessary for the advent of modern capitalist and imperial enterprises. Therefore “zombie” is a euphemism much like the one used in the story, which mistranslates “negrura” into “darkening” instead of “blackening.” Díaz purposefully deflects through mistranslation the violent act of assigning raciality and social deadness on another. Therefore, I propose that instead of calling the infected in the story zombies, they should be termed “the Blackened,” “los negreados.”33 Los negreados’ body is analogically substantiated, to use Scarry’s terminology. The crisis of belief the disease engenders in the population is authenticated by the infected, where “the sheer material factualness of the human body” insists on their own abjectness as real and certain (Scarry 1987, 14). The Blackened remind us that anti-Blackness and white supremacy continually attempt to return Black subjects to a state of abjection and social death—concomitant with the history of slavery, plantation economies, and coloniality. The monster instills fear in the “Great Powers” who bomb Haiti, and “serves to reveal the ultimate transformation of the monster into Caribbean-cannibalistic-Caliban creatures that will forever threaten the delicate thread of human existence” (Quesada 2016, 292). Afraid of the spreading of Blackness, the Great Powers bomb Haiti, poignantly turning “the entire world white,” and demonstrating what Judith 33  Similarly, in “Zombie Manifesto,” Lauro and Embry (2008) create a new term, “zombii” to demarcate a new phase for the zombie that traces its African and voudoun folklore roots in Haiti, its move to American popular culture, and finally its instantiation as a “true” posthuman subject that indicates the razing of all systems and the end of capitalism: zonbi, zombie, zombii.

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Butler terms “a racially saturated field of visibility” (that frames Blackness as a danger from which whiteness must be protected) (Butler 1993, 15). The Blackened, los negreados, threaten the racial and geographic boundaries that demarcate people of color as inhabiting zones of violence and social death and whiteness as located in zones of normative social reproduction. Yet, the effects of the history that defined these spaces is inescapable, and the final moments of “Monstro” become a revenge fantasy where the “zombie” is able to force the history of slavery, colonization, and labor—which it continually carries on its body—onto the human, blackening the island beyond the Haitian border and presumably the rest of the Americas. By the end of “Monstro” the only evidence of the zombie’s veracity is a found Polaroid of the monster consuming a girl with the words written below it, “Numbers 11:18. Who shall give us flesh to eat?” (Díaz, 2012, 118). At the end of Numbers 11, Yahweh has inflicted another plague onto the Israelites for their supplications of food in the desert. In the invocation of this biblical passage, “Monstro” points to the inevitable unending repetition of doom within the Caribbean and the recurrence of apocalyptic violence and monstrous embodiment on the island, and the biblical violence that will always repeat itself. The bomb, called “the Reaper,” reenacts fukú’s apocalyptic violence by opening a “dead zone […] over a six-hundred-mile chunk of the Caribbean,” and the narrator warns us that we “cannot imagine the damage it caused” (Díaz, 2012, 118)—another inscription of violence that exceeds language or the imagination. Like fukú, the “Reaper hadn’t just swung and run; it had swung and stayed” (Díaz, 2012, 118), presumably unleashing another form of cyclical violence that replicates the fukú and which, like the curse itself, is both a curse and a symptom of the curse. The Reaper proliferates death through contamination, seen in the Class 2 monsters at the story’s end: the Great Powers generate the Black contagion feared by Americans and Europeans during and after the Haitian Revolution and occupation of Haiti in the early twentieth century. In fact, the Great Powers activate a modern form of the zombie within the narrative. What was at the outset of the story a fully embodied viktim with affinity for space, the need for proximity to others, and a necessity to speak, becomes by the end of “Monstro” all mouth. Following the trajectory of the zombie from being mindlessly enslaved in the plantations of Haiti to the eaters of brains in popular culture, the monsters of “Monstro” are also

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transformed by the end of the narrative and defined as concomitant solely by the actions they take as consumers of human flesh. Following the typical conventions of the genre, the narrative returns readers to the threat imposed by notions of Blackness in the colonial and contemporary imaginary: the zombie’s mouth holds within it the threat of racial infection and the deadly articulation and spread of the histories of slavery their bodies cite. The danger seen within the mouth of los negreados promises to imprint colonial violence and Blackness onto the rest of the Americas, much as the original curse, fukú, reverberated from Hispaniola to the rest of the continent. However, the recuperative drive most readers of Díaz find within the story, and which Díaz himself desires in the apocalyptic, would implement los negreados as an allegorical signifier of hope.34 In “Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveals,” for example, Díaz reflects on the etymology of “apocalypse” to argue how the 2010 earthquake in Haiti offered an unveiling of the pernicious systemic injustices “that we as a society seek to run away from, that we hide behind veils of denial” and which instead should serve as tools for change (Díaz 2011). Yet, the seemingly unfinished and mysterious ending of “Monstro” forces readers to contend with the story’s narrator walking toward death. “They call those of us who made it through ‘time witnesses.’ I can think of a couple better terms” (Díaz 2012, 107), he states. After the “zombie” outbreak, Alex heads toward the Haiti-­ Dominican border with his Polaroid camera—a prolepsis that indicates the woman in the “soon-to-be-iconic Polaroid” will be Misty, the “girl” the narrator is “chasing” at the outset of the narrative. The narrator and Misty follow him, becoming “time witnesses” yet never explaining what “making it through” means or what better terminology could be to define them: Is the narrator speaking from “the beyond”? Is he speaking from a no-place? Where is “through” and what have they traversed? Although there was speculation when “Monstro” was first published that it would become a novel with a Haitian, woman protagonist, this has yet to appear. The aporetic nature of the story then foments apocalyptic violence as a doorway through which to access a conceptual Caribbean space that exceeds time, narrative linearity, and ideas of the posthuman. Walking off in search of the monster, the nameless narrator understands that Blackness is a marker of social death and expendability that excludes the Afro-Caribbean subject (himself included) from the fantasy of political  Díaz describes the uses of the apocalyptic in “Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveals” (2011).

34

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life. Following the thinking of Afropessimism, the narrator’s actions are also a form of refusal that reify the curse of fukú and apocalyptic violence as a permanent and recurring state of experiencing the world—one the disease discloses. “Monstro” reveals the centuries-long apocalyptic history of the Caribbean and how Afro-Caribbean subjects, Haitians in particular, have endured these end-times with no apparent end. As I argue about fukú, Martin Munro also posits the Caribbean as “born out of apocalypse” and whose history has revolved around apocalyptic cycles (Munro 2015, 3).35 The apocalypse, then, is not a singular event with recuperative futurity, but always in existence and, as Glissant (1996) stipulates, reoccurs through the annihilation of memory and Caribbean historical experience, “nonhistory.” The lack of state recognition, the urge of the Great Powers to turn the world white, for example, highlights an indifference to catastrophe that reinforces apocalyptic feeling. The narrator’s final actions show that “post” is a categorical fiction for Black Antilleans; apocalyptic terror continues to destroy Black being. By the end of “Monstro,” the narrator makes an active decision to walk off with his friend to the Dominican-Haitian border during the height of the plague. This ending attempts to tackle Fred Moten’s poignant question: “What would it be, deeper still, what is it, to think from no standpoint; to think outside the desire for a standpoint?” (Moten 2013, 738). While the end of the story leaves readers with an expectation of movement, the last line is after all, “And what do we do, like even bigger idiots? Go with him” (Díaz 2012, 110). Yet, the narrative provides no ending but the continuation of suspense, an unresolved mystery, and the expectation of death at the hand of new zombies. Moten describes this “no standpoint” of Blackness as having “the potential to end the world” (Moten 2013, 739), and the Díaz narrator’s final decision does in fact end one: his going to the border ends the narrative, leaving the reader with no language outside of biblical violence, outside los negreados mouth seeking flesh to eat, outside of the violence of vengeance they embody and the white space he leaves behind. The story’s ending and los negreados rebellion reconceptualizes any familiar understandings of conclusions, both in terms of narrative finality and death. As Steve Shaviro argues, the zombie rebels against the capitalist endeavor to transform death into value, therefore enacting a “radical 35  Munro argues that invoking “apocalyptic memory” (a recollection of a time marked by endings) acts anti-apocalyptically by invoking memories that counteract the feeling of living in an eternal end-times (2015, 18).

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refusal and destruction of value” (Shaviro 2017, 8). Effectively, los negreados destroy value itself and radically refuse to ascribe value to the narrative’s ending: they present an anti-resolution with no easy answers. If the “zombii” is the harbinger of complete destruction of the known world, perhaps this is why “Monstro” writes itself into blank space with which readers must wrestle: the silence, refusal, rage, and revolt instigated by los negreados initiate the end-of-worlds the “Zombie Manifesto” calls for and provokes our narrator and us as readers to “go with” them. “Monstro” refuses to be appropriated into a message about survival or  the end of violence, death, and injustice. Instead, los negreados enact a revenge fantasy that relishes in the performance of violence for the sake of violence itself, underscoring through their bodies (and rage) the histories that engendered them in the first place. In so doing, los negreados execute another fukú-like cataclysm that has world-destroying (narrative-­ destroying) potential. It is uncanny to be writing this chapter during a now ongoing global pandemic (COVID-19), especially one that the Trump administration initially tried to racialize by calling it the “Chinese virus.” As these events make clear, the Othering that happens in “Monstro” is not only relegated to fiction. It was even stranger still to be writing this during the summer of 2020 when people across the US (and the world) rebelled by taking to the streets to protest the long legacy of anti-Black racism in the country. The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, among the many others, are not exceptional; they are three of many who have traumatically fallen victim to systemic racism and anti-Black violence. Yet, systemic racism is at the root of this country’s origins, and the incidents that spurred a necessary national response underscored this fact, while also noting how important it is for us to work together in anti-racist action and assert the value of Black life. Los negreados of “Monstro” unearth the violent histories of colonization, slavery, and exploitation that racialized subjects have apocalyptically been subjected to, and which los negreados embody. As we’ve seen with the burning of police buildings, the headquarters of the Daughters of the Confederacy, and the toppling of confederate and imperialist monuments across the US and internationally, to think posthumanly, to consider los negreados as harbingers of a new era, we must also come to terms with the idea that this means razing the entire system, the known world. The white space at the end of “Monstro,” its irresolution or unfinishedness can also be read as an invitation to think about what this post might look like, the words that could fill the space the Class 2, the negreados, have created for us. What will they be?

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Acknowledgments  I am grateful for the generous support and feedback of Justin Mann and Isabel Gómez in writing this chapter. I also want to thank the editors of the collection, Emily Maguire and Antonio Cordoba, for their comments and guidance throughout the life cycle of this chapter.

Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2012. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. 1996. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Translated by James E.  Maraniss. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2000. Three Words Toward Creolization. In Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity, ed. Kathleen M.  Balutansky and Marie-Agnès Sourieau, 53–61. Gainsville: University Press of Florida. Bogues, Anthony. 2012. And What About the Human?: Freedom, Human Emancipation, and the Radical Imagination. Boundary 2 39 (3): 29–46. Boon, Kevin. 2011. The Zombie as Other: Mortality and the Monstrous in the Post- Nuclear Age. In Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-­ Human, ed. Sarah Juliet Lauro and Deborah Christie, 50–60. New  York: Fordham University Press. Brown, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press. Buscaglia-Salgado, José F. 2003. Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia. In Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams, 15–22. New York: Routledge. Cacho, Lisa Marie. 2012. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press. Canavan, Gerry. 2010. We Are the Walking Dead. Extrapolation 51 (3): 431–453. Césaire, Aimé. 2001. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 2012. Undead (A Zombie Oriented Ontology). Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23 (3, 86): 397–412. Columbus, Christopher. 1987. The Log of Christopher Columbus. Edited by Robert Henderson Fuson. Candem, ME: International Marine Publishing Co. DeGuzmán, Maria. 2005. Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Díaz, Junot. 2007. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New  York: Riverhead Books.

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Di Iorio, Lyn. 2016. Laughing through a Broken Mouth in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, ed. Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, and José David Saldívar, 69–87. Durham: Duke University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso. Kee, Chera. 2011. In ‘They Are Not Men…They Are Dead Bodies’: From Cannibal to Zombie and Back Again. Better off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-­ Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, 9–23. New  York: Fordham University Press. King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. 1986. Historia de las Indias, 3 vols. Edited by André Saint-Lui. Caracas: Ayacucho. Lauro, Sarah Juliet. 2015. The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lauro, Sarah Juliet, and Karen Embry. 2008. A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism. Boundary 2 35 (1): 85–108. Machado Saez, Elena. 2011. Dictating Desire, Dictating Diaspora: Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao as Foundational Romance. Contemporary Literature 52 (3): 522–555. Maguire, Emily M. 2018. The Heart of a Zombie: Dominican Literature’s Sentient Undead. Alambique 6 (1): 1–20. McKittrick, Katherine. 2013. Plantation Futures. Small Axe 17 (3): 1–15. Mignolo, Walter. 2012. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Milian, Claudia. 2017. Extremely Latin, XOXO: Notes on LatinX. Cultural Dynamics 29 (3): 121–140. Moraña, Mabel. 2017. El monstruo como máquina de guerra. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Moten, Fred. 2013. Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh). The South Atlantic Quarterly 112 (4): 737–780. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Munro, Martin. 2015. Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Newitz, Annalee. 2006. Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Quesada, Sarah. 2016. A Planetary Warning?: A Multilayered Caribbean Zombie in Junot Díaz’s ‘Monstro’. In Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, ed. Monica Hanna, Jennifer Hartford-Vargas, and José David Saldívar, 291–320. Durham: Duke University Press. Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology 15 (2): 215–232. Ramírez, Catherine S. 2002. Cyborg Feminism: The Science Fiction of Octavia E. Butler and Gloria Anzaldúa. In Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture, ed. Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, 374–402. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ramírez, Dixa. 2018. Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present. New  York: New  York University Press. Rhodes, Gary Don. 2001. White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Saldívar, José David. 2011a. Conjectures on ‘Americanity’ and Junot Díaz’s ‘Fuku Americanus’ in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The Global South 5 (1): 120–136. ———. 2011b. Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press. Saldívar, Ramón. 2012. Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America. Journal of Transnational American Studies 4 (2): 1–18. Scarry, Elaine. 1987. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schalk, Samantha. 2018. Bodyminds Reimagined; (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press. Seabrook, William. 2016. The Magic Island. New York: Dover Publications. Sexton, Jared. 2011. The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism. InTensions Journal 5: 1–47. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. Shaviro, Steve. 2017. Contagious Allegories: George Romero. In Zombie: A Reader, ed. Sarah Juliet Lauro, 7–19. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. small axe. 2011. The Visual Life of Catastrophic History: A Small Axe Project Statement. small axe 15 (1): 133–136. Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. 2009. Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage. GLQ 14 (2–3): 191–215. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. 1994. Dominican Literature and Its Criticism: Anatomy of a Troubled Identity. In A History of Literature in the Caribbean, A.  James Arnold, 49–64. Amsterdam. J. Benjamins. Viego, Antonio. 2007. Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2017. Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now: Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene. In The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, ed. Jon Christensen, Michelle Niemann, and Ursula K.  Heise, 206–215. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Villa Epecuén: Slow Violence and the Posthuman Film Set Jonathan Risner

In its heyday from the 1940s through the 1970s, Villa Epecuén was an exclusive lakefront town in Argentina drawing celebrities and families from Buenos Aires who, among other amenities, were attracted by Lago Epecuén’s salty therapeutic waters that surrounded much of Villa Epecuén. However, in 1985 disaster struck when a dam broke and submerged the town in nearly 30 feet of water for some 25 years. The town’s entire population was displaced. The bursting of the dam has been attributed to unceasing torrential rains that summer and, albeit never officially investigated but rendered plausible given testimonials by former residents,

J. Risner (*) Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6_6

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governmental malfeasance.1 As the waters have receded during the past five years, Villa Epecuén has reemerged as a conglomeration of blanched ruins and contorted trees bisected by several roads. And with its reemergence, the town has been reconstituted and rehabilitated for two primary purposes; first, as a site for disaster tourism, or the practice of visiting locations to view human-made or natural disasters (e.g., post-Katrina New Orleans, depressed Detroit, or Chernobyl). Villa Epecuén also has become the partial or main setting for three contemporary Argentine genre films that have been released since 2015: Daemonium (Pablo Parés 2015), a science-fiction/action/horror film; El Expediente Santiso/The Santiso Report (Brian Maya 2015),2 a science-fiction/mystery/thriller; and Los olvidados/What the Waters Left Behind (Luciano Onetti and Nicolás Onetti 2017), which is a horror film. Given its ternary metamorphosis from resort to aqueous wasteland to an onscreen post-apocalyptic space that remains largely uninhabited,3 I conceive of Villa Epecuén here as a posthuman film set. Posthuman has become a remarkably fungible term, and, here, I am relying on Rossi Braidotti and Simon Bignall’s notion of posthuman ecology, which is indebted to Gilles Deleuze. For Braidotti and Bignall, “The posthuman paradigm [serves] an analytical tool for understanding the perspectival nature of knowledge, and for drawing attention to the primacy of nonhuman influences in formative processes” (Braidotti and Bignall 2019, 2). In the three aforementioned Argentine films, water, unmoored from human management, is the cardinal “nonhuman influence” that fashions Villa Epecuén into a propitious genre film set. Yet, the human is hardly canceled out, and Villa Epecuén onscreen is depicted through the human intervention of cinema, which adheres to Braidotti and Bignall’s vision of preserving the human within a posthuman episteme: “[…] the posthuman 1  Josefina Licitra’s El agua mala. Crónica de Epecuén y las casas hundidas (Licitra 2014) (“Bad Water: Chronicle of Epecuén and the Sunken Houses”) exemplifies a contemporary form of literary journalism in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America and relies on a mix of historical sources and testimonials. El agua mala provides the most comprehensive overview of Villa Epecuén’s development and demise, and I refer to the work extensively in my analysis. Unless otherwise noted, all translations, including that of Licitra’s book title, are my own. 2  I subsequently will refer to El Expediente Santiso simply as Santiso. 3  According to multiple news reports, an 88-year old man, Pablo Novak, is the sole resident of Villa Epecuén. See, for example, Vesco (2018).

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convergence [is] best understood as an epistemological framework for supporting the elaboration of alternative values and new codes of inter-­ relation that extend beyond the human influence and cognizance, but do not discount it” (Braidotti and Bignall 2019, 2).4 And while human and non-human subjectivities emerge and can interact through cinema, as Jennifer Fay contends in a point that I will explore further below, “[…] cinema is the aesthetic practice of the Anthropocene” (Fay 2018, 4). Still, in Villa Epecuén the human remains decentered. As I will argue here, Villa Epecuén in its present manifestation constitutes a posthuman ecology-­ cum-­film set in which the posthuman ostensibly exists in tension with the Anthropocene via cinema. Here, I will trace Villa Epecuén’s transformation into a posthuman ecology and will rely on Rob Nixon’s notion of slow violence to conceive of this spatial conversion. I will then turn to notions of spectatorship and filmic space to hold out the possibility for the visibilization of a posthuman ecology in select Argentine genre films.

Slow Violence and the Making and Unmaking of Villa Epecuén I begin with a cartographic and historic orientation of Villa Epecuén to put into relief its transformation into a posthuman space. Villa Epecuén is located in the southwest corner of Buenos Aires Province about 320 miles away from Argentina’s capital. Nowadays, Epecuén often is referred to as a forgotten city, and there is no shortage of Argentines on social media wistfully describing their experiences venturing to Villa Epecuén with family during the 1960s and 1970s. A Facebook page titled “Gente de Villa Epecuén” (“People of Villa Epecuén”), for example, merges expressions of bliss, nostalgia, and sadness. Beginning in the early 1920s, Villa Epecuén billed itself as a health destination. Its salty waters were purported to be equal to those of the Dead Sea and had the capacity to alleviate any number of ailments, Braidotti and Bignall are hardly alone in how they conceive of posthumanism. In a similar vein, in What is Posthumanism?, Cary Wolfe writes, “[W]e are not just talking about a thematics of the decentering of the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates […]; the point is not to reject humanism tout court—indeed, there are many values and aspirations to admire in humanism—but rather to show how those aspirations are undercut by the philosophical and ethical frameworks used to conceptualize them” (Wolfe 2010, xvi). In other words, for Wolfe, posthumanism does not entail throwing the baby of humanism out with the bath water, so to speak. 4 

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including respiratory problems and arthritis. And though the waters’ medicinal properties may suggest Villa Epecuén was perhaps a kind of aquatic sanitarium for the elderly and/or infirm, Epecuén was more like a resort where working-class, middle-class, and upper middle-class individuals, couples, and families vacationed. An advertisement from the 1950s for “Epecuén-­Ville” sought to highlight the town’s attractions alongside its ameliorative waters: “no es solamente el BALNEARIO TERAPEUTICO para la curación maravillosa de los enfermos más es la estación veraniega en la que se pueden gozar todos los sports que hacen agradable la vida en la temporada de descanso físico y moral, necesaria a todo trabajador, y que transcurrirá feliz al borde de gran ‘Lago Epecuén’” [Not only is [EpecuénVille] the THERAPEUTIC SPA offering a marvelous recuperation from illness but is also the summer resort in which one can enjoy all the sports that make for a pleasant physical and moral respite that every worker needs and that happily unfolds on the banks of ‘Lake Epecuén’] (Licitra 2014, 75; capital letters appear in original text). The advertisement’s appeal to workers underscores the historical moment from which the advertisement emerged—Juan Perón’s first tenure as president from 1946 to 1955— during which the Argentine government intensified “turismo sindical” (“union tourism”) (Scarzanella 1998). Villa Epecuén’s orientation toward the working class during the 1950s, which prompted some upper-class residents to abandon the town, evidences one of multiple economic class and other identities that defined Villa Epecuén throughout the twentieth century. Josefa Licitra traces the historical evolution of Villa Epecuén and the range of economic classes, or vocations, that inhabit the town at sometimes distinct historical junctures: exiled European royalty and well-heeled elite from Buenos Aires; a working and middle class that composed a service economy; and the presence of military officers during the last dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 during which Villa Epecuén seemed a kind of utopic bubble insulated from and oblivious to the political violence and systematic killing unfolding during El Proceso (Licitra 2014, 48).5 5  This conception of Epecuén as blissfully removed from the atrocities of the last dictatorship must be balanced against another anecdote that appears in Licitra’s text, which suggests that the resort town was hardly exempt from political dynamics. A resident of Epecuén, Walter Roldán, registered two official complaints, presumably with the local government in the late 1970s. One complaint concerned the poor conditions of the dam, and another divulged Roldán’s suspicions that officials of the dictatorship were siphoning nitrate from the lake in some underhanded business scheme. Roldán was eventually picked up by a gaggle of agents in a Ford Falcon. Upon his release, Roldán abstained from politics and soon moved away (Licitra 2014, 83–84).

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This mix of economic classes and eventual ecological catastrophe in Villa Epecuén initiates an engagement with and complication of the notion of slow violence. Nixon, as intimated by the full title of his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, is interested chiefly in the environmental activism of those he and others have called “disposable people” (Nixon 2011, 4), or those, who in some sense, are marginalized according to class, religion, gender, ethnicity, and/or race in countries, such as India, Nigeria, and Guatemala. Faced with the post-disaster inertia of government, many past residents of Villa Epecuén complained about being forgotten and having to start over from nearly nothing (Licitra 103, 109). Indeed, those whose houses were inundated, left with nearly nothing, and who were poorly compensated by the national government can be conceived as disposable. Yet, on the other hand, those well-heeled residents of Villa Epecuén who owned hotels or second or third homes do not squarely fit into the category of disposable people. To be sure, their homes and hotels were destroyed. Nevertheless, those who possess sufficient disposable income are spared the ardor of starting over in any adverse sense. Despite the crucial difference between the contexts in Nixon’s study and Villa Epecuén, slow violence remains a productive tool of analysis here and for tracing how Villa Epecuén emerges as a posthuman film set. Nixon characterizes slow violence as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2011, 2). And though Nixon acknowledges that slow violence can describe other “social afflictions” (Nixon 2011, 3)—domestic violence and post-traumatic stress are explicitly named—climate change is the violence on which he focuses. Oil drilling, pollution, dams, consequences of nuclear reactors malfunctioning, deforestation: Nixon examines the literary narrativization of ecological catastrophes, and trains his critical eye on the writings of post-colonial authors/activists, such as Jamaica Kincaid, Abdulrahman Munif, and Nadine Gordimer. Central to Nixon’s notion of slow violence, and to my analysis of a posthuman film set in a genre film, is the problem of representing through literature a violence that is, by definition, without spectacle. Slow violence, in Nixon’s words, is “neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive” (Nixon 2011, 2). In turn, activists/novelists must come up with engrossing narrative strategies for violence that departs from those mediatic portrayals of violence that dazzle: “to intervene representationally entails devising iconic symbols that embody amorphous

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calamities as well as narrative forms that infuse those symbols with dramatic urgency” (Nixon 2011, 10). The author/activists have their work cut out for them. In the face of waning attention spans, authors tackling slow violence enter into a mediatic environment in which attention has become conceived as a currency,6 and, for those consumers with the means, other media constantly beckon. The circumstances surrounding the flooding of Villa Epecuén underscore the utility and relevance of Nixon’s definition of slow violence. Licitra recounts the weeks leading up to the bursting of a dam that flooded the town. She alludes to testimonies of several former residents, including firemen, who were alarmed by the torrential rains and the rising lake water surrounding the city (Licitra 2014, 14, 83). Otherwise, residents of Villa Epecuén, as well as government officials in nearby towns, believed the assurances of the provincial government that things were fine. According to one former resident of Villa Epecuén, “‘En el gobierno […] nadie parecía estar al tanto de esto’” [“In the government, nobody seemed to be on top of this”] (Licitra 2014, 14). However, the threat of flooding to Epecuén had been imminent since at least 1978 when the town flooded slightly. As one can see in maps of Villa Epecuén, the town sat at the end of a series of lagoons or ponds, which along with floodgates, were used to control the excessive flow of water from the Salado River. Following the flood in 1978, the government built a containing wall to guard against flooding. Simply put, however, the wall was not enough to contain the waters in 1985. Nixon consistently alludes to bureaucratic entities—the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, governments, non-governmental organizations—as bodies that can stifle action against slow violence, and, in no small measure, enable slow violence to continue unabated. In Ecocriticism and Italy, Serenella Iovino underscores the relationship between slow violence and bureaucracy more forcefully regarding the aftermath of earthquakes in Italy when she writes, “[…] a major component of an earthquake’s ‘slow violence’ comes from the way geology ‘reacts’ in combination with politics and society” (Iovino 2016, 85). In other words, Iovino conceives of government agencies’ actions, or inactions, that follow a natural disaster as a means by which slow violence can take another form and impinge upon “landscapes and ecosystems” and cultures (Iovino 2016, 85). See, for example, Ingram (2015).

6 

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Nixon’s chapter titled “Megadams, Monumental Modernity, and Developmental Refugees” renders slow violence especially instrumental for understanding the disaster of Villa Epecuén and how water temporarily cancels out the human. Nixon considers the writings of Arundhati Roy in opposition to the megadam that was being built with World Bank funds in Narmada Valley in India. Roy viewed the dam as part and parcel of nascent Hindu nationalism in which a megadam operated as a conspicuous expression of modernization. To be sure, the dam that protected Villa Epecuén was not a megadam. However, Nixon’s description of a dam as a means by which a country displays modernization is significant in the context of Argentina. In Facundo, the significance to which Domingo Faustino Sarmiento accords water in the modernization of Argentina is unmistakable, and, albeit lengthy; the following quote is instructive, as translated by Kathleen Ross: We may indicate, as a noteworthy feature in the configuration of the country, the aggregation of navigable rivers, which come together in the east, from all points of the horizon, to form the Plata by their union, and thus worthily to present their mighty tribute to the Ocean, which receives it, not without visible marks of disturbance and respect. […] Thus is the greatest blessing which Providence bestows upon any people disdained by the Argentine gaucho, who regards it rather as an obstacle opposed to his movements, than as the most powerful means of facilitating them; thus the fountain of national growth, the origin of early celebrity of Egypt, the cause of Holland’s greatest, and of the rapid development of North America, the navigation of rivers, or the use of canals remains a latent power, unappreciated by the inhabitants of the banks of the Bermejo, Pilcomayo, Parana, and Paraguay. (Ross 2003, 46–47)

Marshall Berman’s analysis of Goethe’s Faust in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air further highlights the link between the control of water, modernity, and the human. Berman describes the multiple “metamorphoses” of Faust, and Faust’s third metamorphosis is into that of the developer. Faust, in Berman’s words, “will become the consummate wrecker and creator” (1988, 62–63) and his capacity “to move the world itself” (Berman 1988, 62) hinges on the management of water. Again, to quote Berman, “Faust outlines great reclamation projects to harness the sea for human purposes” (Berman 1988, 62), and he then ticks off those projects in which the protagonist literally moves water: dams, harbors, canals, and agriculture. The relationship between modernity and water implicitly suggests that the

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destruction of Villa Epecuén constitutes a kind of stunted or failed Argentine modernity if the dominion over water is conceived as some barometer for development. Yet, the list of major dam failures over the past century in developed countries, such as the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, and Japan, suggest that the breaching of the walls at Villa Epecuén is hardly anomalous to modernity anywhere. Berman underscores Faust’s powers as a developer to manage water in an unaccommodating space: “And all this to be created out of a barren wasteland where human beings have never dared to live” (Berman 1988, 62). I wince at the idea of callously suggesting that the residents of Villa Epecuén should not have been there. Such a sentiment recalls Slavoj Žižek’s statement on ecology as ideology in the documentary Examined Life (Astra Taylor 2008) in which ecological catastrophe interpreted as a divine punishment enables that catastrophe to remain within “‘a universe of meaning’” (Taylor  2008). In the case of Villa Epecuén, the logic of punishment would be the breaking of the dam operates as a comeuppance for those vacationing in Epecuén. While such rationale is perverse, the notion of “should not have been there” is not without some measure of truth. Licitra dates the discovery, or perhaps better said, human appropriation, of Lago Epecuén back to the early nineteenth century when two indigenous groups—araucanos and tehuelches—used the waters to cure themselves and their horses (Licitra 2014, 35). The particular indigenous groups understood the cycle of flooding and droughts around Lago Epecuén and thus inhabited and evacuated the area according to that cycle (Licitra 2014, 35). However, Julio Roca’s Campaña al Desierto, often translated into English as “Conquest of the Desert” and which commenced in 1878, eliminated indigenous groups from the area. Soon afterwards, Epecuén was founded, and, in a turn of events that recalls Ericka Beckman’s characterization of a commodity system in Latin America during the late nineteenth century, a train eventually was built after an Italian chemist recommended that the water of Lago Epecuén be bottled and sold (Licitra 2014, 36).7 By 1903, Epecuén became a full-fledged tourist destination. 7  While alluding to coffee trees and cotton plants, Beckman writes: “The production of these commodities occurs simultaneously, if invisibly, alongside the production of the locomotives, textiles, and threshing machines for which they are exchanged” (Beckman 2013, xiv). While water for Lago Epecuén hardly constitutes a national commodity for Argentina, the relationship between the construction of a rail line and the emergence of a product (bottled salt water) is worth noting.

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Genre Cinema and Seeing the Posthuman As stated above, Nixon’s study centers on post-colonial literature, and the narrativization of slow violence, by definition, preempts the use of spectacle. In turn, to transpose Nixon’s ideas of slow violence onto Daemonium, Los olvidados, and Santiso requires some adjustments. The three films are unabashedly genre films, and their science-fiction, thriller, and horror credentials solidify, in part, with the inclusion of spectacles of film violence characterized by shaky and swift camera movements, choppy editing, a dramatic soundtrack, and gore. However, in a move that I will expound upon below, I consider the three films’ potential not as narratives of slow violence per se. Instead, the movies make visible posthuman film sets shaped by slow violence in which the Anthropocene is reduced but not completely evacuated. Collectively, Daemonium, Santiso, and Los olvidados, among other films, signal a kind of turn in the production of kindred film genres in Argentina: science-fiction, horror, and thriller. Until about 2010, such genres in Argentina have been relegated to artisanal/underground/independent filmmaking and have been made on meager budgets.8 The three films possess higher production values than most of their predecessors, and Santiso and Los olvidados enjoyed support from the national film production agency, the Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales. And though Santiso and Los olvidados are part of a commercial turn in Argentine genre cinema, the two films themselves were hardly deemed as ushering in a paradigm shift in Argentine genre cinema. Santiso and Los olvidados were released in commercial cinemas, which, indeed, is a milestone for an Argentine horror film or thriller. However, both films were among the least watched during the respective years in which they were released: 2366 box-office tickets were sold for Los olvidados (Batlle 2018), and precise box-office numbers for Santiso are non-existent. Daemonium, in many respects, is a different animal from Santiso and Los olvidados and highlights the range of genre film production in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America. Daemonium is what one could call “una producción ultraindependiente” [a super-independent production], a moniker that distinguishes it from other independent films deemed

8  For an overview of the evolution of contemporary Argentine horror cinema, see Rodríguez (2014).

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so exclusively according to aesthetics and not necessarily production.9 Daemonium was made voluntarily without state support by a number of all-star figures working in Argentine genre cinema, including Pablo Parés, Walter Cornás, and Berta Muñiz of Farsa Producciones, Dany Casco, Chucho Fernández, Rocío Rodríguez Presedo, and Simon Ratziel. In addition to horror and science-fiction, the film traffics in cyberpunk and anime. Originally, Daemonium was released in five chapters via YouTube starting in 2011 and had no budget. In its current form, Daemonium has been edited into a single film and streams on Netflix. The film is usually panned by most viewers who post comments on IMDB. However, for a film made for nothing, Daemonium is phenomenal. The film is set in an anonymously future and post-apocalyptic world. In a convoluted narrative, a wealthy and powerful family hires mercenaries to capture Lucio Fucanelli (Cornás), who is a wizard. Fucanelli is then forced to open a portal to an underworld, and a demon, Rufus (Jotar Tarruella), emerges and proceeds to annihilate everyone. The wizard escapes but is hunted by different factions, and one mercenary, Razorback (Dany Casco), manages to survive by striking a deal with Rufus so as to acquire supreme power. Villa Epecuén serves as the backdrop for one of several post-­ apocalyptic realms and battles between factions. The dilapidated town appears onscreen for about fifteen minutes total during the entire film. For instance, below appears an image of Razorback after he makes a pact with Rufus. As is typical of canted camera angles, the framing accentuates a moment in which the world has gone awry, and the gathering storm shows how CGI reinforces the dystopic state of the setting (Fig. 6.1). In Santiso, Villa Epecuén serves a purpose that is distinct from the other two films. Salvador Santiso (Carlos Belloso) is a star journalist covering the War on Terror in Iraq and the fate of archeological relics. While attending a press conference at Iraq’s national archeological museum, the building is bombed by US aircraft and his daughter disappears. Santiso suffers from

9  I consciously use the term “ultraindependiente,” and it emerges from the Argentine context, more specifically, the discourse around low-budget horror cinema. Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre is Argentina’s most well-known horror film festival featuring exploitation cinema, horror, and science-fiction movies, among other genres. The term “ultra-independiente” appears on the festival’s website in the section entitled “Acerca de” (“About”) and, as stated above, serves to demarcate the degree of independence by which a film is produced. See “Acerca del festival.”

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Fig. 6.1  Storm clouds loom over an anonymous Villa Epecuén in Daemonium

hallucinations of his daughter and spends 10 years in a psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires. Upon release, Santiso’s marriage disintegrates and his daughter’s disappearance continues to plague him. In an extremely suggestive scouting location decision, Villa Epecuén serves as a stand-in for a war-torn Iraq during the first ten minutes of the film. Concrete ruins and twisted buildings abound as Santiso and his daughter occupy a Hummer that makes its way through the streets of an Iraqi city. The water surrounding Epecuén resides beyond the frame. Here, as in Daemonium, the decision to film in Epecuén is understandably an economic one. The production team need not construct Iraq from scratch. Instead, the destruction left over from the flooding of Epecuén provides an adequate backdrop for destruction elsewhere wrought for completely different reasons. Los olvidados is, in part, a reworking of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977), in which city dwellers venture to a hinterland only to meet their doom. In this case, a group of young professionals from Buenos Aires go to Villa Epecuén to make a documentary about the town’s flooding. Although the town appears uninhabited, the group is attacked by a family of “los olvidados” [the forgotten], who reside within the town’s slaughterhouse, which remains standing. Here, “los olvidados” are those abandoned by the state after the dam broke, and the film foregrounds the animosity that former residents of Epecuén harbor toward provincial and national governments. Epecuén is the primary setting of Los olvidados, and images of the town figure much more saliently than in the other two films. Villa Epecuén is

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Fig. 6.2  An aerial shot of Villa Epecuén in Los olvidados

ubiquitous and, as can be seen in Fig. 6.2, captured via aerial drone shots, long shots of crumbling concrete structures, and close-ups of particular spaces, such as the town cemetery. At times, Villa Epecuén is depicted briefly as an autonomous space emptied of human subjects; otherwise, conversations, squabbles, and violence unfold against the backdrop of the former resort. Martin Lefebvre’s discussion of cinematic landscapes is instrumental for understanding how Villa Epecuén can be viewed as a posthuman landscape. In “On Landscape in Narrative Cinema,” Lefebvre alludes to a text by Victor Freeburg titled The Art of Photoplay Making, which was published in 1918. Freeburg coins five categories to describe how landscapes in films become subservient to narrative. Neutral, informative, sympathetic, participating, and formative: the five categories compose a scale that conveys to varying degrees the external and internal conditions of a character (Lefebvre 2011, 64). For example, a neutral setting “relates indifferently” to character and his or her actions, and a formative setting shapes the character’s personality (Lefebvre 2011, 64). All of the five categories can be put into play when assessing the three of Argentine genre films and how Villa Epecuén functions vis-à-vis a character or group of characters. Though the terminology is absent, Freeburg’s ideas have become commonplace in film production design. Jane

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Barnwell’s Production Design for Screen provides a historical and conceptual window into the crucial role of production design in the realization of a film. For Barnwell and several well-known designers, film sets absolutely are conceived as subservient to the narrative, valued for their capacity to drive narrative (Barnwell 2017, 7), and convey character psychology (Barnwell 2017, 68–69; 84; 108; 116; 133; 174). More important for my analysis of Villa Epecuén as a posthuman film set is Barnwell’s commentary: “[s]et design constitutes a paradox in that set elements are visible in the frame yet often invisible in our viewing of the film. As ‘unconsciously registered backgrounds’ there to support the story, it can be argued that their invisibility is essential in the enjoyment of the narrative” (Barnwell 2017, 6). While Barnwell underscores the simultaneously conspicuous and inconspicuous nature of set designs, which can include landscapes, Lefebvre endows the spectator with an ability “to mentally ‘extract’ and ‘arrest’ landscape from the flow of narrative films to further investigate the relation of landscape to narrative in film” (Lefebvre 2011, 69). In short, a viewer can look past the progression of a story, characters, onscreen actions, and sound, in order to meditate on the landscape’s role in a narrative film. Moreover, Lefebvre conceives of such an ability on the part of a spectator irrespective of whether a landscape appears in a commercial genre film or a film that ostensibly possesses a more contemplative veneer in which an immobile camera and long takes—hallmarks of so-called slow cinema—enable one to reflect on a landscape. In an assertion that is crucial for making visible Villa Epecuén as posthuman ecology in a genre film, Lefebvre acknowledges the possibility of a viewer focusing on the landscape in the midst of an action spectacle: “[…] the spectator can still direct his or her attention toward the landscape in such a way as to momentarily break the narrative bond of subordination that unites the forest setting to the raging duel between the lead protagonists. And should this not happen during a first viewing, it might well occur with repeated ones” (Lefebvre 2011, 66) Concerning the three Argentine films, one can look beyond the narrative and narrative components to see, assess, and study Villa Epecuén. Moreover, it is crucial to note that Epecuén as a set design enables it to remain as slow violence and not an instance of meteorological spectacle wreaking environmental carnage à la films of the likes of The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004) when nature and/or climate attack. Rob Nixon couches his idea of slow violence around the politics of speed,

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and, as touched on earlier, for Nixon a cardinal impediment for representing slow violence is waning attention spans. And if Nixon describes in a somewhat open-ended fashion the need for drama in narratives of slow violence, he is suspicious of spectacle and even the cinematic. Nixon asks, “How do we bring home—and bring emotionally to life—threats that take time to wreak their havoc, threats that never materialize in one spectacular, explosive, cinematic scene?” (Nixon 2011, 31). Nixon does not train his eye on theories of cinema, or even written spectacles and possible receptions of spectacle. Nevertheless, he appears to conceive spectacle purely as an action spectacle with special effects, rapid editing, and fast camera movements.10 In doing so, Nixon, perhaps unknowingly, joins a line of film criticism that embraces a sometimes reactionary notion that fast cinema is meaningless willy-nilly and, at worst, indicative of a sort of lowest common denominator entertainment.11 Spectacles can produce meaning; one needs to look no further than the volumes of discursive criticism and criticism of films belonging to genres defined by and constituted by some form of spectacle, such as action cinema, horror, musicals, slapstick comedy, and pornography. Spectacle for Nixon remains out-of-bounds for representing slow violence because of the politics of speed and the dizzying pace of contemporary life. A cinematic action spectacle harmonizes with a dromology of current human subjectivity and implies that slow violence can, or should be, be perceived in textual form as if the meditative act of reading would retrain subjectivity to enable a reader to look for slow violence elsewhere. However, Lefebvre leaves open the possibility of seeing landscapes

10  Here, the term “action spectacle” alludes to the formal properties typical of an action film. Filmic spectacles can take vastly different forms depending on the genre: murderous violence in horror cinema, the dance and song number in a musical, and the so-­called money shot in pornography. 11  José Arroyo’s characterization of Mission Impossible (Brian DePalma, 1996) exemplifies an approach to action cinema in which the spectacle is vacant of meaning and exceeds narrative: “[Mission: Impossible] is built around set pieces […], each involving some element of action and ingenuity (from characters or film-makers). These scenes are woven through the film like songs and dances are in an old-­fashioned musical: it isn’t so much that they don’t tell us anything about the characters, but that their function as spectacle exceeds their function as narrative” (Arroyo 2000, 23–24). To be fair, Arroyo’s intervention is exceptional in that he is firmly aware of the challenges of locating meaning amidst cinematic spectacles. In other words, his starting point is an attempt to locate meaning in DePalma’s film and not an outright dismissal of all action cinema.

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regardless of spectacle. In Daemonium, Santiso, and Los olvidados, we are witness to violent spectacles as well as autonomous landscapes in which Villa Epecuén fills the entire frame. Whether as a backdrop for spectacle or otherwise, Villa Epecuén may be contemplated as a space that was formerly under the firm thumb of the Anthropocene. For nearly a century, humans managed salt water only for that water to evacuate from that very space a human system: a resort and economy consisting of hotels, parks, restaurants, streets, and stores. With the production of the three Argentine films, it would appear that the human has begun to encroach again upon a posthuman ecology via the very human activity of filmmaking. As an uninhabitable site, Villa Epecuén nevertheless remains posthuman and, thus, the films constitute a snapshot in which the posthuman and Anthropocene appear in tension. The ramifications for films of the likes of Daemonium, Santiso, and Los olvidados are instructive for the present moment in which the world is in the throes of climate change. In some sense, the three Argentine films are a continuation of a precedent in other national cinemas: using sites of disaster as sets. In post-World War II Germany from 1946 to 1949, so-­ called rubble films, such as Wolfang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns/The Murderers are Among Us (1946), are set amidst the bombed wreckage of German cities. Films set amidst the same disaster site are Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del Fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (2007), and Agustí Villaronga’s Pa Negre/Black Bread (2010). The three films make use of the town Belchite, which resides outside Zaragoza and was the site of a ferocious battle during the Spanish Civil War. The town was devastated, and Francisco Franco decided to leave the ruins as a reminder of the war. However, the three Argentine films are different from “rubble films” and the movies set in Belchite. The Argentine films join a handful of other recent movies in which the aftermath of ecological disasters provides the natural set of apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic cinematic narratives. It is as if computer graphics that built science-fiction sets for past films—think, Blade Runner or Alien—are no longer needed. Ecological disasters fashion apocalyptic settings, and it is only a question of time and an able location scout to discover the ideal disaster site for filming. Movies such as The Road (Hillcoat, 2009), the remake of Bad Lieutenant (Herzog, 2009) with Nicholas Cage, and Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin, 2012) all relied upon the carnage left behind by Hurricane Katrina. Akin to New Orleans, Villa Epecuén can be seen as an Argentine movie set wrought by

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ecological destruction. Nevertheless, Villa Epecuén differs from New Orleans in that the ruins are simply left there. While certain sectors of New Orleans have recovered better than others, no attempt has been made to recover Villa Epecuén. The former resort town of Villa Epecuén has become a posthuman film set that is ushered back into the Anthropocene through the human endeavor of cinema along with other activities, such as disaster tourism. In the introduction, I turned to a particular definition of posthuman in which the human is not jettisoned or canceled out but rather decentered and held in tension with the non-human. Villa Epecuén becomes a posthuman film set insofar as it features into a film and thus allows for the human to enter the space. To be sure, Villa Epecuén as film set is not some kind of harmonious balance between human and non-human. The cinematic endeavors that resulted in three Argentine genre films evidence that the human, albeit still kept at arm’s length, has crept back in the space to render it a posthuman film set. Yet, the human can only take hold temporarily through filming. It was impossible for film crews to stay in Villa Epecuén amidst the ruins; they filmed and then left on a daily basis. And the notion of cinema as a human endeavor should hardly come as a stretch: films are products of human intervention composed of a multitude of decisions about framing, sound, editing, color, mise-en-scène, and narrative, or lack thereof. Through cinema, Villa Epecuén was again brought into the Anthropocene. The argument of film as human endeavor can be juxtaposed against Stanley Cavell’s oft-cited take on the ontology of the image and what it means for what the human can exert. In The World Viewed, Cavell juxtaposes painting and photography, the former being “what painting wanted, in wanting connection with reality, was a sense of presentness—not exactly a conviction of the world’s presence to us, but of our presence to it” (Cavell 1979, 22). In contrast, photography, and, by extension, cinema, “overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, a way that could not satisfy painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction” (Cavell 1979, 23). And while I would contend that a film director’s choices and collaborations with their crew suggest human agency is not completely absent, Cavell’s extrapolation of his ideas onto spectatorship is crucial here for how cinematic consumption, irrespective of genre, cancels human agency:

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In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It is as though the world’s projection explains our forms of unknownness and of our ability to know. The explanation is not so much that the world is passing us by, as that we are displaced from our natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it. The screen overcomes our fixed distance; it makes displacement appear as our natural condition. (Cavell 1979, 40–41)

Lefebvre and Cavell, in turn, each hold out possibilities for a spectatorship of a posthuman film set. If Cavell’s notion of displacement of the human appears natural, then Lefebvre holds out the possibility of the ecological disaster as background being noticed. One might ask, then, what is to become of the possibility of Villa Epecuén being noticed? In her study of cinema and the Anthropocene, Jennifer Fay broaches another spectatorial possibility for films that rely on the ruins of ecological disaster for film sets. In her comments on films that capture the effects of atomic bomb detonations in Survival City, Nevada, Fay alludes to Walter Benjamin’s notion that cinema trains the human senses to accommodate the shocks of modern industrialization (Fay 2018, 66). Los olvidados, as well as scores of other films that narrativize environmental catastrophes, can catalyze people to act against ecological catastrophes. In addition, the three Argentine films taken together, can train the moviegoer, or better, the set designer or production company magnate, to understand that sites that have undergone an ecological disaster can nevertheless remain within the realm of the human via cinema. The analysis of filmic spaces in contemporary Argentine cinema often serves as a means of critiquing relationships between different sectors of the populace, whether it be along class, generational, religious, racial, and/or gender lines. In her examination of architecture in select Argentine films, Amanda Holmes’s insightful comments are symptomatic of such an approach to filmic space in Argentine cinema: “Architecture’s privileged role in contemporary Argentine cinema coincided with a time when the city was transforming itself from an urban center with interactions among diverse populations to a site reflecting a more Americanized lifestyle. […] Architecture mediates political needs in these films” (Holmes 2017, 139). Other critics, as well as films themselves, have weighed in on the changing relationships among people. In turn, Daemonium, Santiso, and Los olvidados arrive as a supplement to existing criticism of space and spatial dynam-

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ics in Argentine cinema. The three films offer something not through the narratives or actors per se, but rather through their landscapes. Albeit subsumed within a narrative, a spectatorship that lingers over the setting enables a form of the posthuman to emerge in contemporary Argentine cinema.

Works Cited Acerca del festival. Rojo sangre. Accessed May 10, 2022. http://rojosangre.quintadimension.com/2.0/bars/. Arroyo, José. 2000. Mission: Sublime. In Action/Spectacle Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. José Arroyo, 21–25. London: BFI. Barnwell, Jane. 2017. Production Design for Screen: Visual Storytelling in Film and Television. London: Bloomsbury. Batlle, Diego. 2018. Coco recuperó la punta en Argentina y se vivió el ‘efecto Oscar. Otros cines. Accessed May 4, 2022. https://www.otroscines.com/ nota?idnota=13103. Beckman, Ericka. 2013. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berman, Marshall. 1988. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Viking Penguin. Braidotti, Rossi, and Simon Bignall. 2019. Posthuman Systems. In Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process After Deleuze, ed. Rossi Braidotti and Simon Bignall, 1–16. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Harvard UP. Fay, Jennifer. 2018. Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmes, Amanda. 2017. Politics of Architecture in Contemporary Argentine Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ingram, Matthew. 2015. The Attention Economy and the Implosion of Traditional Media. Fortune. Accessed May 4, 2022. https://fortune.com/2015/08/12/ attention-­economy/. Iovino, Serenella. 2016. Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Lefebvre, Martin. 2011. On Landscape in Narrative Cinema. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 20 (1): 61–78. Licitra, Josefina. 2014. El agua mala: Crónica de Epecuén y las casas hundidas. Buenos Aires: Aguilar. Maya, Brian, dir. 2015. El expediente Santiso. Buenos Aires: 1971Cine, Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA), TJM.

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Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Onetti, Luciano, and Nicolás Onetti, dir. 2017. Los olvidados. Buenos Aires: Black Madala. Parés, Pablo, dir. 2015. Daemonium. Buenos Aires: Hydra Corp. Rodríguez, Carina. 2014. El cine de terror en Argentina: producción, distribución, exhibición y mercado (2000–2010). Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. 2003. Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. Translated by Kathleen Ross. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scarzanella, Eugenia. 1998. El ocio perionista: vacaciones y ‘turismo popular’ en Argentina (1943–1955). Entrepasados: Revista de Historia 7 (14): 65–84. Taylor, Astra, dir. 2008. Examined Life. New York: Zeitgeist Films. Vesco, Leandro.2018. Pablo Novak, el hombre de 88 años que custodia las ruinas de Villa Epecuén. La Nación. Accessed May 4, 2022. https://www.lanacion. com.ar/sociedad/la-­h istoria-­d e-­p ablo-­n ovak-­e l-­h ombre-­d e-­8 8-­a nos-­q ue-­ vive-­solo-­en-­las-­ruinas-­de-­lo-­que-­fue-­villa-­epecuen-­nid2128889. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 7

Catfish and Nanobots: Invasive Species and Eco-critical Futures in Alejandro Rojas Medina’s Chunga Maya Samuel Ginsburg

In a 1960 speech to representatives of sugarcane worker cooperatives, Fidel Castro identified the biggest threats to the future of the industry in Cuba: Francoist fascism, US imperialism, and ferrets? While socio-political and economic fears loomed over Castro’s agrarian reform projects, it was the ferret that most directly stood in the way of successful sugarcane harvests. The hurón cubano, or Cuban ferret, is actually a mongoose, originally brought to the island in the 1880s to combat rat and mouse infestations in sugarcane factories (Borroto-Páez 2009). The mongooses eventually moved beyond rodent control and instigated chaos in the Cuban ecosystem, preying on native species of birds, reptiles, amphibians, and other mammals (Lotti Soler 2015). Castro’s speech declares war on these pests, saying:

S. Ginsburg (*) Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6_7

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¿Por qué nosotros no vamos a luchar contra las plagas, si hemos luchado contra el imperialismo? … No sé qué latifundista fue el que para acabar con los ratones trajo los hurones, y ahora resulta que tenemos a los hurones, que son peores que los ratones. Pero ustedes mismos van a acabar con los hurones también en la caña; con fusilitos 22 y con lo que sea, van a acabar allí con todos los hurones, para que no se coman las gallinas, para que no se coman las gallinas y los pollos. (Castro 1960, 11) [Why shouldn’t we fight against plagues, if we have already fought against imperialism? … I don’t know what big landowner it was that brought the ferrets to exterminate mice, and now it turns out that we are stuck with ferrets, which are worse than mice. But you are going to finish ferrets off yourselves in the fields of sugarcane; with little 22 rifles and with whatever you can get hold of, you are going to finish all ferrets off, to prevent them from eating all the hens, the hens and the chickens]

In the speech, Castro compares the ferrets to US imperialism as infestations that should be eradicated. He further connects the ferret plague to latifundistas by identifying them as the source of the rodents, brought in to support an antiquated system of large, privately owned farms and mills. Seizing the ferret as a symbol of the desperate need to reshape Cuban agriculture, Castro identifies them as a tangible enemy to the public goal of making use of every inch of fertile land in Cuba for all Cubans. Sugarcane workers were told to take up arms against the ferrets, a call that framed the struggle more like a worker’s rebellion than an ecological dilemma. The destructive ferrets were also put in opposition to chickens and hens, much more useful animals in the quest to feed all Cubans and make the country agriculturally self-sufficient. This history and the rhetoric surrounding the ferret and other invasive species form the background of the 2017 science fiction short story collection Chunga Maya by Cuban author Alejandro Rojas Medina (Havana 1984). In the short story also titled “Chunga Maya,” Rojas briefly speculates on the evolutionary outcome of the present-day ferret, along with the chaos it could cause to the Cuban ecosystem and economy. He writes, “El superroedor transgénico se apareó con ejemplares mutantes de ratas locales y procrearon un engendro mucho más agresivo y grande que, depredando al ganado de toda clase, superó con creces los estragos causados por su supuesta presa” [The transgenic superrodent mated with mutant specimens of the local rats and they engendered a much more aggressive and bigger monster that, devouring cattle of all kinds, went way beyond any damages caused by their supposed prey] (2017, 91). In this

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future world, the ferret has mutated and grown to the point of preying on large cattle, a situation that threatened the country’s agricultural industry and its ability to feed its citizens. Introduced into the ecosystem artificially and for financial reasons, both the real-life history and Rojas’s futuristic speculation on the Cuban ferret speak to the dangers and consequences of the human manipulation of the natural order. The example also shows how the public perception of a non-native species can transform over time, from a possible solution to an uncontrollable predator. By citing an actual disruptive species from Cuba’s history, Rojas speculates on how debates over invasion, food production, and environmentalism may be framed in the future. Shortly after receiving the 2016 Premio Calendario for science fiction by the Asociación Hermanos Saíz for Chunga Maya, Rojas said in an interview that he sees science fiction as a warning for future generations. For him, the genre offers “escenarios distópicos y apocalípticos donde cosas muy malas pueden pasar. Es una forma de advertencia para que se logre evitar ese camino” [dystopian and apocalyptic scenarios in which very bad things can happen. It is a form of warning, so that we avoid taking that path] (Riquenes Garcia 2017). In Chunga Maya, Rojas imagines a dark future for Cuba, overrun by invasive nanobots and with militarized fumigators authorized to exterminate both the technological pests and those humans that build and propagate them. However, part of Rojas’s strategy for seeing into the future involves extrapolating on biological invasions that are currently affecting the Cuban environment. Extreme versions of real-life invasive species—genetically enhanced ferrets, mutant catfish, and radioactive marabú—populate Rojas’s stories, speculating on how ecological changes interact with social and political structures. Not only do the appearances of these particular invasive species ground Rojas’s science fiction stories specifically in Cuba, they also conjure up current debates over the future of environmentalism, sustainability, and consumption on the island. By highlighting the rhetoric and cultural assumptions involved in eliminating a supposed alien or invasive threat, Chunga Maya stresses the nationalistic and xenophobic rhetoric concerning environmental protection that makes it difficult to conduct important and incisive discussions about the future of climate change. In this chapter, I begin with a study of the rhetoric surrounding invasive species elimination, often connected to binary, nativist perspectives and an overestimation of human abilities to control nature. It must be noted that the intention of this chapter is to analyze the rhetorical

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manipulations of invasive species rhetoric, not to criticize the treatment of these real issues by the scientific community, even if the reduction of complex environmental phenomenon for a public audience contributes to the over-­simplified language used for political purposes. Next, I will take a closer look at two short stories from Rojas’s collection, “Fumigador” [Fumigator] and “Chunga Maya,” by paying special attention to the treatment of invasive species. These stories feature oversized catfish that are both kept as pets and threaten to terrorize Cuban sovereignty. By showing the non-­scientific factors that affect how the public labels species as invasive or dangerous, Rojas forces readers to recognize the role of divisive rhetoric in the framing of environmental crises. Finally, by analyzing the conclusion of “Chunga Maya,” which features redrawn human-catfish relations, I will look at how a posthumanist, interspecies solidarity could reframe environmental debates and strengthen proposed solutions to climate crises.

Rhetoric of Invasion: A Definitive War on Marabú The Cuban ferret was not the only disruptive species upon which Fidel Castro publicly declared war. The marabú, a weed-like legume plant originally from Southern Africa and also known as the sicklebush, was mentioned in at least four of Castro’s official speeches throughout the 1960s. Just like the ferret, it was believed that the marabú’s rapid spread across Cuba was interrupting the country’s ability to make use of all available fertile soil, and thus becoming an obstacle to the regime’s projects of agrarian reform and resource independence. In 1961, during the closing statement of the First National Meeting on Production, Castro promised to combat the plant’s negative effects in the province of Camagüey: “Le vamos a hacer la guerra definitiva al marabú, y vamos a empezar por esa provincia, que fue clásica del marabú” [We are going to wage war against marabú, and we are going to start here, in this province that was a typical place for marabú to grow] (1961, 37). In 1967, Castro doubled down on his anti-marabú message and folded the issue into his standard revolutionary rhetoric: “¡Guerra contra la maleza, guerra contra el marabú, guerra contra el subdesarollo, contra la miseria, contra la pobreza, guerra para lograr dominar a la naturaleza! ¿Y con qué espíritu? ¡Con el espíritu de los guerrilleros de la Sierra Maestra!” [War against weeds, war against marabú, war against underdevelopment, against misery, against poverty, war to achieve mastery over nature! And with what spirit? With the spirit of the

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guerilla fighters of Sierra Maestra!] (1967, 8). Marabú is seemingly implicated here for having a role in proliferating underdevelopment and poverty in Cuba. Castro went on to call for the formation of the “Brigada Invasora Che Guevara” to lead the fight against the sicklebush. By invoking both Guevara and the revolutionary fighters of Sierra Maestra, Castro connects this battle to those against the Bautista dictatorship and illustrates the severity with which he takes on this fight against the ecological invader. Even more notable is his stated goal to dominate nature. As previously seen in the story of the Cuban ferret and as will be shortly illustrated with the current catfish situation on the island, human attempts to dominate nature are often based on an over-confidence in one’s ability to control their surroundings, frequently leading to unintended ecological consequences. The marabú plant appears briefly in the Rojas’s short story “Chunga Maya,” with the mention of a radioactive strain that was spreading across the island following the installation of the second nuclear power plant in Cienfuegos. This detail implies that the first nuclear plant in Cienfuegos was completed, despite the fact that the real-life project, the Central Electronuclear Juraguá and its surrounding Ciudad electronuclear, was suspended following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the story, a special brigade was deployed to fight the bush, much like the Brigada Invasora Che Guevara suggested in Castro’s speech. Perception of the weed shifts by the end of the story, as the radioactive plant is later used as a weapon against a gargantuan catfish threatening to strangle the country. This ambiguity between the dangers and benefits of marabú may reference Cuba’s changing relationship with the plant. Though historically thought of as detrimental to the agricultural industry, the plant is now being lauded for creating a future for Cuban farming. A 2013 article in Diario de Cuba titled “Marabú, ¡gracias!” credited the plant with preventing land erosion, maintaining soil fertility, and protecting certain species of quail and guinea hen (Méndez Castelló 2013). In 2017, The Economist (2017) published “The Miracle of Marabú, Cuba’s Wonderful Weed,” outlining Cuba’s recent exportation of the plant, along with plans to explore its potential as a large-scale fuel source. Marabú as fuel would be an ironic transformation; Rachel Price notes that Cuban artists and filmmakers often connect representations of marabú to issues of fuel scarcity, as it spread particularly quickly during the Special Period when supplies of petroleum, which can be used to kill the plant, ran low (2015, 49). Rojas’s radioactive version connects the invasive bush to Cuban agricultural issues and its failed quest

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for energy independence. By including marabú in his stories about invasive species, Rojas invokes these debates over how issues of invasion and dependence are discussed, controlled, and reshaped over time. As is often the case with popular narratives of invasive or introduced species, public declarations of war against the marabú have the power to influence the perception and treatment of the weed. Many scholars within the field of environmental humanities have argued that popular environmental narratives can affect actual environmental policy. Environmental humanities scholars Susanna Lindström, Simon West, Tania Katzschner, M. Isabel Pérez-Ramos, and Hedley Twidle argue that biologists seeking public support for conservation efforts must often rely on catchy metaphors to explain complicated phenomena, leading to situations in which “environmental concerns are sometimes reduced to fast, simple, evocative, invasive narratives” (2015, 5). While such descriptions can aid short-term funding goals, they also have the ability to misconstrue ecological relationships in terms of decontextualized understandings of violence and justice. In deconstructing the “invasive” and “native” labels, Harriet Ritvo argues that framing ecosystems as such a binary conflict “ahistorically assumes the previous existence of a static biota without intruders, in which relations among the constituent species were balanced, if not harmonious” (2017, 173). Ritvo continues, “In many cases, the proliferation of introduced species is a symptom rather than a cause [of massive anthropogenic environmental impacts] … a reconsideration of a morally loaded rhetoric […] might make it easier to identify those causes and even to do something about them” (2017, 173). By relying on such reductive understandings of which species belong and which do not, it becomes more difficult to discuss environmental issues in a depth that could foster real solutions. As the attention given to climate change increases public awareness of resource scarcity, the ability to have specific, nuanced conversations could be an essential tool in averting further ecological disasters. One way to combat reductive environmental language is to highlight the often arbitrary labels assigned to different species. Among the many deciding factors in the public differentiation between invasive and native species is that plant or animal’s place within the popular imagination. Jonathon L. Clark (2015) argues that certain invasive species are treated and discussed differently, based on their presumed level of non-human charisma. The assigning of charisma to particular species often prioritizes particular biological features, such as vertebrates over invertebrates or the perceived ability of said animal to feel pain. Deciding which species are

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charismatic and which are not can also be based on such subjective factors as existing animated representations of said species (Can this animal be considered “cute”?), or on a particular species’ impact on the local agricultural economy (Can it be exported or marketed as an attraction?). This last issue helps explain why Florida’s orange trees, which likely arrived in the 1400s from Asia via Christopher Columbus, are legally and popularly considered native, while the bacteria and insects that threaten the state’s citrus industry are labeled as invasive (Cattelino 2017, 131). Neel Ahuja offers another example from the Caribbean: the rhesus monkeys brought to Puerto Rico in the 1930s as raw materials for the pharmaceutical industry and lauded as a symbol of universal scientific progress only later to be labeled as dangerous, disease-carrying pests once they no longer served their original purpose (2013, 195). In the case of Cuba, this all helps to understand how the public sentiment toward both ferrets and marabú has changed over time, as their places within the agricultural economy have shifted. The animal or plant’s position in the tourism industry can factor into their assignation of animal charisma; Rafael Borroto-Páez has shown that the creation of tourism-focused shooting preserves has helped justify the introduction of invasive cattle and other hooved mammals in Cuba (2009, 2287). It is likely also a factor that these cattle primarily feed on local flora, which is less likely to garner public sympathy than fauna. All of these factors highlight how scientific labels must contend with non-­ scientific factors when translated for public use and education. Aside from its effect on public funding and resources, invasive species rhetoric is often politicized as the already reductive narratives are conflated with issues of nationalism. It is no coincidence that Castro referred to ferrets, marabú, and US imperialism as “plagues.” Pseudo-scientific rhetoric of invasion and native species often lends a perceived legitimacy to xenophobia and racist violence; for example, former President Trump’s characterization of Latin American immigrants as “an invasion” of “animals” has instigated and directly or indirectly helped justify violence against Latinx Americans (Rucker 2019). Banu Subramaniam argues that language concerning biological invasions, especially when such species are referred to as “aliens,” is often fueled by globalization anxiety and can appear remarkably similar to nationalist, anti-immigrant speech. One of the most common tropes used against both human and biological immigrants is the fear of super-fertility, or the idea that these new invaders will reproduce at such a high level that their consumption of natural resources will overtake those who have been there for longer (Subramaniam 2001, 31). As is commonly

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the case for xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric, this narrative is particularly gendered as it places the blame on female plants and animals and their supposed uncontrollable sexuality. There is also a racialized fear of cross-contamination or biological miscegenation, as if these natural processes threaten an imagined purity attributed to local ecosystems. This framing of invasion inherently delineates who or what should be considered “native” to a particular landscape, de-historicizing past movement across physical and artificial borders and making judgments on who deserves or merits the resources produced in that area. Also, as can be seen in Castro’s rhetoric concerning ferrets and marabú, the presence of an invader provides useful scapegoats for domestic environmental and economic crises, offering overly reductive solutions to very complicated situations, which can lead to unintended negative ecological consequences. The politicized narrative that ecological crises could be solely caused by invasive species, or that their annihilation would single-handedly lead to increased prosperity and a return to the natural order, is based on a speculative model of terraformation. Terraformation, as both a real-world practice and science fiction motif, traditionally involves the manipulation of other planets’ natural systems to make them more suitable for human inhabitation, or the manipulation of earthly ecology to counteract harmful changes in our planet’s environment. The process and narratives surrounding terraformation speak to the relationship between people, political systems, and the natural world. Chris Pak argues, “Terraforming narratives often entail a consideration of economic, social, political and cultural relationships and strategies for negotiation and decision making. Issues of voice and the legacy of colonial history are central to their subject matter” (2016, 12). I argue here that this consideration happens prior to any attempt at physically altering the landscape. Before any terraforming action can be undertaken, an initial judgment must be made over what type of landscape is acceptable and what needs to be changed. In the case of invasive species, this judgment includes deciding what plants or animals belong in a certain space, and which ones can and must be eliminated. Terraformation, which can be described as the implementation of order and civilization on an otherwise uninhabitable landscape, is by definition a colonizing act. Pak continues, “Terraforming stories are underpinned by a will to transform planets according to a predetermined vision, often one that is homeworld-centric, in that new planets are terraformed against a blueprint” (2016, 12). Invasive or introduced species that reshape the ecosystem can be cast as symbols or legacies of colonial rule. It is thus no

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surprise that Castro’s speeches against the ferrets and marabú also connect these invasions both historically to Spanish colonialism and symbolically to US imperialism. At the same time, Castro’s own ecological interventions suggest that he was not necessarily against terraformation, but merely had a different blueprint in mind for the final product. As this discussion on terraformation shows, science fiction offers fertile ground for conversations about climate change, resource scarcity, and invasive species. Science fiction narratives of invasion, no matter which political or social viewpoint is prioritized, are often rooted in the historic colonization and destruction of the environment for economic gain. As John Rieder writes: For enslavement, plague, genocide, environmental devastation, and species extinction following in the wake of invasion by an alien civilization with vastly superior technology—all of these are not products of the fevered imaginations of science fiction writers but rather the bare historical record of what happened to non-European people and lands after being “discovered” by Europeans and integrated into the capitalist world economy from the fifteenth century to the present. In fact, the lexicon of science-fictional catastrophes might profitably be considered as the obverse of the celebratory narratives of exploration and discovery, the progress of civilization, the advance of science, and the unfolding of racial destiny that formed the Official Story of colonialism. (2005, 343–4)

Whether in celebration of colonization’s supposed contributions or as a challenge to the official narratives that minimize its horrors, science fiction has borrowed from this ongoing conflict a vocabulary with which to understand the intersections of humanity, environment, technology, and power. Not only does science fiction facilitate the uncovering of the historic link between human and environmental colonialism, it also highlights the role of language in maintaining and subverting those oppressive structures. As texts like Chunga Maya show, science fiction has the power to illuminate environmental issues that are often overlooked or deemphasized behind narratives (both legitimate and not) of technological advancement, scientific discovery, or economic stability. By deconstructing the language surrounding ecological crises, such as the label of “invasive species,” Rojas’s stories question the politics, violence, and possibilities within much environmental debate.

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Possibly because of the colonial history of the region and the fear that islands will find themselves on the front lines of rising sea levels, recent Caribbean science fiction has seen the creation of many films and texts that could be considered climate fiction. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert argues that the rise of eco-critical art and literature in the region can be attributed to the transformation of the Caribbean landscape: “The rapid deterioration of the environment in the Caribbean region, which has taken place within the lifetime of many of its residents, has led to a ‘sense of ending,’ to the apocalyptic dread of a potential ecological disaster that can erase the islands, their peoples, and cultures” (2010, 114). This “apocalyptic dread” has been the springboard upon which many Caribbean authors and filmmakers have based their fictions of ecological crisis, speculating on deadly waves and rising waters (Rita Indiana’s 2015 novel La mucama de Omicunlé and Tomás Piard’s 2010 film La noche de juicio), food scarcity (Rafael Acevedo’s 2014 novel Al otro lado del muro hay carne fresca and Eduardo del Llano’s 2014 film Omega 3), and a depleted ozone layer (Nuria Dolores Ordaz Matos’s 2010 novel Entremundos), among other potential emergencies. Artists and writers have been forced to speculate on climate change not only due to the topic’s urgency but also because of the ways that environmental issues are often ignored or delegitimized in popular rhetoric. Paravisini-Gebert continues: In the Caribbean region, where post-colonial politics, foreign controlled development, and the struggle for economic survival has for many decades forced environmental concerns out of the mainstream of national discourse, writers and artists have responded to increasing fears of global warming, food insecurity, habitat losses, mangrove destruction, and the uncontrolled tourism-related development with eloquent defenses of the fragile ecologies of the islands in the name of the nation. (2010, 114)

Paravisini-Gebert highlights another supposed binary within official rhetoric concerning the environment—that people and governments must choose between environmentalism and economic development. This represents yet another obstacle to a clear explanation of natural phenomena and the importance of preservation to a public audience. While eco-critical literature and art may or may not affect change in public policy or perspective, texts like Rojas’s Chunga Maya critique and push the boundaries of the ways nature is discussed, treated, manipulated, and saved.

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Clarias as Crisis and Solution In Rojas’s short story “Fumigador,” nanobot fumigator José González knows that he is unwelcome as he searches rundown apartment buildings for the high-tech pests and those that create them. In José’s words, the first nanobot outbreak plunged the country into “otra de nuestras más violentas crisis económicas y alimentarias” [another one of our most violent economic and food crisis] (Rojas Medina 2017, 10), implying that this future Cuba is still recovering from another Special Period-like depression. Since that crisis, unauthorized nanobot production has become the domain of the Nanoplague Control Center and its fumigators. To protect himself and his expensive equipment, José brings Silvia, a giant mutant catfish (or Claria omega) that can walk out of water for short amounts of time. Silvia easily gobbles up any projectiles lobbed at José by the angry public, along with the bodies of pigeons found in her way. While José treats Silvia like a guard dog, he mentions other uses for the catfish within this dreary society: “Su capacidad de alcanzar enormes tamaños, la habilidad de reptar fuera del agua varios cientos de metros y el devorar y digerir cualquier materia la convertía, gracias a la prominente suciedad citadina, en un vehículo único, con combustible gratis” [Its capacity to grow to a huge size, the ability to creep out of water for a few hundred meters and devour and digest any matter turned it, thanks to the prominent filthiness of the city, into a unique kind of vehicle, with free fuel] (Rojas Medina 2017, 12). This attempt at turning the giant catfish into eco-friendly public transit appears to be too little, too late, as a worldwide freshwater shortage made the project unsustainable. This infrastructural failure forces many to turn to these urban leviathans for cheap sustenance, though José mentions that synthetic food remains the government’s preferred solution for the nutritional crisis (Rojas Medina 2017, 10). Silvia’s presence in the story highlights the contention surrounding the government’s response to the nanobot plague and conjures up present-day conversations about food scarcity, alternative fuel sources, and water pollution. The image of the mutant claria is especially striking because, just as with the genetically enhanced ferrets and the radioactive marabú, it alludes to a real-life invasive species staking out its place in the Cuban ecosystem. As a solution to the food crisis stemming from the fall of the Soviet Union, the catfish were brought to Cuba from Malaysia and Thailand in 1999 to be bred in freshwater tanks. However, intense rains from hurricanes Michelle in 2001 and Isidore and Lily in 2002 allowed the fish to proliferate

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throughout the island (Grogg 2009). Said to clog storm drains and destroy local fish species, the claria has become a symbol of the government’s lack of foresight. Due to the rise of smartphones and internet access in the era in which it spread, it has also become possibly Cuba’s first “viral” invasive species, as unconfirmable stories, videos, and images of the catfish supposedly walking down Cuban streets have appeared on blogs and YouTube. Conversations over the animal’s “bad reputation” have taken on a life of their own. A 2013 article in Diario de Cuba claimed that “la introducción de la claria no ha estado exenta de polémica, pues tiene fama de ‘predador.’ Hay humoristas que la hacen objeto frecuente de chistes” [the introduction of claria has been polemical, because it has the reputation of being a predator. There are comedians that frequently make fun of it] (Agencias 2013). Months earlier, the state-run publication Granma claimed that public perception of the claria was improving: Poco a poco pierde fuerza aquel rechazo que inicialmente hicieron muchos ciudadanos: unos por desconocimiento o falta de información y otros dejados llevar quizás por la infeliz denominación de ‘pez gato’, impresionados por la apariencia externa del animal o por leyendas y comentarios en torno a sus ‘extraños’ hábitos alimentarios, sin desconocer la forma poco sugerente de presentación que caracterizó al producto en los primeros tiempos. … La mala fama, en fin, con que a inicios del actual milenio llegó desde Tailandia ese inquieto habitante del reino acuático, pierde intensidad, al tiempo que su carne gana adeptos entre quienes la consumen en filetes, en picadillo condimentado o en otras variantes no menos nutritivas. (Batista Valdés 2013) [Little by little, citizens that initially rejected them change their minds: in some cases, they rejected it due to ignorance or lack of information, and in others because of the unhappy denomination of ‘cat fish,’ impressed as they were by the external appearance of the animal or by legends and comments about its ‘strange’ feeding habits, while also influenced by the unappetizing way in which this commodity was presented at first. … In the end, the bad reputation that accompanied this restless inhabitant of the watery world when it arrived from Thailand at the beginning of this millennium, diminishes, while its meat gains fans amongst those that eat it in fillets, as seasoned picadillo, or in other no less nutritious ways.]

While the Granma article blames the initial mistrust of the catfish on superficial reasons, Rojas’s representation of the future mutant version plays off of current fears over official food policies and shortsighted environmental manipulations. Other than protecting her owner from

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projectiles, Silvia’s chief concern in “Fumigador” is a lack of fresh water into which she could lay her eggs. Even if the catfish could represent a legitimate food source in this future world, there still seems to be little infrastructure in place to make it sustainable. “Fumigador” juxtaposes the catfish infestation with the nanobot outbreak, connecting the divisive environmental rhetoric to that used to talk about invasive technologies. Like the claria issue, the nanobot infestation began as a state-sanctioned project that eventually spiraled out of control. The nanobots and those that still create them are treated like enemy combatants. Soldiers like José are dispatched to deal with the nanobots, with the goal of elimination instead of capture or investigation. The safety of the people caught up in this battle is neglected; José gives a quick warning to residents of infected buildings that their personal electronics and life-­support machines will be affected by his gun but does not appear to give them any time to evacuate (Rojas Medina 2017, 8). Residents are considered guilty by association just for living in infected buildings, an accusation that ignores the social and economic factors that could explain both living in poor conditions and the need to deal in illegal contraband. José’s language while addressing them, despite his sympathy for their situation, shows the place of these poor citizens within the nanobot crisis: “¡Comemierdas! ¡Banda de malagradecidos! … ¡Acaso quieren regresar a la época de los nanobots que flotaban por las nubes en la que uno tenía miedo tanto de respirar como de cagar!” [Comemierdas! What a gang of ingratiates! … Perhaps you want to go back to the age of nanobots floating between the clouds, when one was as afraid of breathing as of taking a dump!] (Rojas Medina 2017, 9). The people most affected by the economic depression and the nanobot plague are seen as ungrateful and threatened into compliance, despite the fact that they were not the ones to cause the problem in the first place. Similar to the issues surrounding the environmental crises, militaristic rhetoric over new technologies creates a situation in which human lives can be sacrificed for an imagined greater social good. The comparison with invasive species also highlights the role of economic impact in the labeling of invasive technologies as dangerous. Despite the disastrous consequences, nanobot creation has not stopped in Cuba; José is merely hunting the unauthorized production of the tiny machines. His primary job is to “regular la oleada de productores de nanobots no controlados por el Estado. Estos cuentapropistas solo necesitaban una impresora 3D barata y la programación adecuada” [regulate the wave of producers of nanobots that not under state control. These self-employed

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people only needed a cheap 3D printer and the right software] (10). Independent nanobot producers are seen as an uncontrollable force, though their primary crime is not building the nanobots but the fact that they do it outside of the official structure where the state can control and profit from their uses. “Cuentapropistas,” a term used in today’s Cuba to mean self-employed citizens, is a notable designation for these marginalized contraband builders, as the term was previously stigmatized and demonized by Fidel Castro but later embraced by Raúl Castro (Henken and Vignoli 2016, 161). Another connection to the current Cuban economy is the fact that José has created a secondary source of income within his state-sanctioned position. He says, “Como siempre, cobraría por mi discreción ante aquellos casos de infecciones no graves. Del salario no se vive” [As always, I would get paid for turning a blind eye to those non-­ serious infection cases. No one can live on their salary] (Rojas Medina 2017, 11). Far from orthodox in his desire to eliminate the nanobot threat, José grants himself the ability to decide which cases are minor enough for him to just ask for a bribe and move on. The casual nature of this corruption suggests that working entirely within the official rules is not economically stable. By the end of the story, José decides to retire as a fumigator and give classes so that those making the illegal nanobots could do so safely and avoid the authorities. This move offers an alternative model to invasive technology and species control, based on non-state education programs and cooperation instead of war and violence. In the story, the state has failed to control the spread of the claria or the nanobots, both of which were then coopted by local groups as mechanisms for obtaining resources unavailable through sanctioned means, ripping away the state’s claim to dictating and defining the relationship between those who belong and those labeled as dangerous invaders. Rejecting his orders of state-­ sanctioned violence and dedicating himself to defending the area from the new fumigators, José shows a path toward solidarity, a reimagining of the Cuban need and creativity in seeking solutions beyond the state, that starts with understanding the roots of crises on a deeper level rather than merely trying to eliminate them. While “Fumigador” introduces the figure of the claria to Rojas’s distant Cuban future, the collection’s titular story, “Chunga Maya,” goes even further with the fish’s environmental and political potential. “Chunga Maya” tells the story of an expedition to capture and kill Chunga Maya, a giant catfish also referred to as an “aberración” and “el Terror de las Antillas” (Rojas Medina 2017, 88–9). Ana, Membrillo the cook, and

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Captain Mayito are the only surviving crewmembers of the Chencha Tuerta ship. Volunteering to take on such a perilous mission comes not only from the desire for eternal fame but also a desolate economic landscape that offers few other options; Ana notes that her alternatives included annihilating its body to survive or succumbing to the pandemic of murders related to workplace stress (Rojas Medina 2017, 88). Ana also shares with Mayito a deep anger at the world, something the captain noticed in her eyes the first time they met. More than an obsession with a giant catfish, Ana sailing into almost certain death highlights the economic and social issues in this dystopian future. Even their high-tech appendages— Mayito’s bionic claws and Ana’s pirated “wikimemoria” technology—do not shield them from these difficult times. Watching these two technologically modified humans struggle in yet another economic depression challenges the transhumanist, utopian visions of the future that link techno-scientific advancement and social progress. Ana uses her wikimemory to recall Mayito’s story, originally told to her by Membrillo. Mayito had been sent out of the city by his mother after his father suffered a work-related mental breakdown. He later joined the “Brigada de Chapeo de marabú radiactivo Guillermón Moncada” [Guillermón Moncada Anti-Marabú Veneer Brigade] to eradicate the nuclear weed, similar in both mission and use of historical figure to the “Brigada Invasora Che Guevara” proposed by Fidel Castro. As with the rhetoric around invasive species, eradication plans often take on patriotic and militaristic tones. It was at this time that the Claria Omega, a genetic cross of Thai and Malaysian catfish, was born and escaped to wreak havoc on the island: “Abarcando muy pronto desde la desembocadura de los ríos Cuyaguateje, en Pinar del Río; Almendares, en la Habana, hasta el Iabo, en Ciego de Ávila” [Including from very early on from the mouth of rivers Cuyaguateje in Pinar del Río; Almendares in Havanna, to Iabo, in Ciego de Ávila] (Rojas Medina 2017, 91). Just like the allusions to Cuban military history, Rojas’s citation of specific Cuban geography grounds the story in a particularly Cuban environmental history; in “Chunga Maya,” he immediately compares the catfish’s plague to that of the ferret, especially since both “invasive” species were actually introduced for agricultural purposes before their populations spun out of control. In the story, the government’s treatment of giant catfish, which after six months could weigh around 350 kilograms, serves as an example of how the framing of invasive species can depend on its utility to the state, in this case to the state’s goal to end the food shortage. Officially, killing a claria in the water

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was considered a service to the community, while killing one on land was punishable by up to twenty years in a forced labor camp (Rojas Medina 2017, 92). Arriving at such drastic measures while dealing with a self-­ inflicted environmental catastrophe highlights the lack of foresight in the government’s decision to introduce such an unrivaled predator. Mayito, who was always looking for dangerous challenges, becomes one of the first claria fishermen, a profession considered both “una de las mejores cotizadas en el país y también la ideal para los aspirantes a suicidas” [one of the better paid in the country and also the ideal one for candidates to kill themselves] (Rojas Medina 2017, 92). Due to their enormous size and nearly impenetrable digestive systems, the best way to kill a claria was to be swallowed up by the enormous fish and tear apart its stomach with a “motomachete” from the inside (Rojas Medina 2017, 93). The use of the futuristic machete harkens back to Castro’s speeches and campaigns that called for all Cubans to spend time working in sugarcane fields, as both a contribution to the agricultural industry and sign of solidarity to the political and social project. Just as the catfish itself has been extrapolated into the future, the idea of taking up machetes for the good of the country has reached a new extreme, as claria fishermen risk their lives to feed the people. The question of human rights afforded to these workers comes up again when Mario uses a special supersonic bait that has the power to attract catfish underwater but also can cause painful side effects in the fishermen: “afectaba al sistema nervioso humano de manera tan violenta que provocaba orgasmos o la defecación instantánea de los infelices que lo escuchaban fuera del agua” [affected the human nervous system in such a violent fashion that provoked orgasms or instant defecation among those unhappy enough to listen to it out of the water] (Rojas Medina 2017, 94). These physical dangers are justified with nationalist rhetoric, as these fishermen are said to be working for the common good. In Mayito’s case, an accident with one of these electronic baits in combination with too much rum leads him to take on the Chunga Maya with an uncharged motomachete and no wetsuit. Though he goes missing for many days, he finally reappears naked and hairless, with a voracious sexual appetite and a strong desire to reunite with the monster that held him in her stomach and then let him go. Hunting the Chunga Maya becomes both a religious and sexual experience for Mayito and many others, showing how both in the story and in real life this catfish has taken on a supernatural persona based on curiosity and infatuation.

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The story then returns to the crew of the Chencha Tuerta, who are preparing for another battle with the allusive Chunga Maya. While searching for the giant fish, Mayito wants to fly above the ship to get a better view, and asks Ana whether they will have enough moringa diesel to go for a short flight (Rojas Medina 2017, 98). The moringa, originally from India and commonly known as the drumstick tree, became a minor obsession to Fidel Castro, who believed that the plant’s leaves, fruit, seeds, and roots could help with Cuba’s nutritional crisis. In 2010, Castro dedicated one of his “Reflexiones” in the newspaper Granma to the mass production of moringa plants, praising them as “fuentes inagotables de carne, huevo, y leche, fibras de seda que se hilan artesanalmente, y son capaces de suministrar trabajo a la sobre y bien remunerado, con independencia de edad o sexo” [inexhaustible sources of meat, eggs, and milk, fibers of silk that are woven in an artisan manner and can provide plenty of well-paid jobs, no matter the age or the sex of those employed] (2010). While the offerings of the moringa tree are commonly consumed in parts of Africa, South Asia, and within the alternative health community in the US, Castro was derided for his faith in the foreign plant. The backlash was similar to the initial reaction to the introduction of the clarias, or throughout his Ubre blanca (White Udder) project, which involved genetically engineered cows that were bred to produce more milk than usual. Whether or not his plans worked, public reception was affected by the image of Castro as an obsessed tinkerer. As Daniel Whittle and Orlando Rey Santos have argued, debates over Cuba’s history of environmental and agricultural policies often “proceed narrowly along ideological grounds,” so that one’s view of the Castro regime in general often overtakes any analysis of the country’s plans to promote nutritional sustainability (2006, 75). By citing the moringa in a collection that already alludes to the history of marabú, ferrets, and clarias, Rojas points out the role of political polarization and rivalries in the supposedly scientific process of designating a particular species as useful for or a menace to the state. Divisive politics and public perception can seep into and influence the adoption of environmental policies, potentially forcing researchers to invest more time and effort into less promising solutions that test well in the public arena, or stifling work on less popular solutions with more potential. The fact that in Rojas’s story the moringa proves to be an alternative fuel source signals the need to separate scientific research from public and political pressure. After an unsuccessful day of hunting, Ana goes to bed and returns to her wikimemory to illustrate the political impact of the Chunga Maya.

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Scientists had noted that even stranger than the catfish’s size was its behavior; instead of swimming out to the ocean, it decided to circle back and surround the Cuban archipelago (Rojas Medina 2017, 102). As Ana’s wikimemory recounts, “Con lo que la isla se encontró afectada por un nuevo bloqueo, esta vez surgido no por caprichos, doctrinas políticas o negocios de hombres, sino por la mano irracional y despiadada de la naturaleza” [As a result, the island suffered a new blockade, this time not because of whims, political doctrines or humankind’s business, but because of the irrational and merciless hand of nature] (Rojas Medina 2017, 102). This new blockade separated Cuba physically from the rest of the Caribbean and presumably the United States, while mysterious electromagnetic pulses emanating from the enormous catfish made it impossible to cross the area by water or air. Although the official account blames the irrational and ruthless hand of nature, Rojas’s story emphasizes many times the fact that the decision to both breed and introduce the Claria omega was part of a planned government project, just like the decision to bring the clarias to Cuba in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The lack of foresight given to disrupting the ecology to such a great degree, along with the ability to blame nature if it doesn’t go to plan, highlights how rhetoric around invasive or introduced species can alternately over- and under-estimate human responsibility in environmental crises. Instead of blaming the monstrous catfish, more attention should be given to those officials who pushed for the plan. Also, Rojas’s characterization of Chunga Maya as a new blockade underlines the current connection between the US embargo of Cuba and the issue of food scarcity, especially according to public perception. In this new blockade, it is the solution to the nutritional crisis that created the political isolation, and not the other way around. By showing Cuba shut off from its neighbors due to its own environmental mistakes, the story suggests that climate change solutions should supersede political and ideological battles. The story ends with the crew finding and confronting Chunga Maya, though they cannot bring themselves to kill the beast. Mayito, with the fish’s help, recognizes that his obsession with hunting her down had long ago transformed into a romantic connection. As the giant catfish explains to him, something has transformed inside them both, and they no longer have to be afraid of their intense love for each other. The captain agrees to stay on as co-leader of Chunga Maya’s sex cult on Claryantis, an artificial city constructed by her loyal followers in the Bartlett Trough, the deepest point in the Caribbean Sea. Chunga Maya also allows Ana to return home

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with a few of her scales, so that she could claim to have successfully completed the mission: “Llevarás como trofeo el pedazo de aleta de Madre que el capitán le arrancó con su arpón. Eso y tu testimonio serán suficiente evidencia de que la has exterminado. ¡Ana, la pescadora del Terror de las Antillas!” [You will bring as a trophy a piece of Madre’s fin that the captain took away with his harpoon. This and your testimony will be enough evidence that you exterminated her. Ana, the fisher of the Terror of the Antilles!] (Rojas Medina 2017, 118). Ana is granted a level of mercy that she would not have originally given the giant fish, forcing her and the reader to reconsider their relationships to animals, the environment, and the concept of who belongs in a particular place in the world. Chunga Maya hopes that Ana’s triumphant rhetoric will end the hunt, so that the fish, Mayito, and the rest of her followers can live in peace. By allowing both Chunga Maya and the human crew to escape unharmed, Rojas suggests a different model and vocabulary for understanding invasive species. The catfish still refers to herself as a terror and her scales as a trophy, suggesting that the rhetoric surrounding invasive species may only change once the relationships between humans and animals are transformed. Chunga Maya’s deal with Ana and partnership with Mayito signal a reframing of interspecies relations and classifications. In particular, the bond between Chunga Maya and Mayito is written as a relationship between two equal partners, and not as a more advanced organism taking advantage of a lesser one. Admittedly, this human-animal relationship is written here in a way that allows the giant catfish to consent to such a scenario, which is not possible outside of this fictional world. Still, Julie Livingston and Jasbir K. Puar write that the concept of “interspecies” represents an effort to “go beyond species by emphasizing relationships over types and by joining a politics that queries the origins, products, and uses of classificatory hierarchies” (2011, 7; emphasis in original). By highlighting and questioning categorizations that seek to separate and apply limits between and among species, interspecies solidarity can push back on a biopolitics based in taxonomies and androcentric exceptionalism. This reframing is in essence a posthumanist project, as “posthumanism seeks to destabilize the centrality of human bodies and their purported organic boundedness” (Livingston and Puar 2011, 4). In the same way that posthumanism articulates the arbitrary and repressive nature of the boundaries and classifications put on and between human bodies, interspecies solidarity can rewrite the classifications that position humans against animals or supposed invasive species against supposed native ones. By the end of the

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story “Chunga Maya,” humans are no longer dictating the power dynamics between them and the environment; instead, agreements are formed between humans and non-humans in a way that considers the needs of both sides. Decentering the human, combined with the allusions to invasive species throughout the collection, opens the door for rethinking the way we classify non-­human species and the role of humans in causing and correcting environmental crises. In both “Chunga Maya” and “Fumigador,” the militarized and xenophobic rhetoric surrounding invasive species only exacerbates the critical ecological issues that require cooperation, nuanced discussion, and political and social solidarity. By placing the short stories of Chunga Maya in an environmental dystopia, Rojas not only gives readers a glimpse of what nature could look like in the future, he suggests that we must also rethink how we conceptualize nature before we can hope to rectify our destruction of it.

Works Cited Agencias. 2013. El Gobierno insiste en la claria para aumentar la produccuón de alimentos. Diario de Cuba.  https://diariodecuba.com/cuba/1364495851_ 2389.html Ahuja, Neel. 2013. Notes on Medicine, Culture and History of Imported Monkeys in Puerto Rico. In Centering Animals in Latin American History, ed. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici, 180–205. Durham: Duke University Press. Batista Valdés, Pastor. 2022. El pez claria pierde mala fama y gana adeptos. Granma. Accessed May 5, 2022. http://www.granma.cu/granmad/ 2013/07/10/nacional/artic03.html. Borroto-Páez, Rafael. 2009. Invasive Mammals in Cuba: An Overview. Biological Invasions 11: 2279–2290. Castro, Fidel. 1960. La clausura de la reunion de coordinadores de cooperativas cañeras. Accessed May 5, 2022. http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1960/esp/f100860e.html. ———. 1961. Las conclusiones de la primera reunion nacional de produccion. Accessed May 5, 2022. http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/ esp/f280861e.html. ———. 1967. Inicio a las actividades de la Brigada Invasora de Maquinarias. Accessed May 5, 2022. http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1967/ esp/f301067e.html. ———. 2010. La alimentación y el empleo sano. Granma. Accessed May 5, 2022. http://www.granma.cu/granmad/secciones/ref-­fidel/art281.html.

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Cattelino, Jessica R. 2017. Loving the Native: Invasive Species and the Cultural Politics of Flourishing. In The Routledge Companion to Environmental Humanities, ed. Ursula K.  Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann, 129–137. New York: Routledge. Clark, Jonathon L. 2015. Uncharismatic Invasives. Environmental Humanities 6: 29–52. Grogg, Patricia. 2009. Exotic Fish has Bad Reputation but High Yields. Tierramérica. Accessed May 5, 2022. http://www.ipsnews.net/2009/05/ exotic-­fish-­has-­bad-­reputation-­but-­high-­yields. Henken, Ted, and Gabriel Vignoli. 2016. Entrepreneurial Reform, Market Expansion, and Political Engagement: Risks and Opportunities for Cuba Today. In A New Chapter in US-Cuba Relations, ed. Eric Hershberg and William LeoGrande, 161–177. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lindström, Susan, et  al. 2015. Invasive Narratives and the Inverse of Slow Violence: Alien Species in Science and Society. Environmental Humanities 7: 1–40. Livingston, Julie, and Jasbir K. Puar. 2011. Interspecies. Social Text 29 (1): 3–14. Lotti Soler, Luis. 2015. La mangosta, vector de la rabia, su introducción en Cuba. Correo científico médico de Holguín 9 (1): 128–131. Méndez Castelló, Alberto. 2013. Marabú, ¡gracias!. Diario de Cuba. Accessed May 5, 2022. http://www.diariodecuba.com/cuba/1382721171_5665.html. Pak, Chris. 2016. Terraformation: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. 2010. Caribbean Utopias and Dystopias: The Emergence of the Environmental Writer and Artist. In The Natural World in Latin American Literatures: Ecocritical Essays on Twentieth Century Writings, ed. Adrian Taylor Kane, 113–135. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Price, Rachel. 2015. Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island. New York: Verso. Rieder, John. 2005. Science Fiction, Colonialism, and the Plot of Invasion. Extrapolation 46 (3): 373–394. Riquenes García, Yunier. 2017. Diez minutos con…Alejandro Martín Rojas Medina. Claustrofobias. Accessed May 5, 2022. https://www.claustrofobias. com/2017/02/diez-­minutos-­alejandro-­martin-­rojas-­medina. Ritvo, Harriet. 2017. Invasion/Invasive. Environmental Humanities 9 (1): 171–174. Rojas Medina, Alejandro. 2017. Chunga Maya. La Habana: Ediciones Abril. Rucker, Philip. 2019. ‘How do you stop these people?’ Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Looms Over El Paso Massacre. Washington Post. Accessed May 5, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-­do-­you-­stop-­these-­ people-­trumps-­anti-­immigrant-­rhetoric-­looms-­over-­el-­paso-­massacre/2019/ 08/04/62d0435a-­b6ce-­11e9-­a091-­6a96e67d9cce_story.html.

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Subramaniam, Banu. 2001. The Aliens Have Landed! Reflections of the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 2 (1): 26–40. The Economist. 2017. The Miracle of Marabú, Cuba’s Wonderful Weed. The Economist. Accessed May 5, 2022. https://www.economist.com/the-­ americas/2017/06/01/the-­miracle-­of-­marabu-­cubas-­wonderful-­weed. Whittle, Daniel, and Orlando Rey Santos. 2006. Protecting Cuba’s Environment: Efforts to Design and Implement Effective Environmental Laws and Policies in Cuba. Cuban Studies 37: 73–103.

PART III

Posthuman Others

CHAPTER 8

Andean Cyborgs: Market and Indigeneity in Miguel Esquirol’s “El Cementerio de Elefantes” Liliana Colanzi Translated by Julie Lind In 2008, Miguel Esquirol published the science fiction collection Memorias de futuro. One of the texts is the nouvelle “El Cementerio de Elefantes,” a futuristic rewriting of the myth of the aparapita, the Aymara man who carries things in the market. In Aymara, aparapita means “the one who carries” and has become emblematic of the city of La Paz, portraying the contradictory figure of the indigenous subject in the national imaginary. The nouvelle is set in a popular market, the site where all social classes of Bolivia converge. Esquirol’s story is narrated by an ex-wrestler who now works as a carrier in a popular market in La Paz; carriers call themselves “elephants” because their muscles have swelled due to the use of testo, an injectable

L. Colanzi (*) Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6_8

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substance that also induces an intense sensation of euphoria.1 The elephants’ bodies have also been altered through prostheses that have made them more resistant and support the grueling physical work entailed with hauling furniture, bags of cement, and even people on their backs. In this vein, Esquirol imagines a contemporary Bolivian subject who is a cyborg and whose body has been doubly modified: on the inside with chemical substances that increase muscle mass and alter emotional state, and on the outside with the accruement of metallic body parts. The cyborg/elephant is part animal and part machine and occupies the most exploited, precarious space in the economy. The narrator of “El Cementerio de Elefantes” describes his friendship with the Writer, a quiet, observant, physically fragile man who is fascinated with the work of the carriers of the market and decides to join them. To do so, he puts a “turtle shell” implant onto his back and injects himself with testo; because of his small, weak build, other carriers call him “the mouse.” It becomes clear to them that the Writer belongs to another social class, since his prosthesis, though second-hand, is a “good brand” and he can purchase high-quality testo. In contrast, the narrator is accustomed to injecting himself with illegal testo because it’s cheaper; bodies are connected to the economy through falsified or used substances and prostheses that are not regulated by the state.2 “El Cementerio de Elefantes” gathers emblematic themes of the Bolivian literary tradition and brings them to the present, adding a new twist. On the one hand, it goes back to the figure of the aparapita used by Jaime Saenz (1980, 2014) as a symbol of indigenous identity that has paradoxically survived the city as both a ghostly presence and the cornerstone of national identity. However, Saenz’s aparapita has Quechua instead of Aymara roots, and in Esquirol’s world the Quechua language and culture 1  In “El Cementerio de Elefantes,” testo is similar to anabolic steroids, which are synthetic strains of testosterone used by athletes, bodybuilders, and trans men. In Testo Yonqui, Paul B. Preciado (2008) talks about Testogel, a gel form of testosterone that “gender hackers” obtain from the black market to acquire masculine physical characteristics like facial hair and muscle growth, and which also causes mood changes. “Gender hackers” support free access to substances used in the process of gender change. “We ‘copyleft’ users: that is, we consider hormones to be free and available biocodes whose use should not be regulated by the State or seized by pharmaceutical companies,” Preciado says on the matter (Preciado 2008, 49). 2  Here, as J. Andrew Brown suggests, it is helpful to consider the metaphoric function of the concept of the hacker: just as the cyborg is capable of “hacking” his country’s “traumatic past” in a novel like Carlos Gamerro’s Las islas (Brown 2010, 122), in “El Cementerio de Elefantes” the Writer is a cyborg who can hack his country’s present economy.

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are disappearing, or at least invisible to those who live in the city. On the other hand, Esquirol adds a more contemporary side with a cyberpunk sensibility that is preoccupied with the exploration of a body connected to the economy—capitalist but largely illegal—through multiple implants, prostheses and chemical substances. In a basic way, these “elephants” replace and continue the work of the “aparapitas”: Saenz’s atavistic, premodern Indian does not completely disappear, but remains as a specter and model for the “elephants.” I would like to emphasize the intentional use of the term “Indian,” rather than “indigenous,” in this text: as Irina Soto-Mejía (2022) points out, it is a choice that is meant to make visible and dismantle colonial and patriarchal power structures that are responsible for the systemic racism, femicidal violence, and class hatred in Latin America; on the conscious election of the word “Indian,” Soto quotes Mary Weismantel: “I am not interested in making yet another attempt to describe indigenous people. Rather, I want to expose the dialectic of Indian and white” (Weismantel xxxiii, 2001). I use the term in the same way in this work. In her famous essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway presents the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as fiction” (Haraway 2000, 291). These beings, half-animal and half-machine, are a product of “patriarchal capitalism,” but their hybrid nature, which challenges the notions of origin, unity and purity, makes them “exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” (Haraway 2000, 293). The cyborg storms into the Latin American imaginary as a product of neoliberalism, globalization, and dictatorship. In Cyborgs in Latin America (2010), J. Andrew Brown explains that the posthuman beings in the literature of the region are born out of violence; fiction on implants and electronic chips in human bodies stems from the torture mechanisms used during the dictatorial periods that sought to extract information, monitor or modify the memories of political prisoners. For Brown, the hybrid character of the cyborg comes from the “economic hybridity of neoliberalism” (Brown 2010, 115), a process of economic globalization that inscribes imported technology into Latin American bodies, often through traumatic means. In “El Cementerio de Elefantes,” the cyborg is used to explore the figure of the Indian in contact with the forces of the capitalist market: the Indian lives in the excrescence of neoliberalism, the unreliable promises of progress, the ambiguous territory of the anti-citizen, the semi-human.

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Esquirol’s nouvelle suggests that, as J.  Andrew Brown mentions, “the posthuman’s essential hybridity would seem an appropriate conduit for the exploration of neoliberalism in contemporary Latin America” (Brown 2010, 114). In both Saenz and Esquirol’s writing, the Indian is associated with garbage, which lies at the margins of the modernizing capitalist project. It is in this marginal place that the city is rearticulated and national identity redefined, revealing the motley way in which tradition and modernity, past and present, country and city, indigenous and western, and high and popular culture overlap. The motley (“lo abigarrado”), a concept developed by René Zavaleta (2009), is integral to understanding Bolivian modernity as the juxtaposition of distinct historical layers that do not form an organic whole but remain disconnected. Bolivia is a motley structure “because there is a layering of economic periods (of common taxonomic use) that do not often mix into each other, as if feudalism pertained to one culture and capitalism to another, but nonetheless they occurred in the same setting: or as if one country were feudalist and another capitalist, one on top of the other but not combined” (Zavaleta 2009, 214). “El Cementerio de Elefantes” accounts for the archaic—from indigenous languages to pre-­ capitalist modes of production—and the elements of capitalist modernity—like the presence of cutting-edge technology—that intersect in Bolivian modernity to form an essential heterogeneity that is different from the more or less homogeneous experience of European modernity. In Esquirol’s nouvelle, carriers experiment with their own bodies to fit into the most modest link of the economy. At the same time, they sabotage the capitalist concept of production through their commitment to alcohol and self-destruction. The Indian comes across as the great Other of modernization, a displaced being who can never be fully integrated into the city and turns garbage and broken pieces into a resistance movement.

The Aparapita: He Who Carries the City on His Back The representation of the indigenous subject in Esquirol’s “El Cementerio de Elefantes” has at its core the work of Jaime Saenz, one of the most celebrated Bolivian authors, who wrote on alcohol and the night as alternative paths toward knowledge and created a mythology founded on marginality. The elephant cemetery is an African legend: supposedly, when an elephant feels the proximity of death, it goes off to the place where its congeners died; this place is full of valuable marble tusks, which

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turned elephant cemeteries into an obsession for nineteenth-century fortune seekers. In the novel Felipe Delgado (1984, originally published in 1979), Saenz refers to the Elephant Cemetery as a legendary place in the imaginary of the city of La Paz, a bodega where alcoholics gather before committing suicide, literally linking themselves to the place until they die. For Saenz, their death has metaphysical connotations, since to die there is “to slough off the body,” or to detach oneself from the corporeal to remain on earth in a spiritual form.3 Saenz’s fascination with aparapitas was so notable that they became the focus of two of his best-known essays, “El aparapita de La Paz” (1968), which is part of the posthumous book Prosa breve (2014, originally published in 2008), and “El aparapita,” published in Imágenes paceñas: Lugares y personas de la ciudad (1979).4 In these essays, Saenz depicts the aparapita as an Aymara man who has moved from the country to the city to become a carrier and live among garbage. He wears a coat made completely of patches and survives almost without eating, drinking copious amounts of alcohol. In spite of his extreme poverty, he never begs for money and conforms to whatever his clients are willing to give him. The aparapita is the anti-citizen, backward and out-of-place in the big city; his inability to integrate himself and the repulsion he provokes make clear the failure of European, modernist dreams of the nation: “For some he’s a beast, for some an animal, and yet others take him for a leper” (Saenz 2014, 18). Even his job—physical, rudimentary, and unspecialized—is a symptom of his anachronism; the aparapita is quickly being replaced by more efficient, fast, impersonal technologies like the truck, which can carry many more goods. 3  Víctor Hugo Viscarra (2002), another writer from La Paz with a reputation as an autor maldito, recuperates the theme of the elephant cemetery years later. In his memoir of life on the margins of the streets of La Paz, Borracho estaba pero no me acuerdo (2002), Viscarra refers to the cemetery as a bar where drunks go to die, though in his text the connotations derived from death are more sordid and terribly physical than spiritual. 4  Imágenes paceñas: Lugares y personas de la ciudad is the book where Jaime Saenz describes 35 memorable places and 14 memorable characters of La Paz. Saenz focuses on characters from the city who are disappearing because their jobs have become anachronistic—like the candle merchant, the knife sharpener, and the vendecositas—or who are situated on the margins of modernity, whether because of their indigenous origin or something else—like the aparapita, the fortune teller or the madman. The forgotten places and characters of the city are paradoxically what make La Paz indestructible, grounding the city in tradition and occupying a site of resistance in the face of the advancement of modernity.

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Jaime Saenz romanticizes the marginal figure of the Aymara in La Paz. His precariousness becomes a type of virtue: the aparapita, Saenz tells us, has access to places where no one else can go, which allows him to understand the city better than anyone else: “The aparapita knows the most remote, intimate parts of the city and,—going further—you could even say that the city is him” (Saenz 1979, 139). The aparapita works when he wants to and does not have to report to anyone: in his poverty, he is much freer than a middle-class person, who is constrained by a work routine and the accumulation of goods. When he is tired of living, the aparapita commits suicide, drinking until his death. For Saenz, a poet who sought mystical transcendence through a “negative way” that involved drugs, alcohol, streets, the body, and death (Gander and Johnson 2007, 3), the aparapita possesses spiritual qualities: even though academics have announced “his imminent or already complete disappearance,” the aparapita is never entirely gone because he himself is the city when he carries it on his back (Saenz 1979, 139). Luis H. Antezana explains that the aparapita’s death is only physical: “[A]ccording to local beliefs, his ‘spirit’ now protects his friends in the tavern. This ritual, known as ‘sloughing off the body,’ highlights the way death reconciles an individual with his community. The aparapita’s body dies, but his spirit survives” (Antezana 2007, 134). Beyond the mythology that Saenz constructed on the concept of “sloughing off the body,” the idea that the Indian—disregarded and excluded by elites—has to die or be defeated in order to become the symbol and “essence” of the nation is not new. In the nineteenth century, identitarian fables that sought to comprehend the formation of the new nations began to emerge in Latin American literature, along with mystical, mostly rural figures like llaneros, cimarrones, cangaceiros or gauchos, which represent the cultural others of modernizing projects and can only be idealized when they no longer pose a real threat to the hegemonic system (Dabove 2007, 3). Valeria Canelas affirms that Saenz approaches the city of La Paz like a paradoxical construction where worldviews that will never understand each other, but contain the condition of possibility of the city, coexist: The indigenous city remains, in many instances, illegible to the habitants who do not know the mysteries that constitute it. Whereas the modern city is often inaccessible to indigenous people, mainly Aymara. Nonetheless, there are characters from La Paz who nullify that division, as they themselves consist of a paradox: that of being the essence of a city that, in a way, makes them disappear. (Canelas 2014, 111)

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The coexistence of various cities in La Paz with distinct historical moments incapable of comprehending each other again points to a motley society. As Luis Tapia points out, the motley does not simply refer to “the diverse and coexistent,” but rather to a social formation with a dominant mode of production that does not manage to transform or rearticulate the modes of production beneath it: “It is a way of considering domination as motley, but still domination” (Tapia 2002, 312). In this manner, it is not just about the Aymara presence in the city, but the way the dominant class of Bolivia has rejected indigenous modes of production for the sake of the idea of progress while it serves those modes of production in order to guarantee its class privilege.5 Narratives of the second half of the twentieth century, where Saenz’s work is situated, feature the geographic displacement of the Indian from the country to the city. That displacement does not change Saenz’s central logic, which takes root in the nineteenth century: the Indian is seen as an atavistic figure on whom the weight of the national tradition rests. He can never be a modern subject and always remains in a position of irreducible alterity. The aparapita is a radicalized version of the other indigenous figures who appear in Saenz’s work—notably in Imágenes paceñas—destined to become obsolete with the advance of modernity, a symbol of a past time. It is interesting to see how—thanks to the work done by popular genres, notably science fiction—indigenous people reappear in urban, futuristic, and even intergalactic spaces in twenty-first-century Bolivian narrative, with novels like De cuando en cuando Saturnina (2004) by Alison Spedding, comics such as Altopía (2020–) by Alejandro Barrientos Salinas and Joaquín Cuevas Tellería and short story collections such as Para comerte mejor (2020, originally 2015) by Giovanna Rivero and Memorias del futuro (2008) by Miguel Esquirol. The works of these writers show Bolivia negotiating its identity between the past and the future in a particularly motley setting where indigenous traditions, technological advances, extractivism and capitalist economy mix into each other. Indigenous futurism can also be seen in another artistic space: in recent years, the so-called cholets (cholo chalets) gained international acclaim, featuring the opulent, colorful buildings of the new Indian bourgeoisie, characterized as “Andean Neobaroque” or “Psychedelic Andean Baroque,” which contain as many 5  “The Indian … is perceived as a great danger to seigniorial mentality, as that which is negated but cannot be exterminated because if it were, they would have to work” (Tapia 2002, 316).

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futuristic architectural components as Andean cultural elements. In any case, far from remaining on the margins, like Saenz’s aparapitas, or fixed in a mythical past, Aymara and Quechua peoples have achieved a presence that is more and more powerful and decisive in Bolivian politics of the twenty-first century. One example of this is the city of El Alto (the origin of the cholets). Today the second biggest city in Bolivia, it was founded in the beginning of the twentieth century as a small satellite of La Paz, a destination for rural migrant Aymaras and Quechuas. The population of El Alto grew immensely in the 1950s, and in the 1980s it gained political independence from La Paz.6 The ethnic composition of El Alto is 76% Aymara, 9% Quechua, 14% Mestiza, and less than 0.1% white. With nearly a million inhabitants, it is one of the fastest growing urban centers in Bolivia and the place from which a new indigenous urban identity has emerged in recent years, as portrayed in the non-fiction book Los hijos de Goni (2022), by Aymara author Reyna Quya, or in the novel Seúl, São Paulo (2019), by Aymara writer Gabriel Mamani Magne. Characterized by the overlaying of distinct temporalities, it is rooted in the convergence of “internet technology, cell phones, Hollywood movies, Japanese anime, Mexican wrestling, and North American hip hop, which coexist with polleras, the Aymara language, the morenada, the cachascán, the oral tradition, social mobilization, and Andean yatiris” (Soto-Mejía 2015, 140–41).7 It isn’t surprising that the heterogeneous landscape of El Alto is recuperated in Miguel Esquirol’s text. In spite of its striking economic and demographic expansion and vibrant culture, El Alto continues to face serious obstacles to providing basic services like sewage systems and potable water to its inhabitants, and its poverty indexes are very high. It is in this indigenous metropolis where the tolls of neoliberalism and the resistance to it become apparent. Thanks to their ability to organize and mobilize, the people of El Alto have been the protagonists of important moments in recent national history. The Alteños 6  During this decade, the population boom was due largely to the migration of miners who were relocated because of decree 21060, which privatized the Corporación Minera de Bolivia (COMIBOL) and left nearly 30,000 miners without work. As Irina Soto points out, “the cause of this displacement was the instauration of the neoliberal regime in Bolivia during the administration of Víctor Paz Estenssoro” (Soto-Mejía 2015, 138–9). Another contributing factor to the growth of El Alto was the arrival of farmers affected by the severe droughts that devastated the altiplano between 1982 and 1983 (Soto-Mejía 2015, 139). 7  Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by Julie Lind.

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led the Gas War of 2003, which prevented the exportation of natural gas from Chile at prices that did not favor Bolivia and ended with the resignation of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, a driving force of neoliberal politics. The city was also the bastion of the indigenous president Evo Morales, and a main focus of protest when he was overthrown at the end of 2019 after allegations of electoral fraud. Both events resulted in the shooting, killing and injury of many Alteños by the police and militarized forces. El Alto exists because of those who were displaced due to neoliberal politics and offer cheap labor in a system that has given them insecurity and poverty. Its people have navigated this situation, seeking life in the unofficial economic sphere through contraband and piracy. “El Cementerio de Elefantes” gathers the characteristics of the unofficial economic sphere of El Alto and imagines a futuristic world from the margins. Esquirol’s nouvelle joins an effort made by several groups in the past decade to reassess El Alto, representing its cultural complexity in a way that leaves behind the image of the “backwards” city that the white Bolivia has created for it and, as suggested by the posters found on the streets, says: “For Bolivia El Alto is not a problem. It is a solution!!!” (Soto-Mejía 2015, 142). One of the most powerful future horizons for Bolivia—from a social, cultural, aesthetic and political point of view—will arise from the indigenous city of El Alto.

The Bolivian Market: Meeting Point of Social Classes and Cultures In Esquirol’s nouvelle, El Alto maintains its natural hybridity, formed through multiple migrations. The Indian, a Quechua peasant who travels to the city and ends up becoming a carrier in the market of La Paz, encounters a hyper-urbanized city when he arrives to El Alto, “which has recently become a refuge for Moors, Pakistanis, Iranians”; migrants have turned it into “a type of Arabian bazaar” where cholas combine the traditional pollera with the burqa and people speak a language that blends Arabic and Aymara (Esquirol 2008, 161). In this manner, the Andean future bears the mark of international eclecticism, but in this case the mixtures are formed with other minority and stigmatized cultures and nationalities: the union of the Alteño and the Arabian produces the Indian of the future. Also notable is the similarity Esquirol establishes between the city of El Alto and the Arabian bazaar; after all, the market is the heart of the city.

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In “El Cementerio de Elefantes,” the popular market appears chaotic: only a very sharp observer would be able to unravel the multiple operations, movements, conflicts, solidarities, meetings, agreements and disagreements that are simultaneously woven together and constantly change the setting of the scene. It is a quintessentially heterogeneous space with its own codes and structures, where the illegal circulates and one can find: (…) entire blocks of outdoor dining areas, giant pots where stews and soups have been cooking since the early morning. Merchants carrying plates of food, drinks, or ice cream walking among the crowd. Small vertical glass caskets where you can find the tecnos, they will fix your radio, change your watch battery, or repair the processor implanted in your eye socket on the spot. Thugs and security agents are all around the market with electric harpoons and cameras behind their glass pupils. Small men in big jackets that hide counterfeit watches, organic implants and property titles for satellites that do not exist. (Esquirol 2008, 156)

What Esquirol describes is an economy that, in contrast to what is represented by other futuristic universes, has not yet disappeared, where transactions are still negotiated intimately with sellers; many of the purchases and sales are informal and illegal. In this informal economy, countless vendors and tricksters offer up their products directly on the streets, without renting a stand; illicit activities, pirated and false goods and high technology also thrive and are sold along with more legitimate items. As we see, the nature of the popular market is very different from the ordered, regulated space that characterizes the economy of countries of the Global North; the fact that authentic products coexist with pirated goods speaks to the lack of state control. In Capitalismo Gore, Sayak Valencia affirms that the logic of the market also operates and reinforces itself in places where “consumer wants … are difficult to fulfill through legal means” (Valencia 2016, 44). This “hyper-­ consumerist alternative market” (Valencia 2016, 45), characterized by piracy and contraband, addresses the difficulty faced by the popular and middle classes when they attempt to participate under equal conditions in a neoliberal market that only benefits some and permits the widening of the social gap. In spite of the cyberpunk sensibility of Esquirol’s nouvelle, it is very easy to recognize many characteristics typical of the Bolivian market in his description. In the Andean world, the predominant economy is not

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individualistic, but composed of complex networks of solidarity and reciprocity; at the same time, the indigenous woman plays a leading role in commerce.8 The market is the place where country and city converge; the chola woman is typically the intermediary between producers from the country and the White and Mestizo consumers from the city (Lazar 2008, 17). If capitalism is central to the dynamics of the Andean world (former Vice President of Bolivia Álvaro García Linera (2006) even coined the term “Andean-Amazonic capitalism” to describe the economic model of the country), practices extending from informal commerce, illegality and networks of reciprocity have allowed Bolivia to develop its own version of capitalism: 46% of the population do not have a labor contract, but work on their own (Barragán 2006, 108). One example is El Alto’s 16 de Julio market, the biggest in Bolivia, where you can purchase a single shoe or snail slime, used clothes, and any type of pirated or expired software. The state, in fact, permits illegality and in some cases even foments it to guarantee that the largest portion of the population has access to a series of products (especially technology) that would otherwise be unaffordable for them. What developed companies throw out—old models of cell phones, cars produced more than thirty years ago, aged toys, used windshield wipers, broken mannequins, electrical appliances that have been repaired again and again until they become unrecognizable—find their use in the Bolivian economy; many products that would end up in a garbage dump in other countries are rescued, fixed, and put into circulation in Bolivian markets. It is worth noting that El Alto has the highest rate of recycling in Bolivia; as the Bolivian writer Vicky Ayllón points out, “those who started recycling in our country, before there was talk of the environment, are the poor” (Yerba Mala Cartonera documentary, quoted in Soto-Mejía 2015, 142). The Bolivian economy has little respect for intellectual property, and its informal branch is nourished, in large part, by the piracy of movies, software, clothing brands, medicine, books, and music. Miguel Esquirol has argued in interviews that the culture of piracy in Bolivia is a way of intervening in the science of the First World and giving it its own use. Journalist Andrés Laguna (2009) asked Esquirol the question: How do you write science fiction in a country that does not have science? Esquirol responded:

8  To learn more about Andean economic and social organization, see El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia, by Sian Lazar (2008).

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“Because even if we don’t have our own, we put what others come up with to good use. We adapt it,” he told me. Then the images of autos transformers or tuned up cars, pirated DVDs of El cholo Juanito or La bicicleta de los Huanca, or artisanal crafts for export come strongly to mind. Those are our ways of making Western knowledge our own. Yes, it is third worldly, almost anti-modern, but it is science, in the end. I think it is from that aspect that we create fiction. (Laguna 2009)

The adaptation of the science of the Global North to the needs and uses of the South becomes creative appropriation, parody and resistance, and the same can be said of the science fiction of Esquirol. In “El Cementerio de Elefantes,” the carriers are cyborgs who construct themselves not with the latest technology but by recycling old parts and using pirated brands; the text also appropriates Saenz’s classic text to adapt it to a popular genre like science fiction. In “El Cementerio de Elefantes,” surgery and medical treatments are not overseen and happen within the black market. Don Pedrolo, for instance, performs every type of surgery without a license: You could tell him to remove your head without anesthesia or inject tar into your vein, if you pay him it’s no problem. He performs fast operations, simple implants like the ones the Writer has in his arm, abortions or ovary implants. He also has a small pharmacy with everything you might need. (Esquirol 2008, 154)

There is an illegal, pirated quality to all of these operations: Don Pedro practices as a doctor without a title and his actions are not subject to any regulation apart from the law of supply and demand; the breast implants he puts on women leave their chests inflamed and do not conceal their artificiality, and the turtle shells he sells are second-hand. The state is a precarious, almost absent institution that does not exercise control, or exercises it in a capricious and inconsistent manner. The carriers use physical modifications to make themselves more apt for work, though they know that drugs and surgeries will end up destroying them. The narrator says: I explained (to the Writer) that if he really wanted (to be a carrier) he could buy a bit of testo, and that there are stronger things, but they would destroy his brain and muscles. I knew people whose arms burst carrying a package, whose back broke beneath a bag of chips. The Writer said it didn’t matter

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and that he had the money to buy testo and anything necessary. (Esquirol 2008, 152)

The illegality and informality of the market that sustains “capitalismo gore” also threatens the lives of precarious workers. If the chemical substances that thicken their muscles and the numerous implants that prevent accidents manage to increase their physical resistance and strength, they also reveal the vulnerability of the body: the wounds they have from implants cause them immense suffering and the injections induce altered states of conscience and sexual impotence. In spite of the risks entailed with the informal market, “there is always a place for strong people” (Esquirol 2008, 153), and becoming loading machines is the destiny of the most precarious workers.

Garbage and Resistance In his works, Jaime Saenz showed interest in garbage as an object of knowledge or contemplation, like a hidden treasure. What has been cast aside and disregarded is precisely where wonders appear: “In garbage dumps there are wonders. … And there are a ton for aparapitas. … It could be a piece of a mirror, a wire; it could be a shoe or only the sole; everything has a use and he knows what for” (1979, 22). In “El Cementerio de Elefantes,” the Writer is the character who takes interest in the cast-aside bodies and objects. Although the text never says that the Writer is Jaime Saenz, it infers that the character is based on the writer from La Paz, who often wore an aparapita jacket and collected rare treasures like bones found in cemeteries. In fact, the epigraph of “El Cementerio de Elefantes” is verses by Saenz and throughout the plot are various phrases by the writer. The narrator does not understand what the Writer finds interesting in the everydayness of the market or the trade of the carrier: “His eyes were wide open and he observed what was happening in front of him as if it were worthy of admiration. I stood there watching him, amazed by his amazement” (Esquirol 2008, 157). Even if the reader never knows what the Writer writes, he seems to find the answer to his search in the aparapitas, who he discovers living in a ghostly state in the market: “no one ever sees them, they’re like ghosts or shadows” (Esquirol 2008, 187). Esquirol’s aparapitas are not Aymara but rural Quechua migrants, and their language is disappearing in a city that communicates in Spanish, Aymara, and Arabic. The Writer is the only one

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capable of understanding them, as he studied Quechua in a book he found in a library. The aparapitas detest the city and have been so displaced by modernization—they cannot compete with the muscles and prostheses of the elephants—that the only means of subsistence left for them is gathering garbage in giant bundles and carrying it on their backs: “They get on [the garbage truck] with their own bundles of garbage, defending them and claiming their use, and they go to the dump on the outskirts of the city” (Esquirol 2008, 187). The Writer is attracted to the utter deprivation of the aparapitas and decides to go live with them in the garbage dump for a period of time. There, he confirms that the aparapitas live such a hard life that they do not live to an old age. But the aparapitas maintain their dignity: “they are admirable, proud, excessive, fanatic, solitary and anarchic men”9 who “though dressed in rags, always dirty, there is a certain elegance in their appearance, in the way they walk” (Esquirol 2008, 190–1). Inspired by their example, the Writer decides to take all of the implants off of his body, causing wounds that quickly become infected, and in one last romantic gesture of deprivation, he commits suicide by drinking alcohol in the cantina of Doña Juanita—a chola with a mechanical eye she uses to detect the presence of weapons in her bar—but not before giving the narrator the word processor where he has saved the novel he has been dictating to the machine this entire time. In this manner, we can understand that the Writer has finally managed “to slough off his body” and have his spirit survive, like that of the aparapita, by assimilating to the city. Aside from the aparapitas, a character called the Indian—a “huge idiot” (Esquirol 2008, 162) born in a Quechua town in the altiplano who does not speak or understand Spanish—is the only carrier who does not have “anything artificial, not implants, operations, hormones, testo, or anything” (Esquirol 2008, 160). For Esquirol, Quechua is the last site of indigenous purity in a motley city where identities, languages, temporalities and pirated artifacts converge in a chaotic manner. In their defense of garbage and identification with it, the aparapitas affirm their place as outsiders and vindicate a culture—in Esquirol’s text, Quechua—that has become obsolete in the city to the point of turning into a shadow or ghost. And nonetheless, the Writer affirms that the aparapitas “make the streets as they go down them, not the other way around” (Esquirol 2008, 191); Esquirol’s text returns to the paradox of the Indian as presented by Saenz: they are the essence of a city that wants to erase them. 9

 Here, Esquirol is quoting Saenz’s “El aparapita de La Paz.”

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In his futuristic world, Esquirol reinscribes the indigenous aparapita as an echo of the past who, through his obstinate obsession with purity and rejection of any trace of modernity, can only fit into the present as a specter. A melancholic figure, he is anchored in the past and has been replaced by the more modern elephants/cyborgs, but refuses to completely disappear. It’s true that his resistance is heroic, and both Saenz and Esquirol describe him as proud, while at the same time static. The aparapita does not escape the fate of other racialized figures who have been elevated into mythical characters with roots in their connection to the antithesis of modernizing projects of Latin American nations, like the Argentine gaucho or the Brazilian jagunço. These figures are conceived as radical and idealized others whenever they no longer pose a real threat to the system. The aparapita inspires admiration because he does not ask for anything; he is so proud that he does not demand fairer compensation or try to join a union. Faced with a society that deprives him of everything, he responds with supreme indifference to everything that society considers valuable, including life itself. He is the spiritual counterpart of a materialistic society, but does not want or try to subvert the rules of the game. In spite of the strong impression of Saenz in “El Cementerio de Elefantes,” Esquirol offers elephants an exit that is not sacrificial. The curious, attentive eye of the Writer before everything that happens in the market inspires the narrator to pay more attention to his own condition as a carrier and to his surroundings. After a violent confrontation between the elephants and a few corrupt security agents who want to control the work of the carriers, the narrator finds himself thinking about the Writer: “I realized that I was viewing the market like a stranger, understanding that it was worthy of attention, wonder, but above all that it was our place that we had to defend” (Esquirol 2008, 188). After downloading the Writer’s manuscript and sending it to an editorial company, the narrator implants the word processor into his arm and begins to dictate his own impressions of the market. In this manner, contact with the Writer and the discovery of the aparapitas gives the elephant an incipient awareness of the dynamics of the popular market, his place among a group of workers, the need to reclaim the market as his own and the possibility of telling his own story. In “El Cementerio de los Elefantes,” the struggle between tradition and modernity and the question of indigenous Bolivian identity in the twenty-­ first century becomes present. It is interesting that the solution given by “El Cementerio de Elefantes” would be, on one hand, the recovery of an archaic, marginal Andean character like the aparapita, but also the motley

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image of a city where the Aymara, Arabian, Quechua, Spanish, and cutting-­ edge technology coexist with folk traditions. The fact that cyborgs in “El Cementerio de Elefantes” appropriate technological devices through recycling and piracy speaks to the unequal ways that peripheral countries insert themselves into the global economy, their survival and resistance strategies, and how they are constructing their own modernity and horizon toward the future from the south, though not without tensions and contradictions.

Works Cited Antezana, Luis H. 2007. Afterword. In The Night, by Jaime Saenz, translated by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson, 130–139. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Barragán, Rossana. 2006. Más allá de lo mestizo, más allá de lo aymara: organización y representaciones de clase y etnicidad en La Paz. América Latina Hoy 43: 107–130. Barrientos Salinas, Alejandro, and Joaquín Cuevas Tellería. 2020. Altopía. Accessed 12 May 2022. https://www.gokongo.co/comic/15_altopia-­ la-­traicion-­1-­de-­5. Brown, J. Andrew. 2010. Cyborgs in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Canelas, Valeria. 2014. La Paz y el aparapita, textos de Jaime Saenz sobre una ciudad ambivalente. Ángulo Recto. Revista de estudios sobre la ciudad como espacio plural 6 (1): 111–124. Dabove, Juan Pablo. 2007. Nightmares of the Lettered City: Banditry and Literature in Latin America 1816–1929. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Esquirol Ríos, Miguel. 2008. El Cementerio de Elefantes. In Memorias de futuro, 149–193. Santa Cruz: La Hoguera. Gander, Forrest, and Kent Johnson. 2007. Notes from Bolivia. In The Night, trans. Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson, 1–27. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. García Linera, Álvaro. 2006. Capitalismo andino-amazónico. Le Monde diplomatique. Accessed 12 May 2016. https://www.lemondediplomatique.cl/El-­ capitalismo-­andino-­amazonico.html. Haraway, Donna. 2000. A Cyborg Manifesto. In The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, 291–324. London: Routledge. Laguna, Andrés. 2009. No siempre hay un mañana mejor. Ciencia ficción y fantasía en Bolivia. Accessed 12 May 2022. http://cffbolivia.blogspot. com/2009/02/no-­siempre-­hay-­un-­manana-­mejor_27.html. Lazar, Sian. 2008. El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia, 2008. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Mamami Magne, Gabriel. 2019. Seúl, São Paulo. La Paz: Editorial 3600. Preciado, Paul B. 2008. Testo yonqui. Barcelona: Espasa. Reyna, Quya. 2022. Los hijos del Goni. La Paz: Sobras Selectas. Rivero, Giovanna. 2020. Para comerte mejor. Badajoz: Aristas Martínez. Saenz, Jaime. 1979. Imágenes paceñas: lugares y personajes de la ciudad. La Paz: Difusión. ———. 1980. Felipe Delgado. La Paz: Difusión. ———. 2014. Prosa breve. Edited by Leonardo García Pabón. La Paz: Plural. Soto-Mejía, María Irina. 2015. ‘Almha la vengadora’: Protagonista del indigenismo de neovanguardia alteño. Bolivian Studies Journal/ Revista de Estudios Bolivianos 21: 235–156. ———. 2022. El degollador como denuncia y resistencia a la violencia de la necropolítica en los Andes. In El horror y lo sobrenatural en Latinoamérica: Hispanic Issues Online, ed. Liliana Colanzi and Debra Castillo, forthcoming. Spedding, Alison. 2004. De cuando en cuando Saturnina (Saturnina from Time to Time: Una historia oral del futuro). La Paz: Editorial Mama Huaco. Tapia Mallea, Luis. 2002. La producción del conocimiento local: Historia y política en la obra de René Zavaleta. La Paz: Muela del Diablo. Valencia, Sayak. 2016. Capitalismo gore. Control económico, violencia y narcopoder. Mexico D.F: Paidós. Viscarra, Víctor Hugo. 2002. Borracho estaba pero me acuerdo. La Paz: Correveydile. Weismantel, Mary. 2001. Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Zavaleta, René. 2009. La autodeterminación de las masas. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores y Clacso.

CHAPTER 9

The Politics of Resistance in Brazil’s Dystopian Thriller 3% M. Elizabeth Ginway

Introduction 3% (Pedro Aguilera, 2016–2020), the popular futuristic Netflix series from Brazil, is notable for its emphasis on socio-political issues and complex characters rather than on high-tech special effects. Often described as a dystopian thriller, the series includes well-worn tropes such as a divided futuristic society in which surveillance and control serve to reinforce the division between a select few and the drab masses. Dystopias are distinctive within the science fiction genre in that they achieve the effect of cognitive estrangement—a key element of the genre as defined by Darko Suvin (1979)—by extrapolating norms from socio-political relations rather than by introducing a technological novum. In the twentieth century, works such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) established many of the tropes of modern dystopias. Huxley’s vision of biologically engineered populations controlled by

M. E. Ginway (*) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6_9

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mind-altering drugs operates on the basis of a pleasure-seeking principle, while Orwell’s portrait of a society dominated by Big Brother, Doublespeak, and Thought Crimes recalls the disciplinary model of punishment and mind control. Both these works have similar plots in which the State maintains power over those who struggle against it. 3%, however, offers a more nuanced view of dystopia, using Brazil’s social reality and its multi-faceted culture, along with diverse characters and unexpected plot twists, to infuse dystopian formulas with innovative, if not utopian, possibilities. Whereas the traditional dystopias of Huxley and Orwell portray highly controlled dystopian societies, the Netflix series has more in common with Tom Moylan’s vision of a “critical dystopia,” which emphasizes a feminist vision and concern for the environment (Moylan 1982, 188–89). According to Moylan, critical dystopias use collective action and resistance (1993–1994) to break down the illusion of a controlled world, a feature that is amply illustrated by the plot of 3%. The first season of 3% explores controversial issues in Brazilian society, including race, violence, poverty, social disparities, corruption, and rule by a small elite. The principal theme of the first season is meritocracy, as it portrays a competition among young people living on the favela-like Continent for admission to the First-World comforts of the Offshore. The competition, called the Process, comprises a set of ruthless, dehumanizing, and often brutal tests. Another element of the series is a mysterious movement known as the Cause, which seeks greater social justice and opposes the Process and the Offshore system. In the second season, the focus shifts to the Cause and its plan to attack the Process and to undermine the tenuous balance between the Offshore and the Continent. This second set of episodes offers a more complex view of politics and shifting alliances that erodes the facile division between the utopian Offshore and the dystopian Continent. I discuss the two seasons by using distinct approaches. For the first season, I apply Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) concept of biopolitics and rights of citizenship in conjunction with Erika Robb Larkins’s (2017) study of the implications of body discipline and socio-political control. In Season 2, with the recombination of allies and the discovery of a new technology, the focus shifts from individual merit to the collective good. The events of this second season can be explained in part by what Ecuadoran philosopher Bolívar Echeverría (1994) has called the “baroque ethos,” a creative attitude forged by subalterns who survive at the margins of capitalism through

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informal collective action through networks.1 Echeverría’s cultural critique bears a marked resemblance to Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade’s (1991, originally 1928) idea of cultural cannibalism or antropofagia, a concept that portrays an appropriation and re-assembling of dominant cultural paradigms. Recently, Gazi Islam has affirmed the continued relevance of antropofagia in Brazil, describing it as a “third space,” distinct from concepts of cultural hybridity or postmodernism: The corporalized nature of anthropophagy … contrasts with the identity politics of some postmodern discourse. … Different from political correctness, which sees language as a form of domination, anthropophagy recognizes language as a tool of desire, opens up a hybrid liminal or ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) where the dyad ‘colonizer-colonized’ can be unsettled through changing the meanings of colonial language … to be anthropophagic is not to call oneself a cannibal, and thus take ownership of or re-­ appropriate a formerly derogatory term. It is rather, to identify with re-appropriation itself, defining oneself as an agent of re-appropriation of difference in its various forms. (Islam 2011, 173)

This sense of agency beyond identity politics and the remixing of paradigms and codes characterize the second season of 3%. I suggest that this anthropophagic re-appropriation of the body politic is represented in the series by powerful biotechnology—one that operates beyond binary cybernetic codes and is able to process information and redistribute power in new ways. I also wish to argue here that the series illustrates how the baroque ethos resists capitalism as exemplified by the prosperous yet dehumanized culture of the Offshore yet does not seek to destroy it completely. Finally, I think that the series suggests that the new technology is a posthuman possibility and the expression of the collective experience of 1  The four “ethe” according to Echeverría: the first ethos is the realist or protestant ethos that claims that life exists for the sake of and for the purpose of capital. It subordinates all work, objects, and creativity to capitalism and ignores issues of social injustice or exploitation. The second is the romantic ethos that emphasizes the creative aspect of capitalism and the entrepreneurial spirit of invention, ignoring any of the negative aspects of capitalism. The third or “classical” ethos consists of a more wary resignation regarding capitalism, especially in its shift toward from commerce and monetary value away from the concrete use value of objects (i.e., shoes that can be worn or sold), lamenting the ever more abstract forms of capital that increases social distance between the haves and have-nots. See Echeverría (1994, 38–40) and Stephen Gandler (2015, 295–305).

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Brazil’s social, economic, and political development, as well as its history, as the repressive dystopian biopolitics of the first season is recast and re-­ appropriated by an expansive utopian biotechnology in the second.

Season 1: Biopolitics and Dystopia For the first season of 3%, I focus on two of the Black female characters— Joana (Vaneza Oliveira) and Aline (Viviane Porto)—and how they represent biopolitical policies that reinforce the duality of criminality and security in Brazilian society. The paradigms of the field of biopolitics and disciplinary models were first established in Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (1978), who theorizes that it is not an outside ideology or coercive force that controls society but rather the internalization of discipline and the control of data that generates new and ever more subtle forms of power. Giorgio Agamben (1998) continued Foucault’s work and put forth a theory of biopolitics based on concepts of citizenship in ancient Greece and its contrasting ideas of life, calling quality life bios, and mere life zoê. A person who has lost the rights of citizenship or bios became a homo sacer, someone who, while still human, has been reduced to the status of zoê, hence eligible to be killed with impunity. Agamben notes how governments can claim to be reacting to internal and external threats as a way of depriving entire groups of citizenship, thereby dehumanizing them by invoking a state of exception in order to “protect” society. Finally, Achilles Mbembe’s (2003) “Necropolitics” modifies the concept of “biopolitics” to illustrate how governments use power not so much to control crime and protect society as to target specific members of the population—those who are “killable”—for elimination. These are the biopolitical tensions and counter-narratives that I wish to explore in 3%, especially in the portrayal of the two Black female characters who represent a divided or schizophrenic attitude toward Black labor and meritocracy in Brazil. It could be argued 3% thematizes race, social class, and the geographical space of the favelas.2 In the first season, for example, Joana exemplifies this class and despite the odds, she passes the tests of the Process and is 2  Often associated with Brazil’s internal migrant and Afro-descendent populations, favelas have been studied by many Brazilian and American scholars in order to examine issues regarding these communities and their struggle for citizenship in what came to be known as the “divided city.” See Michael Holston (2008) for background on these issues in Brasília and São Paulo. In Rio de Janeiro, see Janice Perlman (2010).

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eventually recruited for the security team. Aline is another Black female character, yet she plays the role of a polished insider security agent who has been sent to root out the corruption of Ezequiel (João Miguel), the leader of the Process, thus protecting the Offshore system. I argue that 3% uses these two Black female characters in policing roles to estrange viewers from the biopolitics that often associates race, criminality, and security with Black men. In her article “Guarding the Body: Private Security in Rio de Janeiro,” based on her fieldwork at a private security agency in Rio de Janeiro before the Olympics, Erika Robb Larkins (2017) observed that dark-skinned Brazilian men—a group often identified with poverty and criminality— were common targets of recruiters of “security capital” to be trained as security agents (Larkins 2017, 64). Perceived as “hyper-masculine,” they were considered ideal personnel to neutralize security threats and reassure the public in  locations of leisure and spatial exclusion such as Olympic arenas. These recruits were subjected to a rigorous physical training regime in order to work long hours. They were also trained to deal with challenges to their authority by elite guests, being required to maintain a “cabeça fria” [cool head] or self-control while enduring tirades of racial epithets directed at them. They had to be able to stand up to elite demands for special treatment and enforce the rules for all without being threatening (Larkins 2017, 66–67). Appearance, posture, martial arts training, and a specific dress code all served to reassure elite audiences by creating a “commodified effect” of security. The agents wore a “uniform” along the lines of Ralph Lauren, complete with cologne and other specified grooming (Larkins 2017, 64–65). Crucially, when these same trainees or guards returned to their homes in the favelas, they had to relinquish this “body discipline” because it is associated with police work, which might put them at risk of violence at the hands of local drug traffickers or others who regard such body language with suspicion (Larkins 2017, 66). Thus, their body discipline was paradoxical because it could threaten their own existence when out of place, yet provided a step toward upward mobility, as the security field is seen as a feeder to the Rio hospitality industry. Their ordeal is similar, in several ways, to that experienced by the participants in the Process in 3%. Parenthetically, I note that Larkins has also observed that body discipline is reinforced with words and sayings that emanate mostly from positive-­thinking videos used to help trainees cope with the sacrifice of their own leisure during their long 12-hour shifts (Larkins 2017, 63). In the Netflix series, the Black

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evangelical pastor Antônio (Darcio de Oliveira) echoes such sayings, praising the wisdom of the Process with expressions such as “Acredite” [Believe] and “Você merece” [You deserve], painted on the walls of the humble area of worship where he preaches. These maxims recall the popularity of certain strains of Brazilian Neo-Pentacostalism, which promotes the idea of positive thinking and prayer in the pursuit of health and wealth. The pastor also praises the wisdom of the “Casal Fundador,” or a founding couple of the Process, which reflects the fact that Rio’s private firms are usually run by couples, often a man and a woman. I also note that the pastor and his son Fernando (Miguel Gomes) are Black, which would suggest another connection between Larkins’s observations about race, security, and “bodily capital” (Larkins 2017, 61–62) were it not for the fact that Fernando is in a wheelchair, which is incompatible with conventional hypermasculinity. My point is that, by splitting one single Black male body as described by Larkins into the bodies of the two women—the security agent Aline and the favela resident Joana—3% removes or estranges viewers from social norms. Aline conveys the image of a professional, upwardly mobile Black woman, that is, a female executive. Her make-up and highly styled asymmetrical haircut make her appear to be an authority figure whose height, restrained body language and partially shaven head almost cross gender lines, suggesting male traits. Her triangular earring recalls the earpieces used by private security agents. Aline’s role begins as an ambitious and confident authority figure seeking to replace Ezequiel, the object of her surveillance. When Aline discovers that Ezequiel sometimes mysteriously leaves the testing center at odd hours dressed in robes, hiding from security cameras and erasing the footage, she surmises that he is a threat, and communicates this to the Offshore. In response, Ezequiel arranges to have her framed for the murder of a member of the Process testing crew. After being accused, she simulates tears of remorse with eye drops, knowing that she cannot confront Ezequiel, but maintains a “cabeça fria” [cool head], waiting for the truth to come out even as she is taken away. Endowed with the authority to “guard elite power,” her Black female body is used to re-signify and question the limits of such power. Her detention illustrates the risk and schizophrenia that Larkins mentioned as Black bodies move between the favela and the asphalt in the hope of social mobility that may remain out of reach. The other Black female character, Joana, is an orphan from the crime-­ ridden area of the Continent. Since Joana’s body language at times is that of a lower-class woman traumatized by violence, she initially appears to

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represent the opposite of Aline. When she inadvertently ends up killing the child of a vigilante militia leader while recovering the backpack he stole from her, she escapes the leader’s revenge by changing her identity through an illegal chip implanted behind her ear that allows her to be admitted into the 3% competition. However, despite her courage and leadership during the Process, Joana is not offered a spot in the 3% Offshore paradise like the rest. Instead, she is separated from the others by Ezequiel, told she is special, and offered a position in the security detail in the testing facility. Before she can be hired, however, she must kill the criminal militia leader who threatened her. Joana remains unpersuaded and defiant of Ezequiel’s claims about her special “merit,” refusing to participate in the system’s necropolitics and choosing instead to leave the competition. In this sense, Joana proves the fallacy of the 3% premise of meritocracy, since despite the fact that she is the most resourceful and moral of the characters, risking her life for others and refusing to kill, she is not chosen for the ultimate reward. Joana returns to the Continent, while Aline is forced to undergo psychological reprogramming. The fate of these two female characters reinforces traditional hierarchies of Black and white, rich and poor, male and female within Brazilian society as the elite white male Ezequiel, the head of the Process, appears to impose his will on them. This reinforces the favela/asphalt divide of Brazilian society, where, with few exceptions, a mixed-race majority inhabits the periphery or favelas while the white middle and upper classes occupy the legitimate space of the asphalt. We arrive at the inescapable conclusion that Brazil has neither a meritocracy nor a racial democracy. In addition to its dystopian features, some of the tropes of speculative fiction—cyborgs, vampires, and zombies—can help us understand the metaphors of bodily control. First, we see the cyborgization of Aline and the other 3% testers in the form of earpieces and surveillance technology that they wear, which allow them to control or “feed on”—vampire-like— the young participants, some of whom commit suicide after being eliminated, while others become passive zombies who return to their previous existence, empty and drained of hope. These tropes in Latin America often signify trauma resulting from the abuses of colonial and neocolonial regimes, as noted by Mabel Moraña (2017) in her El monstruo como máquina de guerra. Here the Black female body is used to re-signify and recast the anxieties stirred up by crime and violence in Brazil’s urban centers, and in light of the ambush and murder of Marielle Franco, the Black

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LBGTQ city councilwoman from Rio de Janeiro, we can see how dangerous going against such forces can be.3

Season 2: The Third Space—Biotechnology and Utopian Possibilities As mentioned earlier, the clear divisions established in the first season of 3% begin to break down in the second. By showing the use of violence and corruption on both sides and mixing the issues of loyalty and ideology, the action becomes more ambivalent and the characters more entwined. For example, we learn that Ezequiel has deep ties to the Cause, and his puzzling actions to help Michele (Bianca Comparato)—a Cause infiltrator who has been successful in the Process—turn out to be part of a long-term plan to undermine the control of the ruling Offshore elite. At the same time, Joana returns to the Continent to join the Cause, only to learn that its leader, Silas (Samuel de Assis) plans to disrupt the Process through the use of a bomb that could harm or kill innocent bystanders and competitors. We also learn that Silas and Ezequiel have a shared history in the Cause, and that their rivalry suggests that the two men are not so different in their willingness to use force to further their agendas. Joana and Michele reject this projected course of action and forge their own plans, with the help of others. In this way they exemplify the feminist values of the critical dystopia. According to Bolívar Echeverría (1994), individuals in Latin America have no hope of subverting capitalism; rather, they must oppose the prevailing economic forces through resistance, using a “baroque ethos.”4  See Marielle Franco (2018, 139) for more of the context surrounding her death and the threat of violence toward the members of this population. 4  Echeverría explains how the baroque ethos challenges modernity thus: “El ethos barroco no borra, como lo hace el realista, la contradicción propia del mundo de la vida en la modernidad capitalista, y tampoco la niega, como lo hace el romántico; la reconoce como inevitable, a la manera del clásico, pero, a diferencia de éste, se resiste a aceptarla, pretende convertir en “bueno” al “lado malo” por el que, según Hegel, avanza la historia” (Echeverría 1994, 40) [The baroque ethos does not erase, as does the realist ethos, the contradiction pertaining to the world of life in capitalist modernity, and neither does it reject it, as does the romantic ethos. It recognizes it as inevitable, as does the classical ethos, but, unlike the latter, resists accepting it, endeavoring to change the “bad side” into good, through which, according to Hegel, history advances]. 3

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This strategy has been used by subaltern populations dating back to the colonial period when the colonized suffered plagues and violence (Echeverría 1994, 51). Echeverría describes the cultural and racial “mestizaje” resulting from these struggles as “códigofagia” (Echeverría 1994, 51), a term meant to suggest that cultural codes can be metaphorically devoured and reformulated by subaltern members of society in a way that challenges the dominance of a single class. The interdependence of cultural constructs and concepts breaks down binaries, hierarchies, and dominant ideas of modernity. Similarly, Brazilian antropofagia, which was conceived by modernist Oswald de Andrade, resists cultural colonization through parody and reformulation to produce original art and expression. Antropofagia also resonates with the idea of the baroque as theorized by Haroldo de Campos (1981), and the repurposing or contemporary “circuit bending” technologies5 within Latin American modernity that reconfigures and subverts art forms of cultural centers.6

 See Alfredo Suppia’s (2017) article “Acesso negado” regarding the concept of circuit bending and the modification of the internal circuits of electronic devices in the film Branco sai preto fica (2015), directed by Adirley Queirós. Suppia explains that a pioneer and one of the main proponents of circuit bending is the American artist Reed Ghazala. Lucas Mafra, from the Gambiologia group even do workshops focused on the modification of toys to make new sounds. In 3%, the citizens of the Continent use of inventiveness and repurposing of technology is one of the many themes that it has in common with Queirós’s film, including the use of science fiction to talk about social injustice, differently abled bodies, and the discussion of citizenship and human rights and the divisions of Brazilian social and physical space. 6  Haroldo de Campos (1981) traces the similarities between the baroque and the parody and subversion of European standards that would be consumed and reconfigured in Latin America—and codified as antropofagia by Andrade. In some ways, the fundamental difference between the views of Andrade and Echeverría is generational. Andrade belonged to an earlier generation that advocated revolution, and complete rejection of capitalism and a return to the matriarchal utopia of Pindorama. Echeverría belongs to a generation affected by the collapse of communism, neoliberal policies, and the events of 1990s in Mexico, with the rise of NAFTA and the Zapatista movement in 1994, and thus he engaged in a search for rearticulating Latin America’s resistance to capitalism and suggested his “ethe” as a way of dealing with capitalism and not its overthrow. 5

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Returning to 3%, I argue that the new alliances forged in the second season convey the idea of a baroque ethos, since the characters recombine ideological, technological, and cultural paradigms through códigofagia or antropofagia in a way that resists binary ways of thinking and normative modernity. In particular, Joana, Michele, Rafael (Rodolfo Valente), and Fernando learn to overcome the divide between the self and the other, replacing polarized political ideologies with a new cultural paradigm, which, I argue, is represented by the repurposing of the Offshore’s powerful biotechnology. Facing an increased threat of resistance, the Offshore security chief begins to advocate for the use of force and violence, that is, for instituting a “state of exception”—to use Agamben’s term—to counter increasingly polarized political and social tensions. When it is learned that the Cause plans to disrupt the Process through the use of a bomb, Offshore security begins to work with unofficial militias to control unrest, a strategy typical of Brazilian biopolitical reality and policing. While Joana decides to join the Cause, she does not endorse Silas’s use of violence, but rather finds an ally in Fernando, the pastor’s son. Fernando refuses to join the Cause but promises to use his engineering skills to hack the Offshore data systems. Meanwhile, two of the Cause’s infiltrators who passed through the Process—Michele and Rafael— attempt to disrupt the Offshore from within. Both manage to return to the Continent in order to promote the Cause but suffer trauma and the deaths of their mentors. Other shifting loyalties involve Ezequiel, who, although he has committed crimes to protect his plans, ultimately dedicates himself to the Cause. Meanwhile Silas, who appears to be a self-sacrificing medical doctor and leader, informs unofficial militias loyal to the Offshore of Joana’s whereabouts, whereupon they kidnap and threaten to execute her. In another twist, Fernando is also turned over to Offshore authorities for his involvement in the Cause, but while in jail discovers that one of his guards is Rafael, a Cause infiltrator. These shifting alliances undermine the clear differences between the Offshore and the Cause. However, the breakdown of binaries is clearest in the case of the Founding couple, or the Casal Fundador, who turn out to be a group of three engineers—two white women,  Samira and

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Laís,  (Maria Flor and Fernanda Vasconcellos)  and a Black man, Vítor (Silvio Guidane). This shows that the founders do not represent the traditional heterosexual union of a couple as promoted by both Offshore society and the Continent’s popular religion, but rather are a threesome, sharing an unconventional lifestyle and discovering a new biologically based data system.7 The series suggests that the group’s creativity and innovation were due in part to this very resistance to convention and traditional ways of thinking. It is also significant that one of the three—Samira–was murdered by the other two when she threatened the purity of their vision for the Offshore paradise. They felt that the society of the Continent during the previous century was too corrupt and degraded to be trusted with the new technology, so when Samira proposed to share it, the other two eliminated her. This action has devastating consequences for the Continent, which suffers the destruction of its infrastructure through an electromagnetic wave that results in an environmental wasteland. When Michele learns that the culture was founded on a false premise that reinforced a binary division of the pristine Offshore and the polluted Continent, she also discovers Samira’s remains and a necklace with a shelllike device that proves to be the key to controlling the powerful data technology the trio had invented. These discoveries suggest that the new biotechnology is not based on a binary, cybernetic code, but rather on a living biological code similar to that of DNA. Thus, this embodied knowledge appears to be capable of generating a great number of possibilities and applications for solving the society’s ecological and social ills, just as living cells carry out a multitude of tasks simultaneously in the body of a living organism.8 While DNA has been compared to binary codes of cybernetic systems, scientists note that biological systems do not operate in the same way as the sequential logic of cybernetic coding. Although the 7  The importance of trios or a “third” way cannot be underestimated in Brazilian society. According to Roberto DaMatta (1979), a triad of malandro/rogue, santo/saint, and caxias/ lawman operates in every Brazilian individual in the quest for justice, repentance, and order. DaMatta’s argument that “virtue lies in the middle” also suggests an intermediary or triangular logic in Brazilian culture that also operates among the characters in the show. 8  The complexity of these systems can be noted here as cells use energy in the process of creating, and maintaining life goes beyond the binaries of computer coding (Bouchard 2019).

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workings of this biotechnology are not fully explained in the series, its capacity to perform complex tasks at overwhelming speed suggests a new type of biological and digital interface. The sexuality of the three founding members and the innovation of the technology they invented suggest the value of having a diverse body politic and the possibility for innovation in an embodied form of knowledge that normative modernity has repressed, according to Gazi Islam: As repressed desire, cannibalism was not pathological, but taboo, as alluded by Andrade. The ‘return of the repressed’ creates a space for self-affirmation as the re-discovery of nature in its chaotic libidinal form. Thus, anthropophagic knowledge is embodied, both corporeal and representation[al] (my correction), rejecting a distinction between mental and physical central to modernist Enlightenment thought. (Islam 2011, 172)

In the final episode of 3%, Michele, who possesses the key to the system’s biotechnology, approaches Fernando for help, as he is the only one she trusts to administer the power of the new biotechnology in an ethical way. This makes biopolitical issues of gender, race, and embodiment all come to the surface. In order to stop the Process without using a bomb, Fernando has to find a way to disrupt the system. He does so by “infecting” the biotechnology of the Offshore with his own blood, which not only causes a blackout and stops the Process but also initiates a new era, since he and Michele leverage its data in order to create a third option or alternative society to the Offshore and the Continent known as the Shell. At this point, Fernando’s blood signifies the democratization of biotechnology and the possibility of new applications for this powerful entity for the benefit of all, not just the elite.9

9  In addition, we note medical biotechnology as a type of medicine that uses living cells and their materials to create cures and treatments for diseases, which are denied to Fernando during the Process. One example of the Offshore’s powerful medical biotechnology is its ability to sterilize its inhabitants with just a simple injection or vaccine whose mark is used to signify the privileged status of its citizens. Thus, this biotechnology also provides “immunity” to all common diseases and any sense of community with the Continent, which in turn justifies depriving 97% of the population—like Fernando—of these technologies. I discuss the implications of this type of immunity and counter-immunity in biopolitics in my study Cyborgs, Sexuality and the Undead (Ginway 2020, 13–16).

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By the second season’s conclusion, the series has undermined several Brazilian cultural paradigms. First, the idea of a foundational couple is revealed to be a founding threesome, which questions the heteronormative paradigm of Brazil’s foundational myth of a mixed-race society. Second, Fernando, who is in a wheelchair, suggests a more inclusive image of Brazil’s body politic, beyond the tropes of Black hypermasculinity. Third, the increased use of violence in the two societies—whether by the Offshore or the Cause—illustrates that force and repression cannot lead to stability. We also see traditional family ties undermined, since Fernando learns that it was his father Pastor Antônio who turned him in to Offshore authorities, rather than a childhood friend as he originally suspected. Joana and Fernando—the most marginal characters on the social scale—are also the most heroic, as they remain true to their beliefs and resist decisions based on religious or political ideology. Finally, when the new biotechnology is no longer controlled by a powerful elite, it becomes a powerful organic intelligence in tune with the culture that created it. The bleak binary dystopia is replaced by utopian possibility, exemplified by a biological entity of posthuman technology that revitalizes the body politic. The importance of local knowledge and of resistance to binaries through re-appropriation and adaptation are key messages. At the core of this new society is a balanced triad that includes representatives from the Continent, leaders from the Offshore, and the new biotechnology that represents the posthuman possibility of the collective intelligence of its people. It is made clear that positive change will not take place overnight: the plan is a constant set of compromises that will be worked out slowly within existing parameters. While 3% is based on a science fictional extrapolation of a new technology, its originality and power emanate from Brazilian cultural reality, which offers a base from which to imagine a path to greater social justice. This is played out in the final two seasons of the show, which illustrate that  the survival of a united  community will require the  abandonment of elitist, top-down technologies and  policies. Finally,  access to public goods and full citizenship cannot remain restricted to a specific geographic space or specific social strata in the post 3% world, and the rebuilding of society needs to be based on the Continent’s adaptive, local knowledge and models.

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References 3%. 2016–2020. Created by Pedro Aguilera, Netflix, Brazil. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Introduction. Homo Sacer. Trans. Daniel Heller-­ Roazen, 1–29. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Andrade, Oswald de. 1991. Cannibalist Manifesto. Trans. Leslie Bary, Latin American Literary Review 19 (38): 38–47. Bouchard, R. Philippe. 2019. Is DNA Like a Blueprint, a Computer Program, or a List of Ingredients? Medium.com, January 25. https://medium.com/the-­ philipendium/is-­d na-­l ike-­a -­b lueprint-­a -­c omputer-­p rogram-­o r-­a -­l ist-­o f-­ ingredients1484b34a9121. Accessed 19 May 2022. Branco sai, preto fica. 2015. Directed by Adirley Queirós, Vitrine Filmes / Cinco do Norte. de Campos, Haroldo. 1981. Da razão antropofágica: a Europa sob o signo da devoração. Colóquio Letras 62: 10–25. DaMatta, Roberto. 1979. Carnavais, malandros e heróis: para uma sociologia do dilema brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro. Echeverría, Bolívar. 1994. El ethos barroco. In Modernidad, mestizaje cultura, ethos barroco, 13–36. Mexico City: UNAM. Foucault, Michel. 1978. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Franco, Marielle. 2018. After the Takeover—Mobilizing the Political Creativity of Brazil. Trans. Jamille Pinheiro Dias, Katrina Dodson, and Deise Faria Nunes. The New Left Review 110: 135–140. Gandler, Stefan. 2015. Critical Marxism in Mexico. Brill: Trans. George Ciccariello-­ Maher and Stefan Gandler. Leiden. Ginway, M.  Elizabeth. 2020. Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction. Vanderbilt University Press. Holston, Michael. 2008. “Dangerous Spaces of Citizenship.” Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Islam, Gazi. 2011. Can the Subaltern Eat? Anthropophagic Culture as a Brazilian Lens on Post-Colonial Theory. Organization 19, no. 2 (2011): 159–180. Larkins, Erika Robb. 2017. Guarding the Body: Private Security Work in Rio de Janeiro. Conflict and Society 3: 61–72. Mbembe, J. A. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Moraña, Mabel. 2017. El monstruo como máquina de guerra. Madrid: Iberoamericana. Moylan, Tom. 1982. Locus of Hope: Utopia versus Ideology. Science Fiction Studies 9 (2): 159–166.

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Perlman, Janice. 2010. Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Suppia, Alfredo. 2017. Acesso negado: circuit bending, borderlands and science fiction e lo-fi sci-fi em Branco sai, preto fica. Revista Famecos: mídia, cultura e tecnologia. 24 (1). Suvin, Darko. 1979. The Metamorphosis of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 10

Bruja Theory: Latinidad Without Latinos in Popular Narratives of Brujería William Orchard

Just one day before the 2016 presidential election, Afro Nuyorican rapper Princess Nokia (née Destiny Nicole Frasqueri) released the music video for “Brujas” (2016), a cut from her mixtape 1992, which established her as a rising hip hop star. The video’s beginning departs from that of the recorded song. In the recording, we first hear a male voice declaring “I’m the supreme” before being overtaken by Nokia, who repeats, “[w]e is them ghetto witches, speakin’ in tongue bitches” (Nokia 2016). This line, which is repeated several times in the song’s opening, reclaims stigmatizing terms as it centers on the experiences, power, and knowledge of marginalized women of color. The reference to “ghetto” positions the witches in the urban, racialized spaces that are discounted by the powerful and the privileged, while the term “bitch” resignifies an epithet directed at women. This line, then, primes the listener for an anthem for women and queer people of color that is consistent with Nokia’s stardom. She was born in East Harlem, was placed with an abusive foster parent after her mother

W. Orchard (*) Queens College, The City University of New York, Queens, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6_10

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died of AIDS, and forged her political and aesthetic sensibilities in New York City’s punk, DIY, and queer communities (Petridis 2017). She began her career as Wavy Spice, but changed her name to Princess Nokia, after the inexpensive cellphone she was eligible for as a low-income earner. In a 2017 Vice profile, Amani Bin Shikhan writes that Nokia “identifies as a bruja and a tomboy, a classic New York Boricua shorty, a feminist, a queer woman who isn’t burdened, but empowered by her complexity” (Shikhan 2017). These complex identifications resulted in an iconoclastic attitude that eschews respectable conventions and is epitomized in one of the stories frequently recounted about Nokia: her 2017 performance at Cambridge University. During the performance, she stepped into the audience to slap a man who mouthed “show me your tits,” and then told that crowd, “that’s what you do when a white boy disrespects you” (Petridis 2017). The action solidified her commitment to making her performances safe spaces for people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ persons. In this context, the opening verses of “Brujas” reflect this intersectional commitment to lifting the voices of women of color and challenging white, cis-heteropatriarchy by discovering power and community in people and spaces that have been marginalized. The music video for the song continues this work and adds further dimension to it by grounding the song’s references to witchcraft in specific spiritual practices. The video opens with a shot of a Black woman in white linen pants covered in a blue lace veil and standing in a body of water as the soundtrack plays “a song to Yemayá, the orisha or divinity of the sea in the Afrocuban religion Regla de Ocho or Santería” (Santana 2019, 191). The song to Yemayá, consisting just of women’s voices, plays over the images of a woman’s arm gesturing in the water and four other Black women in white circling the first woman in the sea. This opening reorients the song from the urban milieu of the opening lyrics of “Brujas” to emphasize the indigenous and African diasporic connections, across both time and space. This visual prelude to the song underscores the significance of the song’s most sonically captivating verses: “I’m the Black a-Rican bruja straight out from the Yoruba/And my people come from Africa diaspora, Cuba/And you mix that Arawak, that original people/I’m that Black Native American, I vanquish all evil/I’m the Black a-Rican bruja straight out from the Yoruba/And my ancestors Nigerian, my grandmas was brujas/And I come from an island and it’s called Puerto Rico/And it’s one of the smallest but it got the most people” (Nokia 2016). Nokia here identifies as an Afro Nuyorican and connects that experience not only to the

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island of Puerto Rico but to a larger Yoruban diaspora that includes Nigeria, Cuba, and beyond. She simultaneously acknowledges her indigeneity, naming the Arawak, which includes the Taíno, the indigenous people of Puerto Rico (Boricua). The lines also imply a temporal unfolding, as the speaker acknowledges a shared history with “grandmas” who practiced brujería and passed this knowledge down across generations. Examining the song and video, ethnomusicologist Matthew Leslie Santana sees Nokia as engaging in a politics of coalition rather than one of identity. Coalition involves solidarities not simply with those who share an identity with you but who also share a specific relationship to power. For Santana, “Brujas, or witches, becomes Nokia’s way of encompassing and understanding her coalition, which is specifically Black, native, and femme” (Santana 2019, 192). Princess Nokia’s “Brujas” is one of example of a proliferation of bruja narratives in the last decade that are rethinking the terms of Latinidad by imagining it in new, porous coalitions. But Nokia’s “Brujas” also reveals some of the challenges of talking about these narratives. By depicting real spiritual practices, “Brujas” reminds us that Santería, which Nokia practices, and Yoruba spirituality are real things that are actively practiced by people in the present. Scholars in the social sciences have investigated these belief systems, revealing their complex histories. While bruja narratives may refer to actual spiritual practices, they are more often forms of speculative literature that imagine supernatural solutions to some of the impasses of the present. The music video for “Brujas” recognizes this dual nature of bruja narratives when it intercuts the images of women engaged in rituals with shots of Nokia and three other women dressed in plaid skirts and polo shirts against the brick wall of a schoolhouse. This image references the 1996 supernatural horror film The Craft, which depicts adolescent witches in a Los Angeles prep school and became a cult classic about feminist empowerment. These images connect “Brujas” with speculative narrative traditions and allow us to align the video with other recent bruja narratives like The CW’s 2018 reboot of Charmed (2018–2022), featuring three Latina witches, Zoraida Córdova’s Brooklyn Brujas young adult novels (2016–2020), and the OpenTV show Brujos (2017–2020) about a queer coven in Chicago. Recent theoretical work on speculative literature provides some frameworks for considering the significance of these popular bruja narratives and their connection to our historical moment. Drawing a distinction between science fiction and fantasy, Fredric Jameson notes that, while

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science fiction narratives are grounded in “material and historical constraints,” fantasy is less tethered to these conditions and instead embraces “the celebration of human creative power and freedom” (Jameson 2005, 66). Magic in fantasy narratives is “a figure for the enlargement of human powers and their passage to the limit, their actualization of everything latent and virtual in the stunted human organism of the present” (Jameson 2005, 66). Investing supernatural power in Latinas and queer Latinxs, bruja narratives imagine the “stunted human”—which is to say the human being who is oppressed in the current arrangements of power—as possessing their full sovereignty and capable of overcoming the systems that seek to diminish or erase them. Although fantasy may not be as constrained by material conditions as science fiction, its wish of full agency for its protagonists is put in the service of addressing inequities in the material conditions in which one lives. In his recent work on “speculative realism,” Ramón Saldívar (2011) detects a turn toward popular genres like science fiction and fantasy in literary fiction produced by ethnic American writers. For Saldívar (2011), this aesthetic turn is not escapist but provides a way for writers to better engage with the historical realities from which their works emerge. In this way, speculative forms provide better ways to understand the realities that may share terminologies with the recent past but that in fact differ in significant ways. If previous ethnic American writers resorted to social realism in order to describe the conditions under which they lived, contemporary ethnic American writing often deploys the devices of speculative fiction in order to articulate a new racial imaginary suited to the present while still retaining the commitments to racial justice expressed in the social realist fiction of their predecessors. What, then, is the new racial imaginary envisioned in bruja narratives and how do these register historical fluctuations in matters related to racial justice? Among other things, these narratives respond to two developments: the political shifts that precipitated and followed the 2016 presidential election in the United States, and a growing exhaustion with different formations of Latinidad. As mentioned in this chapter’s first sentence, Princess Nokia’s “Brujas” video was released the day before the 2016 presidential election. The connection to politics was not lost on early commentators on the video. In Remezcla, Caitlin Donohoe begins her review of the video by stating, “if your energy hasn’t been fucked by the U.S. presidential campaign, your bruja blinders are functioning at supreme next levels” (Donohue 2016). For those who were distressed by the political happenings on election day, Donohue advises her readers to “[u]se

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these holy Yoruba girl gang visuals to remind yourself of the powers that lie beyond any podium” (Donohue 2016). Similarly, in the pilot episode of Charmed, the three sisters learn from their Whitelighter, who protects and guides them, that their powers were activated by three signs of an impending apocalypse. He explains that the first of these signs is “when the weakest of men reaches ill-gotten glory … suffice it to say, it’s your current president” (S0E01). The other bruja narratives considered in this chapter were also published during the years of the Trump administration. In a recent series of book reviews, Renee Hudson has defined a “post-­ Trump” period in Latinx literature. Hudson identifies a body of recent Latinx writing that comprises a “counter-archive to the white supremacy that dominates the news” and that “has been a site of resistance, of hope, of sorrow” (Hudson 2019).1 The works that Hudson identifies operate in a largely realist mode, urgently addressing some of the current administration’s policy enactments that have harmed Latinx communities across the nation. The bruja narratives share with this body of literature a pressing need to expose and critique white supremacy, but, using fantasy’s ability to amply human capacities, these narratives often figure the current moment in apocalyptic terms that serve to reveal the deep structures that sustain white supremacy and inequality in the present.2 The brujas narratives’ critique of white supremacy relates to the second development that these narratives respond to: an exhaustion with Latinidad in the public sphere. As Paul Allatson notes, Latinidad “should be understood in its plural form” and that Latinidades “emerge in and as multiple transcultural and transnational identifications” (Allatson 2016, 130). Allatson further notes the signifiers Latina/o/@/x emerge in a historical period that “no longer invariably places faith in the ethno-national centers” (Allatson 2016, 130). If this is the case, the “copiousness” or elasticity of Latinidad renders the term legible only in its particular instantiations.3 Although scholars have long acknowledged the variousness of 1  Works that comprise this archive include Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends (2017) and Lost Children Archive (2019), Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied (2017), Carmen Giménez Smith’s Be Recorder (2019), Natalie Scenter-Zapico’s Lima: Limón (2019), Jennine Capó Crucet’s My Time Among the Whites (2019), and José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal (2018). 2  On the ability of apocalyptic narratives to reveal structures and unmask ideologies, especially in Latinx and Caribbean contexts, see Junot Díaz’s “Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal” (Díaz 2011). 3  On the “copiousness” of Latinidad, see Claudia Milian (2013). On Latinidad’s elasticity, see Marta Caminero-Santangelo (2007, 27–30).

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Latinidad, a totemic notion of Latinidad is often erected in the political and media spheres. In politics, the 2016 election dispelled the illusion of this totem, as the Latino vote split in key battleground states, contributing to the election of Trump as president. In media, scholars and activists lament what anthropologist Arlene Dávila refers to as the “whitewashing of race”: how “Latinos are simultaneously subject to processes of whitening and racialization” (Dávila 2008, 12), which results in such things as media representations that feature light-skinned Latinos and that contribute to the erasure of the Blackness and Indigeneity that are important parts of Latinx communities and histories. In this sense, many potent invocations of Latinidad in the public sphere participate in the forms of white supremacy that sustain the forces that brought the Trump administration to power. Because of the ways in which many of versions of Latinidad have been implicated in white supremacist projects, bruja narratives create a form of Latinidad without Latinos, eschewing those signifiers and often even muting national identifications, since many of the nations of origin also generated racial ideologies that valorized whiteness while denigrating Blackness and Indigeneity.4 The phrase “Latinidad without Latinos” evokes the title of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s book about color-blind racism, Racism Without Racists. As Bonilla-Silva explains, most would not identify with the term “racist” or avow racist intent, but racial structures and ideologies persist that enable whites to “express resentment toward minorities” and “reinforce white privilege” (Bonilla-Silva 2014, 7, 9). In bruja narratives, Bonilla-Silva’s schema is inverted: the name of a marginalized group (Latinos) is newly understood to be complicit with anti-blackness and white supremacy, and is therefore disavowed in order to foreground the structures and ideologies that oppress the group. Tatiana Flores offers one of the most recent and clear articulations of this understanding when she writes that “Black erasure, sadly, is built into the concept of Latinidad” (Flores 2021, 59). The nationalisms that circulate around and compete within many instances of Latinidad are also often heteropatriarchal. Therefore, it is not surprising that bruja narratives typically center on the voices of women and queer folk. These narratives, as in Princess Nokia’s video, present coalitions that are identifiably Latinx without being named 4  Although many scholars have discussed this topic, a recent, clear account that synthesizes many of these insights appears in the second chapter of Laura Gomez’s Inventing Latinos, titled “Idealized Mestizaje and Anti-Black and Anti-Indian Racism” (Gómez 2020).

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as such, and downplay the histories of nations in order to locate shared African and Indigenous connections. These coalitions are more porous than most versions of Latinidad, allowing for solidarities with other people of color. As a result, bruja narratives are less directed to interrogating the abuses of US national policy or making appeals for liberal rights. Instead, they do the decolonial work of exposing the coloniality of knowledge and attempting to recover and advance other epistemologies in the service of producing racial justice and building a more sustainable world. Bruja narratives expose systemic forms of exploitation like the hoarding of wealth and power, the extraction of resources that leads to environmental collapse, and the ways that Western epistemologies forge antagonisms that lead to violence and calamity. Even as these narratives represent a wish for new coalitions and different forms of racial justice, it is important to admit their limitations, which often are connected to the industries from which they emerge. Princess Nokia made a distinct effort to circulate her work outside of the normal channels of the music industry, and the showrunners of Brujos produced their episodes on OpenTV, an independent platform meant to encourage “intersectional series and pilots.” In contrast, Charmed was produced by a major television network, and Córdova’s Brooklyn Brujas novels appeared in a competitive marketplace of young adult titles. Of the works considered in this chapter, Charmed reached the most people and, not surprisingly, was also a work that attracted the harshest critique. Despite these limitations, these bruja narratives represent a structure of feeling that expresses dissatisfaction with current configurations of Latinidad and presses us to think more expansively, inviting us to participate in these coalitions by further pursuing the new questions that they set in motion. Charmed debuted on the CW network on October 14, 2018, and was marketed to viewers at a Latina reboot of the popular series of the same name that ran from 1998 to 2005. In the pilot episode of the new series, the daughters of Marisol Vera, a professor of women’s studies at Hilltowne University in Michigan, learn that their recently murdered mother was a witch when their magical powers are activated by their mother’s death. The daughters include: Melanie (Mel), a lesbian graduate student in women’s studies; Margarita (Maggie), a college freshman psychology major intent on rushing a sorority; and Macy, their doctorate-holding scientist half-sister who only connects with her sisters after their mother has died. Although many Latinx culture watchers were eager for the series, others rightly critiqued the show for its representations of Latinas, especially

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Afro-Latinas. The cast consists of just two Latina actors: Puerto Rican actress Melonie Diaz plays Mel and Cuban American actress Valerie Cruz plays the mother, Marisol. The other two Latinas are played by Madeleine Mantock, a British actress of Afro-Caribbean background, and Sarah Jeffrey, a Canadian actress of African American, Indigenous Canadian, and English descent. While some viewers liked seeing different ethnic actresses with different skin tones featured in starring roles in a network television show, others lamented the lost opportunity to feature Afro-Latina actresses. The Latinx culture publication Mitú called out the CW for “exploit[ing] the Latinx community for publicity gains, only to reveal their idea of representation to be colorist and not cultural” (Danielli 2018). The article cites one Twitter user who was incensed about the token appearance of a Puerto Rican flag in Mel’s room in the token show’s third episode, one of three brief references to the sisters’ Puerto Rican roots made across the first season’s twenty-two episodes.5 For the reviewer of Mitú, the show’s setting in a suburban college town, the mother’s whiteness, and the absence of many cultural markers whitewash the show (Danielli 2018). If bruja narratives often highlight African and Indigenous connections over nationality, these criticisms reveal how muting ethno-­ nationalities could be co-opted by corporations in order to market a superficial Latino product that is sellable to a broad population. Yet, the word “Latino” only appears once in the first season of the series, in one of the shows more interesting, if also flawed, reflections on the relationship of Blackness to Latinidad. For most of the season, Mel and Maggie, who grew up with their mother and are both light-skinned, thought that they shared the same father. Macy is phenotypically Black and has an African American father who raised her. Midway through the first season, genetic testing reveals that Maggie and Macy share the same father, which causes Maggie to reflect on what it means to be Black. This issue is brought to a crisis when she applies for financial aid from Hilltowne University. She lingers over a screen that asks her race and ethnicity. She easily clicks the button for “Hispanic/Latino,” but deliberates before clicking “Black/African American.” After clicking the box and advancing to the next page, she learns of scholarship opportunities for Black students 5  The other references include of a discussion of coquito as an alternative to eggnog during the show’s Christmas episode, and a quick moment when Mel asks one of Maggie’s sorority sisters if she knows that they are Puerto Rican and not Mexican when the sorority sister asks her for a margarita recipe for an upcoming Cinco de Mayo party.

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but is unsure whether she should apply for these funds earmarked for Black students. The scene in front of the computer ends with her typing the question, “What determines blackness?” into a search engine (S01E18). Ultimately, after conferring with Macy, Maggie decides to abstain from accessing resources for Black students while also committing to join the Black Student Union in order to better understand her newly discovered background. In this scene, the word “Latino,” which is not spoken aloud, is an administrative term, used by universities and institutions as ways of classifying people. Although the form allows the applicant to “check all that apply,” the administrative categories prove insufficient for Maggie’s evolving understanding of who she is. If Maggie represents a Latina subject, this plot development represents a kind of allegory for the way in which Latinos continue to wrestle with African and Indigenous pasts and presents that have been erased or obscured by racial ideologies not only in the US but also within many configurations of Latinidad. While one might credit Charmed, despite the critiques directed at it, with attempting to complicate our understandings of race as it relates to Latinx identities, it is important to note how the show also reproduces forms of thought that locate Blackness outside of Latinidad. Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores note how “the Afro-Latin@ concept … is also a standing challenge to the African American and English-language monopoly over Blackness in the U.S. context” (Jiménez Román and Flores 2010, 2–3). In Charmed, the Afro-Latinidad represented in Macy and Maggie results from the union of a Latina mother and African American father. The show struggles to imagine forms of Afro-Latinx identity that are not connected to the African American experience. There are possibilities for this: Macy’s love interest, Galvin, is identified once as Haitian, Dominican, and Portuguese, but his Blackness is routed through his Haitian granmè, who is a Yoruba priestess and provides the sisters with crucial information about the demons with which they are warring. The closest the show comes to imagining an Afro-Latinx subject occurs obliquely in the fourth episode of the series in which the sisters use a secret spell left by their mother. The spell is “Santeria-based” and “unsanctioned by elders” (S01E04). Santería is an Afro-Cuban folk religion that synthesized Yoruban and Catholic elements, but the channeling of this tradition through their light-skinned mother whitewashes the African diasporic origins of this cultural practice. Just as their mother, who is an elder, resorts to forms of “unsanctioned” practice in order to discover responses to the future she prophesized, the

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Charmed Ones must reach out to those who represent other systems of knowledge in order to fulfill their mission of saving the world. When they consult Galvin’s ancestor, draw on the knowledge of the Haitian psychic Mama Roz, and deploy Santería-based knowledge, the Charmed Ones enter into coalition with others who share their relationship to power and who possess knowledge that will help liberate them from the rigid thinking of the elders. Their conflicted relationship with the system that regulates their magic is apparent from the onset. When Harry—their Whitelighter, and a white British male—appears in their lives, first as their mother’s replacement as head of the Department of Women’s Studies, Mel questions his position, stating that “they should have never hired a cis male to lead the Women’s Studies department” (S01E01). The Whitelighter’s British accent suggests histories of colonialism—a project that, as a professor in the series Brujos (discussed below) notes, “equated to genocide … but this genocide of bodies was also accompanied by epistemicide, by the erasure or repression of alternative channels of knowledge and thought to understand the universe” (S01E05).6 This racial connection is emphasized later in the series when Galvin, in conversation with Macy after learning that she is a witch, says, “Harry’s your white person” (S01E10). If bruja narratives point to or activate forms of decolonial thinking, Charmed, in small but significant ways, attempts this within its narrative world through mobilizing unsanctioned knowledges in order to resolve its narrative conflicts. These efforts reach a turning point in an episode devoted to Medusa seeking vengeance against fraternity men who slut shame women via social media. The Charmed Ones are instructed to kill Medusa by beheading her, but, after learning that Medusa was a witch who was turned into a Gorgon after Poseidon raped her, they see her as a victim of men who feared powerful women. Choosing instead to “see” Medusa, the Charmed Ones’ recognition releases Medusa from her torment, but the action also causes Macy to wonder in a conversation with an elder at the episode’s end, “What if our entire concept of demons, of good and evil, what if it’s all wrong?” (S01E15). With this new understanding, the sisters are able to vanquish the first season’s main villain, a demon named Alistair who is the CEO of a biotechnology company. Alistair steals the Charmed Ones’ DNA in an attempt to secure and hoard the source of all magical power. 6  The character Professor Morales is condensing some of the insights of the scholar Ramón Grosfoguel. See, for instance, Grosfoguel (2013).

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This demon is an easy figure for the forms of exploitative capitalism that extract wealth from the bodies of Black and brown people and concentrate it in the hands of a small set of individuals. In addition to the reframing of knowledge that helps them defeat the demon, the narrative also emphasizes the significance of heterogeneous coalitions. In the last episodes, the sisters repeatedly remember their mother’s advice, “You are better together. Your strengths are your differences.” This emphasis on coming together across differences to challenge large systems of exploitation reveals the significance of coalitions in the re-articulation of relations of power. Zoraida Córdova’s Labyrinth Lost, the first entry in her Brooklyn Brujas young adult series, similarly stresses the importance of establishing coalitions in order to face the forces that would hoard resources and prey on the marginalized.7 The importance of collectives in the work of securing and maintaining a world is the lesson that Alejandra (Alex) Mortiz must learn in the novel. At the beginning of the narrative, Alex wants to be normal. She is teased by classmates for being “creepy” and “weird” and for her mother who “smells like garlic” and is “a voodoo priestess or something” (Córdova 2016, 23). This desire for normalcy drives her to reject her magical abilities on her Deathday, which the narrative defines as “a bruja’s coming of age ceremony,” in which the young bruja’s dead relatives are summoned and her nascent powers are magnified and stabilized (Córdova 2016, 13). Alex’s refusal of her powers is also motivated by her view of magic as destructive. In her youth, she disrupted a ceremony for her dead Aunt Rosaria, which left Alex with haunting memories of death. Additionally, when her power first manifested, she killed her demon-­ possessed cat Miluna, which she sees as connected to her father disappearing the following day. Her refusal is remarkable because she is an encantrix, the most powerful form of bruja, who is capable of healing the sick, speaking to the dead, and writing her own cantos, among other things. When she refuses the powers and, with it, an incorporation into the family tradition, Alex is individuating herself in ways that often occur in the bildungsroman, but, as is often the case in Latinx coming-of-age stories, the kind of individuation associated with mainstream narratives has to be negotiated with obligations to the community. Alex’s refusal has unintended consequences: a portal opens and swallows her family and ancestors, entrapping them in the Tree of Souls in a realm called Los Lagos. 7

 The other novels in this series are Bruja Born (2018) and Wayward Witch (2020).

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In her analysis of the novel, Domino Pérez notes that “bruja magic is intertwined with Latinx identity” (Pérez 2020, 82). Pérez sees this as most evident in an early exchange Alex has with her older sister Lulu. After Alex sarcastically references the “spells” performed by the family, Lulu retorts, “Spells are for witches. Brujas do cantos” (Córdova 2016, 11). Alex replies that “All brujas are witches but not all witches are brujas” (Córdova 2016, 11). As in the other bruja narratives, this exchange shows how brujas are legibly Latinx, but never take on that signifier. In the author’s note at the end of Labyrinth Lost, Córdova distinguishes brujas from witches who come from Europe or Salem. Using Alex’s equation, we could say that all brujas are Latinx in the world of the Brooklyn Brujas stories, but not all Latinxs are brujas. As in other bruja narratives, the specific national identity of the witches is muted. Alex mentions her family origins twice. First telling the reader that her first ancestor to arrive in New  York came on a “ship to Ellis Island from Puerto Rico by way of Ecuador” (Córdova 2016, 65). Later, while talking with a fairy king in Los Lagos, she further elaborates that her father’s ancestors “were African slaves in Ecuador. They went to Panama and then Puerto Rico. Somehow, my blood comes from all over the world and settled in Brooklyn” (Córdova 2016, 187). Thus, the story emphasizes an African diasporic identity that connects her family to brujas from other regions who form part of their magical community in Brooklyn. The second section of the novel is called “The Fall,” in part because Alex falls into Los Lagos to try to rescue her family and in part because this fall is akin to the postlapsarian fall from innocence into knowledge. Part of Alex’s fall into knowledge involves better understanding the Book of Cantos, which Pérez nicely describes as “an archive of generations of knowledge” that includes not just spells but also family history (Pérez 2020, 83). She also builds her knowledge as she performs a quest that requires her to overcome the terrain of Los Lagos, the different beings she discovers there, and the Devourer, who threatens to kill Alex’s family. In Los Lagos, the Tree of Souls collects energy and then releases it each month on the day of an eclipse, replenishing the land. The Devourer interrupts this process, feeding on the Tree of Life in order to hoard power, which results in the ecological devastation of the land. As one of the avianas (bird-women creatures who live in Los Lagos) tells Alex, “The land changes as the power changes” (Córdova 2016, 156). For the avianas, the changes have caused starvation as their land was rendered barren. The land’s fairies are manacled and enslaved by the Devourer, whose lust for

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power includes exerting control over all of Los Lagos’s inhabitants. Although the Devourer is a bruja gone bad, her desire to accumulate power and concentrate it in the hands of an individual mirrors the neoliberal rapacity of Alistair in Charmed. Alex vanquishes the Devourer by learning the importance of struggle and coalitions. Midway through the narrative, Alex expresses admiration for her mother and sisters who fight back against oppressive forces, noting that “[a]ll I’ve ever done is run from things” (205). The fairy king teaches her that such fleeing has consequences when he states that “[a]ll lands change for the worse when the people do not fight back” (Córdova 2016, 213). Alex draws on the wisdom and assistance of other oppressed groups in Los Lagos, like the avianas and fairies, but, most significantly, draws on the collective wisdom and magical power of her family. Standing in the Tree of Souls where her family is trapped, Alex acts as a conduit through which their collective power can travel in order to destroy the Devourer and liberate the land. In the Open TV series Brujos, the importance of fighting back in coalitions against systems that grind us down is highlighted in the series’ conclusion, which sees a coven of gay Latino witches, who are also graduate students at the University of Chicago, band together with other witches of color to battle their shared nemesis, the Scientists. The Scientists are, as the show’s website explains, “a secret society of white heteronormative male descendants of the first New World colonizers” who hunt witches and sustain their youth by eating the bodies of children of color. While Brujos displays some similarities with the other bruja narratives examined here, it also differs in significant ways, not the least being that its central witches are queer men. If bruja narratives interrogate the colonial systems that organize knowledge, which includes how we think about race, gender, sexuality, the family, and the state, then the queerness of the brujos fits with the other brujas that have been discussed because they similarly challenge normative orders. A more striking difference is the ease with which the series discusses the various ethno-nationalities of its central characters. La Maestra, a Puerto Rican santera, empowers the coven, which consists of four men: Mexican American Panfilo, whose power is telekinesis; Afro-Boricua Edwin, who possesses the ability to become invisible; Mexican American Jonathan, who performs the emotional labor of translating the feeling of those around him into piercing screams; and white guy Brian, whose power is “white privilege,” which show creator Ricardo Gamboa notes is “not a

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supernatural power, it’s a supernurtured power” (Betancourt 2017). The specification of identity may relate to how Brujos was independently produced. Unlike Charmed or Labyrinth Lost, where a muted ethno-­national identity can draw more viewers or readers, Brujos was an independently produced web series published on a platform, Open TV, specifically dedicated to promoting work by queer and trans artists and people of color. Yet, despite this difference from other bruja narratives, the trajectory of identity in Brujos runs in a similar direction. In an interview, Gamboa explains that “sometimes you have to be on guard of the effect of identity. Part of what identity [does] is smooth over real differences. And tries to flatten what could happen in an identity. So, not all brown people are my people. Not all queer people are [my] people” (Betancourt 2017). In the show, the brujos are initially contained in their Latinx coven, but later encounter a bruja fleeing the same witch hunters who are chasing them. From her, they learn a location spell that allows them to find trans, queer, gender-non-conforming, asexual, Muslim, Black, and Asian witches who are being tormented by the same white supremacist Scientists. A coalition forms as the series reaches its finale, comprised of people of color of varying sexual and gender identities who are similarly positioned by the brutality of white supremacy.8 Brujos also differs from other bruja narratives in how it imagines sources of knowledge and scenes of learning. La Maestra, of course, represents one form of knowledge that the brujos are being inducted into. The Scientists represent another form of knowledge that exemplifies Western epistemologies in their baldly racist, heteropatriarchal forms. One of the best scenes in the series involves a face-off between La Maestra and the leader of the Scientists. The Scientists kidnap La Maestra to torture and kill her, as they have others, but she thwarts their plan with a spell that protects her skin and life. As La Maestra is handcuffed to furniture and sitting on the floor while the Scientists enjoy a meal, the leader of the Scientists advances his account of himself as a conqueror who took the magic of the New World and created civilization where barbarity existed: “I learned magic, I calculated, I measured. I mixed and mutated your knowledge to my ends. I invented and owned that knowledge.” La Maestra retorts, in Spanish: “A usurper doesn’t invent anything, Mr. 8  The coming together of this coalition seems especially significant when one considers that the first episode of the series was posted to Open TV on January 20, 2017, the date of the Trump inauguration.

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Smith. A colonizer doesn’t make anything, only takes everything. After all these centuries of violence, you would still be nothing without us” (S01E09). This exchange is highly allegorical, with each representing the two sides of knowledge that appear in other bruja narratives, if a bit more obviously. But the series also has a third fount of knowledge: the university classroom, especially as it circulates the theoretical insights associated with postcolonial, decolonial, feminist, and queer studies. Several episodes feature scenes in classrooms, in which characters wrestle with the arguments advanced in contemporary theory. We see the brujos discuss Lauren Berlant on the wearing down of bodies in neoliberalism, Ann Laura Stoler on how you cannot discuss the history of sexuality without addressing colonization, Chandan Reddy on how freedom for one group is often achieved at the cost of violence for others, and Patrick Wolfe’s figuration of settler colonialism as a structure, not an event. While in Charmed and Labyrinth Lost, the school or university is a locus for Western epistemologies that are contested through the other ways of knowing that brujería opens, here the university—a colonialist institution—academizes much of the thought that La Maestra states plainly. In this way, brujería is offered in these narratives as its own form of theory. The one place in the series where some critical pressure is placed on the university occurs when Panfilo tells his dissertation adviser Professor Morales that he is a witch. When he asks if she believes him, she replies, “I’m too indoctrinated. I’d need empirical evidence” (S01E09). Professor Morales here seems aware of how inhabiting the university can shape one’s thought and being, but she earlier gives a lecture that refers to Ramón Grosfoguel’s theory of epistemicide. She ends that lecture asking, “Why do you think what you think? How can we begin with the decolonization of our minds?” (S01E05). One beginning involves imaginatively reconstructing what has been obliterated or worn down by centuries of colonization. This is the work that bruja narratives attempt. In a profile of Gamboa for Vice, Ashley Ray-Harris remarks that “Brujos uses magic to help viewers understand the extra capacities required to exist as black, brown, or queer person in the world” (Ray-Harris 2018). This extends to other bruja narratives as well. Instead of seeing Latinx and other marginalized people as diminished, bruja narratives acknowledge not only the magic of surviving these systems but also the connections—historical, social, and political—that must be sustained in order to triumph over them. Identity fails to achieve this, but coalitions with those similarly committed to prevailing move us in this direction. The rejection

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or downplaying of identity markers in these narratives may be an instance of what Lauren Berlant calls “genre flailing,” which she describes as “a mode of crisis management that arises after an object, or object world, becomes disturbed in a way that intrudes on one’s confidence about how to move in it” (Berlant 2018, 157). This failure of confidence in “Latino” is evident in Tatiana Flores’s recent reckoning with the concept, which ends by declaring “if latinidad cannot embrace antiracism and speak out against sexism, gendered violence, homophobia, transphobia, family separation, migrant criminalization, white supremacy, Indigenous invisibility, geographic segregation, and cultural erasure—in short if it cannot decolonize—it deserves to be canceled” (Flores 2021, 79). The conditional “if” suggests the concept and its accompanying identity can still be reformed. If bruja narratives are a genre flail, they suggest the possibility both of moving beyond Latinidad and of remaking it, but, in the meantime, they also articulate new terms of struggle. Brujos ends not with the fantasy resolutions typical of this type of speculative literature but by restoring reality and acknowledging that the “fight never ends, revolution is always happening” (S01E12). By acknowledging the magic within us, bruja narratives help us rehearse for the struggle.

References Allatson, Paul. 2016. From ‘Latinidad’ to ‘Latind@des’: Imagining the Twenty-­ First Century. In The Cambridge Companion to Latina/ Literature, ed. John Morán González, 128–146. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2018. Genre Flailing. Capacious 1 (2): 57–62. Betancourt, Manuel. 2017. Ricardo Gamboa Walks Us Through Each Episode of Queer Latino Web Series ‘Brujos’. Remezcla. https://remezcla.com/lists/ film/brujos-­web-­series-­ricardo-­gamboa-­interview/. Accessed 12 May 2022. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2014. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield. Brujos. 2017. Created by Ricardo Gamboa, OpenTV, USA. Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. 2007. On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity. Gainsville: University of Florida Press. Charmed. 2018–2022. Created by Jennie Snyder Urman, Jessica O’Toole, and Amy Rardin, The CW, USA. Córdova, Zoraida. 2016. Labyrinth Lost. New York: Sourcebooks. Danielli. 2018. Here’s How Fans Feel About the CW’s ‘Charmed’ Reboot, Which Was Billed as Latina. Mitú. https://wearemitu.com/entertainment/cws-­ charmed-­reboot-­less-­latina/. Accessed 12 May 2022.

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Dávila, Arlene. 2008. Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race. New York: New York University. Díaz, Junot. 2011. Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal. Boston Review. http:// bostonreview.net/junot-­diaz-­apocalypse-­haiti-­earthquake. Accessed 12 May 2022. Donohue, Caitlin. 2016. Princess Nokia’s ‘Brujas’ Video is a Spiritual Ode to Orishas and ‘The Craft.’ Remezcla. https://remezcla.com/releases/music/ princess-­nokia-­brujas-­video/. Accessed 12 May 2022. Flores, Tatiana. 2021. ‘Latinidad is Cancelled’: Confronting an Anti-Black Construct. Latin\ American and Latinx Visual Culture 3 (3): 58–79. Gómez, Laura. 2020. Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism. New York: New Press. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2013. The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/ Sexism and the Four Genocides/ Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century. Human Architecture XI 1 (2013): 73–90. Hudson, Renee. 2019. Jennine Capó Crucet and Post-Trump Latinx Literature. Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/jennine-­ capo-­crucet-­and-­post-­trump-­latinx-­literature/. Accessed 12 May 2022. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso. Jiménez Román, Miriam, and Juan Flores. 2010. Introduction. In The Afro-­ Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, ed. Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, 1–15. Durham: Duke University Press. Milian, Claudia. 2013. Latining America: Black-Browning Passages and the Coloring of the Latino/a Studies. Athens: University of Georgia. Nokia, Princess. 2016. Brujas—Princess Nokia. YouTube. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=iUcAPCxrSQs. Accessed 20 May 2022. Pérez, Domino. 2020. Afuerx and Cultural Practice in Shadowshaper and Labyrinth Lost. In Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature, ed. Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera, 74–87. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Petridis, Alexis. 2017. Princess Nokia: ‘At My Show, Girls Can Take Up Space the Way Men Do.’ The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/ sep/08/princess-­nokia-­destiny-­frasqueri-­rap-­riot-­grrrl. Accessed 12 May 2022. Ray-Harris, Ashley. 2018. “The New Series ‘Brujos’ Follows a Group of Gay Latino Witches.” Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyk8en/the-­new-­ series-­brujos-­follows-­a-­group-­of-­gay-­latino-­witches. Accessed 12 May 2022. Saldívar, Ramón. 2011. Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction. American Literary History 23 (3): 574–599.

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Santana, Matthew Leslie. 2019. Queer Hip Hop or Hip-Hop Queerness? Toward a Queer of Color Music Studies. In Queerting the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology, ed. Gregory Barz and William Cheng, 185–197. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shikhan, Amani Bin. 2017. Why Princess Nokia Matters Now, More Than Ever. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ypnpzk/why-­princess-­nokia-­matters-­ now-­more-­than-­ever. Accessed 20 May 2022

CHAPTER 11

“A Mutant Faith”: Science Fiction, Posthumanism, and Queer Futurity in Arca’s KiCK Album Pentalogy Antonio Córdoba

In “The Alien Inside,” a song near the end of Venezuelan artist Arca’s album KiCK iiii (Arca 2021c), Shirley Manson asks us to remember, “The first time you recognized the alien inside/In the face of abject misery/Remember the posthuman celestial sparkle/A mutant faith” (6–9). The front woman of the band Garbage recites these lines (and the rest of the lyrics of the song) over what Philip Sherburne describes as a “shoegaze rumble” (2021). This sonic wall of the early 1990s (or, rather, early 2010s revival of early 1990s) shoegaze may also bring to mind the elevating, soul-inspiring soundtracks of late 1970s and early 1980s films and documentaries on intergalactic exploration and encounter, which feels appropriate to song lyrics that move from “A star” to “your sanctuary” (Arca 2021c). The world of this song is a decidedly futuristic, speculative, posthumanist one, a world that includes the cosmic and materialist (the stars, outer space, the alien, the altered flesh of the mutant) and the sacred/

A. Córdoba (*) Manhattan College, Bronx, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6_11

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postsecular (faith and the idea not of shelter or utopian enclave, but of sanctuary). To fully understand the resonance of this moment in the pentalogy (or, at least, better justify my interest in it), it is necessary to highlight that the figure of the mutant has been present in Arca’s work from early on, before KiCK i was officially released in June 2020 and the rest of the albums in early December 2021.1 In 2015, her second album came out, titled Mutant. At the end of September 2019, Arca held at The Shed in New  York City “the site-specific performance Mutant Faith, which [could] be best describe[d] as a shape-shifting three-night show case” (Hahn 2019). The mutant seems to be at the heart of Arca’s conceptual and musical project, appearing at least in three different moments of her still short but quickly evolving career. The alien invoked in the song must not be overlooked either. In an interview in June 2020, before the release of KiCK iiii, she invited listeners “to recognize the fact that there’s an alien inside of each of us,” thereby contributing to the centrality of science fiction motifs in her artistic world (Krentowicz 2020, 40). Finally, cyborgthemed imagery and tropes populate the album covers of this pentalogy and the music videos that Arca produced with her habitual collaborator Frederick Heyman, “Nonbinary” (2020) and “Prada/Rakata” (2021). We can conclude that science fiction figures and motifs prominently recur in Arca’s work, and the purpose of this chapter is to explore this proliferation, devoting particular attention to this idea of “mutant faith.” In the context of Arca’s KiCK album pentalogy (and her whole work), how can we understand the relationship between mutant and faith? More importantly, I will attempt to find links between “the posthuman celestial sparkle,” non-human constructs such as the alien and the xenomorph (the title of a lyric-less song in the same album), and Latinx thinker José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “queer futurity,” in order to see how Arca’s album pentalogy addresses us to open ourselves to an unexpected and unexpectable future defined by the principle of hope and its precariousness and fragility. In this chapter I mention vocal performances by other artists (such as Manson’s) and visual work directed by a recurrent collaborator of Arca’s, but while acknowledging the presence of these other voices and 1  Though commonly referred as a “quintet” by the music press, I self-consciously use “pentalogy” in this chapter as a way to teasingly allude to Reinaldo Arenas’ series of quasibiographical novels that go from Celestino antes del alba to El asalto. This is not the place to explore the possible common ground between these two queer transnational Latin American artists, and yet it seems quite pertinent to hint at that still-to-be-written study by bringing up Arenas’ work using that term.

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crediting them, I still consider the lyrics, music, visuals (such as the album covers) and videos as fundamentally informed by Arca’s vision and treat all of them as different parts of one project. Before moving into the actual body of this chapter, a brief introduction to Arca and her career. Born in Venezuela in 1989 as the child of an investment banker, Alejandra Ghersi Rodríguez is a trans nonbinary electronic artist who lived in suburban Connecticut in her childhood and in a gated community in Caracas in her adolescent years, a time which left her with quite an ambivalent attitude toward her native country: “Everyone who lives in Venezuela has a love/hate relationship with it because of the political turmoil and the crime” (Hutchinson  2014). She started her music career as Nuuro in the late 2000s, singing in English first with ambiguous pronouns before switching to Spanish and more gender-­conforming lyrics, which left her deeply unsatisfied, to the point of killing that project: “I felt as I’d betrayed myself” (Petridis 2017). Ghersi then moved out of the country to get a college education at New York University, where, incidentally (and quite tantalizingly), José Esteban Muñoz was a professor at the time. She produced and collaborated with notable artists in the early and mid-2010s (Ye (formerly known as Kanye West), FKA Twigs, and Björk, for instance) and released her first album, Xen, in 2014. Mutant followed in 2015, and the self-titled Arca came out in 2017. After living in London for years, in 2018 she moved to Barcelona, where she resides at the time of this writing (June 2022). In 2018 Ghersi declared herself nonbinary and later on she added that she identified herself as a transwoman  (Arca’s main pronoun is “she”; she accepts “it” and  “they” as well). About this trans and nonbinary identity, she explains that “I think non-binary and transness are compatible and fertile. Some trans people think that non-binary identity is a threat to them feeling more comfortable in a binary, and vice versa. That’s not my case. I think they are not mutually exclusive, and I also don’t believe ‘it’ and ‘they’ are mutually exclusive” (Pristauz 2020). In a ten-year career in the overlapping scenes of pop and electronic music, Arca has become an exciting and multifaceted transnational figure, a diasporic Latin American artist operating from a city populated by other Latin American artists (like Venezuelan-born Cardopusher, a frequent collaborator in the KiCK pentalogy), a figure that stands at the crossroads of speculative aesthetics, posthumanism, and Latin(x) American re-creations of identities. Her work offers a quite intriguing place to explore in what ways twenty-first-century imagination can grapple with and expand our idea of the future.

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Although this chapter is not the place to explore in detail the ways in which Arca’s project could enter a dialog with uses of science fiction in the work of other musical artists, it would be helpful to offer some context along these lines. The first figure to mention is Afrofuturist Sun Ra, as he deployed science fiction iconography in “an art of the sublime in its persistent interest in the cosmic, the unrepresentable, and the impossible” (Langguth 2010, 148). For Sun Ra, humankind’s place in the universe was extraterrestrial, as he envisioned human beings moving toward “a sense of beingness beyond a politics of earthbound inclusion” (Brown 2021, 156). The celestial posthuman spark that, according to Arca, we carry inside of us in the form of the alien is very obviously a concept of its own, not necessarily connected to Sun Ra’s oeuvre, and yet it operates in a similar wavelength of cosmic estrangement and reintegration. David Bowie’s concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) seems particularly relevant to the work of Arca as well, as it focuses on an extraterrestrial queer rock star defined by androgyny and bisexuality, in a move in which Bowie’s “gender undecidability morphed into highly sexualized camp” (Sharpe 2022, 19). In Ziggy, Bowie turned a science fiction figure into an avatar of escape from heteronormativity, just as contemporary Afrofuturist queer artist Janelle Monae does in her trilogy of conceptual albums set in futuristic universe, a trilogy that has “science fiction symbolism of androids and time travel” at its heart in order to articulate models of antiracist political change (Favreau 2021, 85). Monae’s science fictional world (in which she follows the story of her android alter ego Cindi Maryweather) is self-consciously full of glitches (like Arca’s), as she is “continuously engaged in short-circuiting her own world-building by creating chronopolitical slippages between the future and the present” (Hassler-Forest 2021, 7). Instead of a securely enclosed futuristic enclave that allegorically comments on the present, Monae, I would add, chooses to emphasize the porousness and the circulation between temporal planes. This porousness of different worlds is at the center of my reading of Arca’s speculative universe, as we will see. Finally, there is Björk, an artist that Arca has acknowledged as an inspiration and with whom she has worked a number of times, including “Afterwards” (from KiCK i). As Keren Omry argues, Björk’s album and app suite Biophilia (2011) are grounded in technology in a way that is “inherently science fictional. Instead of a hostile opposition between the organic and the technological, Björk speaks explicitly about the intimate relationship of technology and nature in the opening text of her Biophilia website” (Omry 2016, 113). Constraining binarism are eschewed in

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Björk’s work as much as in the work of Arca, whose “mutant faith” must be understood as a call for never-ending transformation, in the same way in which, in the lines of the early twentieth-century Andalusian poem Björk delivers in “Afterwards” (Antonio Machado’s well-known “Anoche cuando dormía” [As I Was Asleep Last Night]), the bees the poet dreams about keep ceaselessly producing honey and wax out of pain and disappointment inside the poet’s heart. As we open ourselves to the future, something alien, something unexpected and radically transformative may emerge from inside of us and our times, no matter what abject misery we may face at the time and in that time. Arca’s speculative musical work belongs then to a tradition in which science fiction offers tropes for productive disorientation, re-creation, and cognitive and affective estrangement that may open doors to alternative configurations of a suddenly limitless future.

Arca and Queer Futurity In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz argues that “queer politics, in my understanding, needs a real dose of utopianism. Utopia lets us imagine a space outside of heteronormativity. It permits us to conceptualize new worlds and realities that are not irrevocably constrained by the HIV/AIDS pandemic and institutionalized state homophobia. More important, utopia offers us a critique of the present, of what is, by casting a picture of what can and perhaps will be” (Muñoz 2019, 35). He coins the term “queer futurity” to describe “not an end but the opening of a horizon” (Muñoz 2019, 91). The goal is to speak of the potentiality underlying everyday gestures (Muñoz 2019, 91). In a formulation that strongly recalls the work of Ernst Bloch (to whom Muñoz often refers in his book), we should focus on “a future being within the present that is both a utopian kernel and an anticipatory illumination. It is a being in, toward, and for futurity” (Muñoz 2019, 91).2 In a talk delivered in the same year of his untimely death and collected in the 2  In an essay from 1959, “The Conscious and Known Activity within the Not-YetConscious, the Utopian Function,” Ernest Bloch writes, “The not-yet-conscious itself has to become conscious of its own doings; it must come to know its contents as restraint and revelation. And thus the point is reached where hope, in particular, the true effect of expectation in the dream forward, not only occurs as an emotion that merely exists by itself, but is conscious and known as the Utopian function” (Bloch 1988, 105). Although obviously different, Bloch’s “not-yet-conscious” points toward the latent element that may bring about that futurity that Muñoz discusses here.

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tenth-anniversary edition of Cruising Utopia, Muñoz encourages us to embrace hope in spite of its own precariousness and the hostility of the world: “Hope falters, we lose hope, but we need hope to think otherwise in the face of odds that are stacked against us” (Muñoz 2019, 213). The world of Arca in the KiCK pentalogy is definitely a world that rejects constraints for a world of proliferation and excess instead, a seemingly autotelic world (as we will see at the end of this chapter) in which Arca searches for whatever celestial posthuman spark is immanent at the moment to turn it into an element that disrupts our continuum, without, at the same time, ever foreclosing the production of new similar moments of discontinuity. To put it in terms of the lyrics of “The Alien Inside,” the music, lyrics, and visual paratexts of the pentalogy (cover art, videos) invite us to consider that the alien inside us contains one more alien that contains another alien, ad aeternitas. “Nonbinary,” the first song of the first album, celebrates precisely the kind of escape from the heteronormativity Muñoz mentions, as it opens itself up to a queer futurity along distinctive posthumanist lines. The defense of this openness the lyrics convey is particularly highlighted in the music video, which displays Arca’s body in fundamentally two situations, both of which point toward hope without necessarily erasing violence and the fundamental vulnerability of the flesh. This is a definitely posthumanist visual discourse, in that this discourse “wrestles with emerging recognitions of the porousness of boundaries that mark the human condition. The posthuman is a creature of art, SF, literature, and philosophy as much as it is a form of response to the pressures and potentialities of technology, globalization, and extinction at the turn of the millennium” (Aloi and McHugh 2021, 1). Destruction and extinction are acknowledged, as we will see, more prominently in “Prada/Rekarte” (Heyman 2021) but still haunt “Nonbinary” (Heyman 2020), although the first and foremost point made here is the porousness of boundaries in general, and the chaotic indeterminacy of encounters between bodies and objects in particular. Arca embraces the messiness that is a fundamental part of being queer, according to Elizabeth Freeman, a messiness that goes along with the experimentation with bodies, “with affiliation, and with new practices of hoping, demanding, and otherwise making claims on the future” (2011, xxi). Early on in the video, Arca lies down on an operating table, displaying a round belly that we may assume implies that she is pregnant. She has the same prosthetic appendage on her feet that she displays on the cover of the album, giving her the air of a satyr-like cyborg. As she lies prone

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with her legs apart and her feet up, as if waiting for a medical examination, robots move around her, circling her body as if they were chiseling her in an assembly line at a factory, while three figures that are part skeleton, part automata, stand behind her and by her sides monitoring or participating somehow in this probing and/or birthing process. From this image of passivity, eugenics, biopolitical examination, and control of queer bodies, but also dormant potential, Frederick Heyman cuts to a re-­creation of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, in which Arca neither has the legs of a cyborg satyr nor is pregnant any longer. She writhes around as she slowly stands on a shell like the one in Botticelli’s painting, while we see that there are multiple cables attached via nodes to her semi-naked body. Her cyborg nature has slipped from the prosthetic to the kind of network connectivity and dissemination of the self that we may relate to virtuality and transhumanist fantasies of disembodied subjectivities. At the center of the shot, however, stands Arca’s flesh, making sure that we never forget that what we are witnessing is the assemblage of the organic and the technological, in a posthuman inclusive formulation that is far from any transhumanist annihilation of matter. Having seemingly given birth to herself out of a body that eschews binarisms and divisions between human and machine, Arca softly sings about how wonderful it is to be nonbinary. The utopian creature that was growing inside of Arca is simultaneously herself and a radically different other, a cyborg re-creation of a goddess that exists in a state of openness to and communication and exchange with those unknown but visibly present networks those nodes connect her to. This nonbinary, queer body and the future it harbingers are precisely the fluctuant manifestation of the queer futurity Muñoz advocates for. The music video of “Prada/Rakata,” from KiCK ii (Arca 2021a), explores a very different aspect of Muñoz’s reflection on utopia and hope. This is an album in which songs are informed by reggaeton beats, and tracks are “[s]wimming with plangent synth melodies that recall ’90s trance, [as] they move with an aquaticism that contrasts with Arca’s fiery vocal takes” (Sherburne 2021). The lyrics of these two songs celebrate desire, a desire that is both Arca’s and the community around her.3 The music is uplifting, free from melancholia. And yet the video directed by Arca’s collaborator complicates the artistic experience in ways that the 3  In “Rakata,” Arca defiantly sings that she is to eat up this world following the huge urges she has to get laid. In the chorus of “Prada,” she repeatedly invites a wide community of queer people to join her in the dance floor.

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images of “Nonbinary” did not. “Prada/Rakata” does not have the same visual and narrative simplicity as “Nonbinary,” while it shares its invocation of science fiction motifs. This time, however, they are not restricted to the porousness of the cyborg, and Arca is not the only biological being we see on the screen. Oxen show up, turning and turning on a platform as they pull together as a team, in what seems exhausting labor, while they also hint at an impending sacrifice. We see that otherwise empty landscapes appear covered by piles of inert naked muscular male bodies, among which we only spot a few moving figures here and there, either survivors from some recent apocalyptic event or late-comers to death, people that lie dying, slowly. The most prominent shot of Arca in the first half of the video is similarly inert, as she stands over scaffolding like a Sphinx-like oversized figure with the tail of a mermaid and massive automatic fire weapons instead of hands. Arca looks blankly ahead, ignoring a futuristic setting dominated by desolation. In the second half of the video, we encounter a two-headed mutant Arca standing up high, dominating what looks like a diorama at a natural history museum. Skeletons lie down on the floor or join fawns and female deer to worship Arca, the seemingly only posthuman survivor of some nuclear or biowarfare catastrophe that wipes out humanity. The last shot of “Prada/Rakata” presents Arca inside a wheel on fire that massive male figures push up an incline. They fail to move it up the plank because of underlying wheels that roll in the opposite direction. This invocation of the myth of Sisyphus visibly leaves out whatever joy Sisyphus may experience from actually moving his boulder to the top. There is hope in this video, no doubt, the kind of hope Muñoz desired, but this hope is restricted to Arca’s music and lyrics, while the science fiction postapocalyptic images make sure to register the vast destructive forces that threaten it. That utopian hope is at the center of the KiCK pentalogy does not mean that Arca is not aware of the odds that stands against it. It is what Ernst Bloch conceptualizes as a “self-informed docta spes,” a “a well-founded hope” that is “unconditionally disappointable” (Bloch 1998, 341). Hazard and chance are crucial elements in the production of the new, which otherwise would be just repetition (Bloch 1998, 341). Images undercut words and sounds and make us aware of all the dangers that surround the birthing of the alien. After all, as Brian Glavey points out, “Muñoz’s utopianism is not straightforwardly a question of future-oriented optimism. … Instead, it remains rooted in an uncertain contingency and the immanent presence of affects and experiences that might never exist in the usual sense” (Glavey

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2020, 568). This uncertainty of hope is at the heart, either lyrically or musically, of two of Arca’s most uplifting compositions. At the beginning of “Confianza” [Trust] (from KiCK ii), we find Arca singing “Dale/Dale, dale con confianza/Dale, dale con confianza/Dale con confianza, dale, papi” [Give it to me with confidence/Give me it to me with confidence/ Give it to me with confidence, papi] (Arca 2021a). After lines that recount what seems to be a pleasurable sexual encounter, Arca concludes with a demand that, as her voice rises, sounds like a consummation: She asks her lover to put his whole penis inside of her. The song then moves to a voice-­ free “ambient finale [that] might be the most satisfying 30 seconds of music in the whole set” (Sherburne 2021). However, in the middle of this series of successfully answered invitations to go on with intercourse, in which she joyfully explores the messiness of the encounter between bodies that Elizabeth Freeman discussed above, Arca introduces uncertainty by invoking the well-known Latin American saying that can be translated as “the shrimp that falls asleep gets carried away by the current,” to which he adds, quite redundantly, in case listeners were not paying close attention, that the sleepy shrimp wastes its time. The “Carpe Diem” motif conveys here Arca’s anxiety about time, the awareness of our own precariousness and the fragility of hopes and expectations. Invoking well-known early modern sonnets in the Petrarchan tradition that Spanish-language children learn in school (like Machado’s poem), Arca seems to sing, “Fuck me before we turn into dust, into smoke, into nothing.” The fleetingness of jouissance is made blatantly clear right before Arca experiences, we may assume, ecstasy, and we listeners live through those glorious 30 seconds of swirling piano chords without lyrics that “Confianza” ends with. And yet this fleetingness takes nothing away from the intensity of transport that Arca and we the listeners experience at this moment. In fact, this ecstasy of chords recalls Muñoz’s discussion of ecstasy, which he considers crucial to what he understands as the time of queerness: “Queerness’ time is a stepping out of the linearity of straight time,” which is nothing but a self-naturalizing temporality that must be questioned in favor of “a queer ecstatic and horizontal temporality that is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world” (Muñoz 2019, 25). This ecstatic openness to the world in the form of the beloved is precisely what culminates KiCK iii (Arca 2021b) In the lyrics of “Joya” [Jewel], the last song, we find no fear as Arca sings these lines twice and nothing else: “Te quiero decir que eres una joya/Entre los hombres/ Siento tanto amor, tanto amor” [I want to tell you that you are a jewel [or,

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more idiomatically, gem]/Among men/I feel so much love, so much love] (Arca 2021b). Arca is neither doubtful nor scared, and yet the soaring melismatic vocals in this song make us fear for the cohesion of it all. After being exposed to almost three albums of songs full of twists and turns, when will a glitch be introduced? As Arca’s thin voice stretches the syllables in a chant-like melody, when will it break or radically change course? Nothing of that sort actually happens, as the song ends “perfectly” with Arca’s moving declaration of love. In the context of the pentalogy, however, the fragility of the hope that Muñoz discussed is more obvious when it is precisely the more avoided (or repressed) by Arca, and the utopian potentiality immanent in the moment that will bring about that queer futurity the Latinx thinker proposed, the posthuman sparkle inside that Arca looks for and celebrates, must be understood as a moment in permanent danger, as the docta spes Bloch wrote about, while at the same time it constantly invokes speculative, utopian possibilities of alternative temporalities that escape the self-naturalizing straight time that Muñoz intended to question. This queer futurity is predicated on a mutant faith, with all the openness and exposure that the concept entails.

Mutants and Faith When we reach KiCK iiiii, the last album of the pentalogy, we encounter the alien and the mutant again, in a song pointedly titled “Sanctuary.” In this song, Arca collaborates with Japanese musical artist and actor Ruyichi Sakamoto, who asks us to remember “The first time you died/Celestial sparkle/A mutant faith/Posthuman” (Arca 2021d). Why is Arca associating the mutant and the concept of sanctuary here? In his study of mutant superheroes from the 1960s and 1970s, Fawaz Ramzi argues, “postwar comic books used fantasy to describe and validate previously unrecognizable forms of political community by popularizing figures of monstrous difference whose myriad representations constituted a repository of cultural tools for a renovated liberal imaginary” (Fawaz 2016, 4). These mutants represented a synthesis of biology and technology, and in their mutations produced political subjects that were deemed unfit for participation in the national community and therefore became destabilizing figures for the status quo and both sites and tools for a critique of (post) modernity and late capitalism (Fawaz 2016, 8–9). As I have argued myself elsewhere, the mutant literalizes our exposure to the environment and undermines all monadic fantasies of a supposedly self-reliant, cut-off

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humanist self. The mutations accentuate chance and fractured genealogical developments of body and self over time, underplaying the supposedly foundational moment of initial exposure to the mutating agent. Therefore, the mutant offers us a trace of a danger that has been lived through and survived, although not overcome; it is from this failure to simply overcome this exposure to danger that the mutant emerges, the result from an opening to the unexpected (Córdoba 2020, 135). The mutant can be understood as an evolving and indeterminate trace of a first moment of unstable entanglement with the environment that is not necessarily predicated on the reproduction of a predetermined script, a moment of queer intimacy that conjures up both vulnerability and potentiality. In that sense, the mutant, in their failure to replicate themself biologically and/or the national community over time, embodies what Judith Halberstam theorizes as the queer art of failure, with all its utopian overtones: “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (Halberstam 2011, 2–3). Failure can be a way to escape the punishing heteronormativity that Muñoz tried to avoid by envisioning a queer futurity, and the error of mutation, as cells try to reproduce themselves according to an old code that is not working anymore, is very much a queer kind of error, the kind of liberating glitch that, as Arca herself explains, allows us to escape from “the routine loop” (Pristauz 2020). In fact, when recounting her formative years as an artist, Arca concluded that “There’s something in glitchy music that I like to get lost in” (Hutchinson 2014). The glitch behind the mutant is the space that Arca decides to lose herself in, and the whole pentalogy can be read as a literalization of the mutant in musical terms, the creation of soundscapes that open themselves to the unexpected in ways that require both the adherence to and radical subversion of a handeddown musical form. In the KiCK pentalogy, the nurturing space that the sanctuary offers is made precisely of failure and error. FKA Twigs and Arca’s collaboration in 2013, “Papi Pacify,” was, at least to one critic, “just too rhythmically irregular and disruptive—not to mention too slow and depressive—to be easily danceable” (Shaviro 2017, 60). Danceable tracks seemed to be also out of the question when Mutant came out in 2015, as this album offered “a seamless hour-long blast of sensual, volatile soundscapes” (Fallon 2019). By the time KiCK i was released in 2020, however, a significant change had taken place. Over and over again, reviewers mention that Arca moves between pop and

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electronic music, between the well-made song and its dissolution. As she explained in 2020, “I love pop music, I just realized I would try and do it in my own way. I was ready to take a risk. At the same time, I wanted to have my cake and eat it. I didn’t want the departure to be so vast that it felt like overwriting my previous work, but rather something that you could have foreseen” (Sherburne 2020). Most of these mutant songs incorporate recognizable elements of pop music, and many of them are even from a distinctive Latin American background. For instance, in “KLK” (from KiCK i) we find the furruco bass drum, a Venezuelan instrument that would seem to root the song in Arca’s personal past and thereby offer a set of expectations about where the song will take its listeners. However, “KLK” “feels more like a studio experiment than a pop song, despite the A-list guest singer,” at least according to Chal Ravens (2020), who immediately adds, “[p]erhaps that’s the point.” Perhaps the point is having Spanish singer Rosalía repeat “Qué lo qué,” as if she actually were someone from the Dominican Republic using a common Dominican phrase. Perhaps the point is having her impersonate an Andalusian speaker that tries (and fails) to impersonate a Caribbean speaker when she sings “bendecía’, bendecía’/‘tamo’ bendecía’” (Arca 2020).4 “We women are blessed, we women are blessed,” says Rosalía, referring perhaps to Arca and herself. In this context, the Catalan artist’s well-known extractivist program gets re-signified by the Venezuelan artist into a questioning of the importance of foundational origins, in a way that maybe even create, out of this critique of authenticity, a feeling of communion between people (or women, or at least Rosalía and Arca) and even blessedness. Side by side and against the possession-driven, archival aesthetic of the paya, white, (Northern) Spanish, European Rosalía, we encounter Arca’s move toward exploratory, liberating dispossession and uprootedness. There is an an-archeological element in Arca’s whole project in the KiCK pentalogy, if we want to read it through Erin Graff Zivin’s invitation to exercise a form of anti-inquisitorial misreading that radically rejects any form of what she calls an “excavational mode of thought” in which the reader (or listener here) must look for “that which hides under [the surface], an identifiable and revealable truth” (Graff Zivin 2020, 34). 4  While the /s/ in the second-to-last syllable of “bendecía’” may sound right, to the trained ear there is still a softly uttered voiceless glottal fricative at the end of these words, that is, an Andalusian allophone closing the last syllable instead of the actual Dominican pronunciation.

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The drive to “gain access to the truth of the past” actually does not allow for a notion of the future that would leave room for the incalculable,” that same incalculable, I would add, the mutant is an avatar of (Graff Zivin 2020, 36). Therefore, perhaps in the “studio experiment” of “KLK,” in which Arca decontextualizes the furruco, offers us the ghost of reggaeton beats, and invokes the proliferating mis-appropriations of Rosalía, what we find is “a rejection of the excavation of a buried truth in favor of an anarchaeological approach in which the future of the past remains unaccounted for”; the mutant songs of the pentalogy embody precisely this recovery of chance that bypasses the certainties and constraints of “identity, originality, foundation, truth” in favor of an embrace of alterity and incommensurability (Graff Zivin 2020, 36–37). We should not forget either about the other concept that Arca repeatedly invokes, faith, for it is possible to see faith as a concept that fits in an an-archeological project such as Arca’s. As Jean-Luc Nancy has argued, “faith lets itself be addressed by a disconcerting appeal through the other, thrown into a listening that I myself do not know” (Nancy 2008, 10). Faith, we could say, identifies “the alien inside,” the utopian immanent in the moment, because faith, according to Nancy, “consists in seeing and hearing where there is nothing exceptional for the ordinary eye and ear” (Nancy 2008, 22). Faith does not consist in repeating the punishing routine heteronormative loop from which Arca (and the queer theorists we have encountered so far) certainly wants to escape. It consists, rather, “in entrusting oneself to the unknown” (Nancy 2008, 28). This is “the mutant faith” that corresponds to the “posthuman sparkle,” the evacuation of the humanist subject that occurs as she looks for another that, along with danger, risk, and disappointment, may represent the kind of shelter Arca advocates for in “Sanctuary.” In exposure and the unknown Arca finds safety and refuge, against certainties that authoritatively reproduce an oppressive past and re-create a damaging present. Therefore, it is no accident that the song that immediately follows “Sanctuary” and its seemingly perplexing re-creation of the concept of sacred shelter is titled “Tierno” [Tender]. This is a celebration of love and desire for a man, in certain ways not that different from two songs already discussed, “Confianza” and “Joya,” in KiCK iii and KiCK iiii, respectively. And yet, “Tierno” introduces a completely new element. “Desde que te he conocido/no tuve tiempo para prepararme/para tanta ternura,” sings Arca [Since I met you/I didn’t have time to get ready/for so much tenderness] (Arca 2021b). Unpreparedness, disorientation, and a sense of wonder and

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surprise are the feelings that take over the speaker when “so much tenderness emerged,” as if she were now singing about the alien inside that she has repeatedly dreamed of before. Fear and past disappointments color the experience of feeling all this tenderness for the beloved. In the end, however, all that fragility and precariousness are perfectly irrelevant: “Siento tu ternura hacia mí/me la quedo/me la quedaré/la merezco” [I feel your tenderness towards me/I keep it/I will keep it/I deserve it] (Arca 2021c). It is very important to realize that the title of the song does not refer to Arca herself (in that case, it should be “tierna”) but to the man she loves, a man who is “tierno,” whose tenderness creates a response inside of Arca and brings out the completely unexpected by an act of faith (as she sings at one moment, she refuses to entertain doubts any more) in which she gives herself to the unknown, as Nancy would have it. If in “Confianza” she invited the man she was having sex with to penetrate her, and in “Joya” she expressed her adoration toward the beloved, what we have here is a system of two symmetrical (though different) selves in a retroactive feeding loop of tenderness. Openness to the other brings about what Arca thinks is her due. It is neither in the other that she finds what she deserves, nor strictly in herself, in a self that is not unitary to begin with, but which includes the alien, the mutant, and the abject, and the recognition of these three different rejected figures (as she sings in “Lost Woman Found,” from KiCK iiii). It is in relationality, in the never-ending, fraught process of bridging the difference between a porous self and a giving other that Arca here can find, at least momentarily, that thing that she believes that she deserves. This is the reward for an educated hope that is aware of doubt, the past, and the danger of opening up, and still decides to create a complex interaction between two selves that are not subsumed into one, but stand apart from one another while linked in call and response. It is here that sanctuary can finally be found.

Coda We could conclude that in Arca’s KiCK pentalogy the posthuman sparkle brings satisfaction in a quite paradoxical way, by highlighting the gap between entities and building upon it, by letting in bodies, subjectivities, and things precisely because their apartness is acknowledged. Arca’s songs, videos, and her own multifaceted selves are complex, distinctive systems organized according to their own logic, the logic of the mutant, the cyborg, the alien, a logic built on the porousness between technology and

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biology, between “machine” and “nature.” The conceptual apparatus of tropes and figures that conveys and explores this posthumanist porousness is clearly derived from speculative fiction and operates along the lines of well-known rhetorical strategies of cognitive estrangement. It is through this unique, seemingly enclosed character that they can arouse our surprise, our curiosity, and our amazement, and foster intellectual and emotional responses in listeners and viewers. Arca’s science fiction-inspired sonic and visual enclaves in the series of albums released in 2020–2021 bring to mind a previous artistic project of the Venezuelan artist that took place at the lobby of MoMA of New York in 2019. Working with Algerian-­ born French artist Philippe Parreno, Arca made “a room sentient” by installing multiple sensors with different abilities that fed information into an AI that created responses to the changing configurations of people and physical conditions in the room. As a result, visitors could encounter what Arca described as an ecosystem where this intelligence could express itself. I provided all these different sounds, musical figures, textures and codes, but the AI created an ecosystem that surprised me … it is a symbiosis. It creates something that gives me hope and surprises me through the materiality of my sonic textures, while I was able to give the AI a sonic and aesthetic materiality, so to speak. It is a project that I find very tender. (Pristauz 2020)

And she concludes her analysis of this artistic project by praising curiosity, the desire to experiment, and the unknown, because she sees the unknown as something “that would allow for an encounter” (Pristauz 2020). Obviously enough, the songs and the videos of the KiCK pentalogy are not the construction of a sentient room that an AI uses for input to create its own artistic soundscapes, and yet we can find commonalities with Arca’s mutant-, faith-based an-archeological process that shuttles back and forth between the well-known, routine artistic forms handed down to us from the past and their estrangement through an embrace of the experimental, the glitch, and the queer art of failure. Shaped by this utopian drive, Arca’s posthumanist critique offers endless opportunities to envision alternative futures that leave the constraints of straight time behind and incorporate Muñoz’s queer temporality. The mutant faith in constant re-creation brings about an idea of sanctuary that is not a site of stasis and constraining, limiting protection against danger, but a space for exposure, ecstasy, and disappointable hope.

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References Aloi, Giovanni, and Susan McHugh. 2021. Envisioning Posthumanism. In Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader, ed. Giovanni Aloi and Susan McHugh, 1–21. New York: Columbia University Press. Arca. 2020. KiCK i. XL. ———. 2021a. KiCK ii. XL. ———. 2021b. KiCK iii. XL. ———. 2021c. KiCK iiii. XL. ———. 2021d. KiCK iiiii. XL. Bloch, Ernst. 1998. Literary Essays. Trans. Andrew Joron et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1988. “The Conscious and Known Activity within the Not-Yet-Conscious, the Utopian Function.” In The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, 103–141. Cambridge: MIT Press. Brown, Jayna. 2021. Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Córdoba, Antonio. 2020. Genealogía, vulnerabilidad y mutación en Iris de Edmundo Paz Soldán. In Desafíos, diferencias y deformaciones de la ciudadanía: mutantes y monstruos en la producción cultural latinoamericana reciente, ed. María del Carmen and Caña Jiménez, 131–154. Raleigh: Editorial A Contracorriente. Fallon, Patrick. 2019. Arca Is the Artist of the Decade. Vice. https://www.vice. com/en/article/evj9k4/arca-­is-­the-­artist-­of-­the-­decade. Accessed 10 May 2022. Favreau, Alyssa. 2021. The ArchAndroid. London: Bloomsbury. Fawaz, Ramzi. 2016. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York: New York University Press. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2011. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press. Glavey, Brian. 2020. Lyric Wilt, or, The Here and Now of Queer Impotentiality. New Literary History 51 (3): 567–586. Graff Zivin, Erin. 2020. Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading. New  York: Fordham University Press. Hahn, Rachel. 2019. Arca on the Warrior Princess Style of Her Performances at The Shed. Vogue. https://www.vogue.com/vogueworld/article/arca-­mutant-­ faith-­shed-­performance-­style-­natacha-­voranger. Accessed 10 May 2022. Halberstam, Judith. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. Hassler-Forest, Dan. 2021. Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Heyman, Frederick, dir. 2020. Nonbinary. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gfGz4MTQ28I. Accessed 10 May 2022. ———, dir. 2021. Prada/Rakata. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NL-­tvd8jeBc. Accessed 10 May 2022. Hutchinson, Kate. 2014. Arca: ‘Nothing Is Off Limits Emotionally.’ The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/oct/31/arca-­bjork-­kanye-­west. Accessed 10 May 2022. Krentowicz, Steph. 2020. Arca. The Wire 436: 38–412. Langguth, Jerome J. 2010. Proposing an Alter-Destiny: Science Fiction in the Art and Music of Sun Ra. In Sounds of the Future: Essays on Music in Science Fiction, ed. Matthew J. Bartkowiak, 148–161. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2019. Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008. Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body. Trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. New  York: Fordham University Press. Omry, Keren. 2016. Bodies and Digital Discontinuities: Posthumanism, Fractals, and Popular Music in the Digital Age. Science Fiction Studies 43 (1): 104–122. Petridis, Alexis. 2017. How Cruising, Graveyards and Swan Songs Inspired Arca’s New Album. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/ apr/06/arca-­new-­album-­alejandro-­ghersi-­kanye-­west-­bjork. Accessed 10 May 2022. Pristauz, Julius. 2020. In Conversation with Arca. Glamcult, https://www.glamcult.com/articles/in-­conversation-­with-­arca/. Accessed 10 May 2022. Ravens, Chal. 2020. Kick i. Pitchfork. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ arca-­kick-­i/. Accessed 10 May 2022. Shaviro, Steven. 2017. Digital Music Videos. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Sharpe, Alex. 2022. David Bowie Outlaw: Essays on Difference, Authenticity, Ethics, Art and Love. London: Routledge. Sherburne, Philip. 2021. Review: Arca: Kick ii-Kick iii-Kick-iiii-Kick iiiii. Pitchfork. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arca-­kick-­ii-­kick-­iii-­kick-­iiii-­kick-­ iiiii/. Accessed 10 May 2022. ———. 2020. Live from Quarantine, It’s the Arca Show. Pitchfork. https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/live-­f rom-­q uarantine-­i ts-­t he-­a rca-­s how/. Accessed 10 May 2022.

CHAPTER 12

Afterword: Posthuman Subjectivity in Latin America—Changing the Conversation Silvia G. Kurlat Ares

First we had God, humans and nature. The rationalists dispensed with God, leaving humans in perpetual conflict with nature. The posthumanists dispense with humans leaving only nature. The distinction between God, nature and humanity does not represent any eternal truth about the human condition. It merely reflects the prejudices of the societies that maintained the distinctions. —The Posthuman Manifesto, February, 2005

 1 Even though shifting tensions between humanist and posthumanist paradigms have been unfolding outside academia for a very long time, they were not fully addressed as Latin American phenomena until the early 2000s, and by then only reluctantly. In an early diagnosis of the situation, Ignacio Sánchez Prado noted:

S. G. Kurlat Ares (*) Buenos Aires, Argentina © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6_12

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el giro posthumanista observado en las academias metropolitanas ha encontrado un eco limitado en los estudios latinoamericanos. Esto se debe, en parte, al hecho de que muy poco de este pensamiento se ha traducido al español, pero también a que la primacía de los legados humanistas del medio siglo no se ha disuelto del todo. Más aún, la emergencia de nuevas fuerzas intelectuales y políticas en el continente, articuladas bajo la bandera de la “nueva izquierda” (el chavismo venezolano, el MAS en Bolivia, etc.) han dado enorme fuerza a varios de los paradigmas desarrollados en los estudios latinoamericanos en los años noventa, como el poscolonialismo y los estudios sobre heterogeneidad cultural, por lo que mantienen una vigencia mucho mayor que sus contrapartes de lengua inglesa (Sánchez Prado 2008, 9) [the posthumanist turn observed in metropolitan academies have found a limited echo in Latin American studies. This is due, in part, to the fact that very little of this thought has been translated into Spanish, but also because the primacy of the mid-century humanist legacies has not fully dissolved. Furthermore, the emergence of new intellectual and political forces in the continent, articulated under the banner of the “new left” (Venezuelan Chavismo, MAS in Bolivia, etc.) have given enormous strength to several other paradigms developed in Latin American studies in the 1990s, such as postcolonialism and studies on cultural heterogeneity, which is why they remain much more relevant than their English-speaking counterparts.]1

Although I agree with this assessment of what has been called the “pink tide” characterizing Latin American politics since the mid-1990s, the observation fails to take into account the proliferation of new forms of identity and personhood confronting traditional forms of subjectivity, as well as emerging artistic and narrative forms whose questions about body and polity contested teleological and historically consistent answers about the complexity and multiplicity of experiences in the region. Even critical approaches to cultural heterogeneity, for instance, still rest on binary models (quantifiable/non-quantifiable, balance/imbalance, center/periphery, etc.) that organize themselves as alternative ideological frameworks to capitalism and central powers, and assume that certain cultural and political events either did not take place or evolved in radically different ways in Latin America, making it difficult to explain narratives, imagery, and experiences that depart from established political and social accounts and do not fully fit within the period’s aesthetic and culturally emerging paradigms. 1

 All translations are mine, unless noted otherwise.

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The presence of these conflicting perspectives has created tensions and diverse critical approaches to Latin American culture, and can be traced in a number of essays written by key intellectuals in the region, from Beatriz Sarlo and Josefina Ludmer to Alvaro Cuadra and Carlos Monsiváis or Néstor García Canclini. Despite their small numbers and against all odds, these essays have inscribed the posthuman turn into Latin American traditions by asking what is the nature of new social and political space/s, on the one hand, and the definition of the subject/s inhabiting the ever-­ changing culture of a glocalized world, on the other. In many cases, reflections reveal that the lettered intellectual, the natural heir of the liberal, humanist nineteenth-century project’s spokesperson, does not seem to have a proper or clear role within developing frameworks describing visual and narrative representations of contemporary technological and virtual environments; nor can they find a place from which to discuss issues of exploitation of natural resources in terms of fairness. These intellectuals’ gaze seems to not fully grasp what is now at stake and yet, at the same time, it is able to corroborate the nature of an ongoing transformation. Academic circles, always sensitive to utopian will, have been particularly resistant to positive posthumanist readings that seemed to celebrate the disassociation of intellectual and artistic avant-gardes, the transformation of the engaged intellectual into a media one, and the passage from ideologies to cultures, as such metamorphosis indicated to many cultural critics the abandonment of humanist ethics and values. As we shall see, these tensions are not necessarily new, but have come to the fore with intense urgency over the last few years, and are the undercurrent of a changing understanding of subject, community, and polity in the region.

2. A recent personal anecdote seems to illustrate this seeming fracture by underlining some of the elements at play both in these topics and in the articles discussed in this book. A short while ago, I found myself in a long and bland university lecture hall, and the presentation’s topic returned to deep Argentina, as well as to the endless imaginary of the nineteenth century, and the last death throes of liberalism and the left in a globalized world. There was an interesting layered symbolic cartography proposed by where and how this particular event took place, since mirroring the conversation, there was a simple but intentionally elegant supper. European cheeses found themselves next to Argentine empanadas under the auspices

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of touristic photographs of places as exotic as Seville or Berlin. French cheeses settled comfortably in the liberal tradition; empanadas, on the left. Photographs tucked in the conversation within Western Modernity. There was smuggled wine from all over the world providing a cosmopolitan, worldly anchoring to an otherwise pleasant conversation. The setting itself spoke of very old practices and traditions, of institutional forms of communication and symbolic exchange that were very easy to access for everyone present. The topics at hand were not new, and what was disclosed about them lay in a comfortable mold. By the same token, the imagery of the event weaved itself in a coded vocabulary that was both startling and tedious. The presenter used to be my teacher, and there was, as there often are in these circumstances, a few minutes of small talk which quickly veered toward Pola Oloixarac’s Las constelaciones oscuras (2015; Dark Constellations, 2019). The novel fascinated me, and her not so much. Moreover, it is a book that she thought was mediocre or, at least, not as good as the previous one. In her defense, I have to point out that a number of reviewers also shared in her evaluation. Yet, I asked her why, I insisted; I knew I was being inconsiderate, almost rude, but I was curious about her opinion. My former professor did not have a firm verdict; instead, she had an enigma: why did Oloixarac dedicate so many pages to the eighteenth century in her first chapter; why did she delve so deep into the origins of biology when the topic was the Anthropocene? What was the meaning of that chapter? It did not add to the plot. Yet, this book is hardly a book about literature, or at least, not the literature that was being discussed at this event. Sadly, there was no further discussion, no answer. My teacher searched for an excuse, apologized, and went looking for a glass of wine; a sign that I had abused her patience. Thus ended the conversation. The question about the eighteenth century haunted me: on the lips of my former, perplexed, and impatient professor, everything (the event, its sociability, the conversation) became the verbalization of a limit, the materialization of a place where something very old collided onto the void of a somewhat estranged, yet familiar experience. Both the scene and the question staged some of the paradoxes supporting how intellectuals read anew not only the humanities and issues of ideological standing, but also the relationship between sciences, art, and social disciplines. In that irksome chapter, one of Oloixarac’s characters is researching and collecting unknown flora during exploratory travels that reveal not only the nature

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of knowledge but also the nature of institutional machinations. Nevertheless, those discoveries will eventually lead to our understanding of DNA, sexuality, and, above all, control systems. Botany as a personal inquiry turns into science, and knowledge and institutions turn into systems. The novel tells us that the Anthropocene’s seed is the Enlightenment; that the postmodern subject in all its complexities was born out of the humanist will to both understand and catalog the world. These threads allow us to approach questions about a subjectivity that are both anchored in nature, grounded in biology, and at the same time, aleatory and arbitrary, culturally determined, and socially molded. It is a double-edged subject. In my view, what makes that chapter so difficult to read is this simultaneous bet on the oneness and multiplicity of human experience through the ages, on the coherence and randomness of knowledge, on the materiality of contradictions as foundational to the complexity of lived experiences within an unfolding, long history that does not know where it may go. It is not the first time that I find this inflection, this annoyance with what appears in what happens in the first chapter of Oloixarac’s book. It can also be found in Ernesto Sábato. And in him, it is perhaps more burdensome for the reasons that lead his ghost to face off Oloixarac. In this sense, the professor is not especially original. Like her, Sábato never cared much about the many meanings of the eighteenth century. But he did care a lot about its idealized forms of knowledge, about its mechanics for scientific and intellectual development. The professor, on the other hand, despises these particular configurations of the material, because she believes primarily in High Culture, with capital letters, a conceptual culture resting purely on grand concepts. For Sábato the issue was more complicated. Sábato was the scientist who disbelieved not of science but of its raw materials and its consequences. He believed in the romanticism of old machines and clocks that supported a mechanical and easy-to-forecast universe. Randomness made him nauseous. More violent and more subtle, the day that Leopoldo Lugones had to choose, he preferred the occult sciences and all the theosophical paraphernalia, lest by mistake, real silent voices might be heard in his intricate poems. Lugones believed in will and soul, in roots. Diversity terrified him. Julio Cortázar simply chose to laugh at everything, including institutions, and went straight to pataphysics as a form of humanistic, existential protest, once it became clear that Snow’s famous two cultures needed translators. For Cortázar, method seemed trickery. He believed in the essentialism of intuition. Pola Oloixarac, in all

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her existential anarchism, returns to the eighteenth century to look for all the things that so frightened such illustrious men, and my professor. The professor taught me how to read these writers and, as a young woman, I never asked myself how she articulated her readings, and why. In another life, it never occurred to me to think about what she was not telling us in her classes, what was missing, what she thought about the eighteenth century, about what she did not say in her writings. Hence, the question I was trying to articulate that night should have been about the politics of the paradoxical subjectivities populating that (those) book(s), understood as spaces for critical enunciation. This question (which is explored in this volume from different perspectives) has altered how we think about contemporary subjectivity and what culture produces when it thinks critically about itself. In many cases, the posthuman subject has been understood as “the one that comes after,” an unavoidable next step in both biological and cultural evolution, a subject that should take over whatever is left from the dying humanist, cartesian subject. However, such a claim would be difficult to prove, as the posthuman subject demands that the promises of the humanistic project (equality, the value of ethics to guide both behavior and legal systems, the availability of knowledge to all, etc.) come to full fruition, while the humanist subject has never been a simple dualistic entity, as awareness of consciousness arises from skepticism, and operates in uncertainty. Even if for some brands of postmodern thought subjectivity is now so detached from the real it has become itself a form of simulacra feebly rooted in what Jean Baudrillard defined as hyper-reality (a system that produces and exchanges signs—nowadays, we would say data), we should inquire in the nature and the multiple layers of meaning resting on the bodies producing these forms of subjectivity, we should inquire in how those spaces are constructed and discussed. The body itself is an object pierced by cultural and social signs, and hence, neither the cultural nor the social can exist without their biological twin, and by the same token, the individual may not be without their community. How those relationships operate, and to which degree they may or may not constitute destiny, is a completely different issue. Furthermore, the location from where such operations are read also constitutes a matter of critical reflection as discussion in Latin America has been generally very different than discussing about, of, or with Latin America. The turn toward subjectivity marked, as I have discussed elsewhere, the closure of the writing agendas of the 1970s (the search and legitimation of

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a politically charged literature) and 1980s (the reworking of literature as the narrative that could best dispute the place of history to explain the past). It also coincided with debates about the modernization of the literary canon, and about how the postmodern debate was initially understood in the region. These debates meant an abandonment of realism as it has been practiced for most of the twentieth century in Latin America. With a nostalgic, almost melancholic view of the past, came to life a more urgent take on an immediate present devoid of utopia. This new sensibility had many faces, some marred by consumerism and abject forms of coarse individualism. Yet, art and literature started to explore more openly questions about the meanings of that lost utopia, about the importance and impact of science and technology, organizing inquiries about knowledge/s as epistemological reflections. The consequences of industrialization, pollution, and changing environments, topics seldom considered in previous decades, became ubiquitous in the early 2000s. Discussions about the nature of community and the ability of the state to function under complex crisis provided new speculative scenarios to debate the limits of legal, social, or technological systems. However, critics like Josefina Ludmer expressed their distrust in this transformation as she reasoned that these new narratives inscribed themselves as post-autonomous (i.e., as opposed to the politically committed literature of the 1960s and 1970s), and narrated the end of literature because they did not provide a distinct metaphor of the real (Ludmer 2007). Other critics (Sarlo 2007; Saítta 2013) shared this perspective, as for them, what was at stake was the value of literature itself, as a project of historical truism rooted in the modernist nation-state. This point of view has been paradoxically shared by authors like J.P.  Zooey (born in 1973), who has explored all sort of alter-­ subjectivities in his novels, and stated in a recent essay book that “posthumanismo es un lujo para tiempos de abundancia” [posthumanism is a luxury for times of plenty] (Zooey 2019 121). Zooey adds that the debate between humanities and posthumanities supposes divergent concepts of humanity and power, where the latter could only exist should all social and political ills have already been conquered. Yet, as Donna Haraway (2015) has pointed out, given the severe discontinuities (historic, economic, social, cultural, etc.) of the Anthropocene, it deeply matters which concepts and figures we use to speak about the very inequalities of the present; and it is of crucial importance to walk away from the myths and belief systems of the past and not simply question them, but to create a new form of subjectivity.

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3. There may be many reasons why Oloixarac chooses to return to the botany of the eighteenth century as a preface to understand the Anthropocene and its complex, multilayered subjects. I think it is best to imagine Oloixarac read L’homme plante, penned in 1796 by Julien Offray de La Mettrie (France, 1709- Prussia, 1751), an essay that recorded the homologies between the vital organs of human beings and plants. At the time, this essay was not simply a revolutionary masterpiece of empirical observation, but the grounds for a form of materialism that started to walk away from the celebratory hubris that have made humankind the center of philosophical thought since the Renaissance: Il n’y a point d’animal ſi chétif & ſi vil en apparence, dont la vue ne diminue l’amour-propre d’un philoſophe. Si le haſard nous a placés au haut de l’échelle, ſongeons qu’un rien de plus ou de moins dans le cerveau, où eſt l’ame de tous les hommes, (excepté des Léibnitiens) peut ſur le champ nous précipiter au bas, & ne mépriſons point des êtres qui ont la même origine que nous. Ils ne ſont à la vérité qu’au ſecond rang, mais ils y ſont plus ſtables & plus fermes. (Offray 1796, 69) [There is no animal so puny and so vile in appearance, the sight of which does not diminish the self-esteem of a philosopher. If chance has placed us at the top of the ladder, let us think that a tiny bit more or less in the brain, where the soul of all men is (except for the Leibnitians) can immediately precipitate us to the bottom, and let us not despise beings who have the same origin as us. They are in truth only in the second rank, but being there they are more stable and firm than us.]

It has often been pointed out that La Mattrie essays have a certain reductionist bend, a certain utilitarianism. As in one of the arguments carefully constructed in Oloixarac’s novel, in his essays, Offray de La Mettrie argued that humanity was not a rarity: being so closely interconnected with the natural world, humanity could not be detached from it, and hence, any form of transcendence, was to be rooted in life itself. Two hundred years later, the same issues have come back with renewed energy. In a way, Rosi Braidotti has reframed La Mattrie’s original assertion as follows: The posthuman dimension of postanthropocentrism can consequently be seen as a deconstructive move. What it deconstructs is species supremacy, but it also inflicts a blow to any lingering notion of human nature, anthropos

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and bios, as categorically distinct from the life of animals and non-humans, or zoe. What comes to the fore instead is a nature-culture continuum in the very embodied structure of the extended self … a colossal hybridization of the species. (Braidotti 2015, 12)

This viewpoint underlines Haraway’s “making kin” idea: an assemblage of the multiple that undoes the one/other dichotomy (Haraway 2015, 161). This form of subjectivity allows us to question the Enlightenment’s imagined unified subject, albeit this subject was more unstable than generally agreed within literary criticism. It is, however, this subversion of an imaginary centered, fully rational subject grounded in a Modern European culture that provides the necessary counterpoint to dramatize how changing paradigms verbalize their own projects, how they explore and catalog their own agendas. In this sense, posthumanism attempts to break from [human] essentialism, even if this break coexisted with the Enlightenment from the start, and even if that search brings us back to the instability and ambivalence humanists felt about their own changing understanding of what it means to be human, to be a subject within a system: it forces us to discuss anew what it means to embody multiple forms of subjectivity as it travels and moves through multiple communities and experiences. For this reason, critics like Cary Wolfe argue that posthumanism can be situated both before and after humanism, because first “it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world,” and later, “it names the historical moment in which the decentering the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore” (Wolfe 2010, xv). That historical decentering was articulated in the now classic 1985 Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway (2016). The essay was an attempt at providing a language and an imaginary that refused the anti-technological stance of previous decades, and an ethical review of the many meanings of a subject’s (any subject) relationship with both technology and history. The essay proposed the groundwork to redefine the terms we used to think about political theory once it became clear that so many utopian projects have come to naught. In doing so, the Manifesto opened the flood gates to a number of questions about who and what we are, about how we exist as a species in the now, about the multiple networks of relationships in which we function—the Manifesto articulated precisely the coexistence of multiple configurations of the material; it postulated

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subjects and events that were simultaneously rational, logic, and random; it decoupled us both from the mandates of biological imperative and from the telos of History by proposing a subject—cyborg—that did not belong in any specific category but in all of them at the same time: it was intended as a beginning, a turning point of sorts. As if to prove the point, by 2000, the boundaries between natural and artificial, between art and science, between multiple forms of knowledge and material configurations became embodied in the green fluorescent rabbit, Alba, created as a collaboration between bioartist Eduardo Kac (Brazil, 1962) and Louis-Marie Houdebine (France, 1942) at the French National Institute of Agronomic Research (2007). The discussions about how Alba came into being and her rights as both animal and work of art illuminate the nature of these new forms of subjectivities as well as their limits. Alba became, as Kac himself has pointed out, a cause célèbre, as she was “imprisoned” by the French authorities and the artist had to fight (albeit unsuccessfully) for her to go and live with his family in Chicago. The media campaign to liberate her and the art exhibits to advocate her cause underlined the tense relationship between cultural institutions, the use of media to disseminate information and to manipulate the public interest, and the re-definition of what is a subject, as Alba was at the same time animal, experiment, work of art, loved pet, and persona in a legal sense, for there was a fight to end her “incarceration.” These issues permeate the eighteenth-century chapters in Pola Oloixarac’s second novel and, as in the case of Alba, those pages are a mise-en-scène of an epistemic fulcrum. In the words of N. Katherine Hayles, Changes in bodies as they are represented within literary texts have deep connections with changes in textual bodies as they are encoded within information media and both types of changes stand in complex relation to changes in the construction of human bodies as they interface with information technologies. (Hayles 1999, 29)

Posthuman politics re-code difference as one of its own ideological building blocks: subjects are transformed by their relationships with multiple systems and environments; knowledge is not the affirmation of social dogma, but a constant, transformative, and uncertain process. Displacement and mutation (key issues in Pola Oloixarac’s opening chapter) redefine subjects, as there seems to be no line between nature and human, or between human and technology. As these lines are now abolished (or as we are now aware that they are artificial constructs), how we think about

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institutions, laws, and power operate in a different framework, for reality itself is not orderly but chaotic, and all possible meanings coexist in conflicting ways. Choice becomes paramount. It has been pointed out that such variety creates forms of empathy and solidarity that minimize the suffering of other fellow humans; that such a perspective promotes forms of solidarity that deprive the subject and the community from achieving any form of proactive political engagement, that it is not possible for the self to negotiate its own identity within so many options without it being consumed by them, without the subject itself being obliterated by such abstract multiplicity. Yet, it is not a matter of what is, but what should be possible. It is only in this sense that posthuman politics are at its core, critical thinking; a bet on a different form of ethics. As I was writing these pages, the SARS CoV-2 or COVID-19 had forced most countries into quarantining their citizens in order to slow down the contagion rate. All of a sudden, the meanings of citizenry and leadership, of government and governance, of inequality and fairness, of quality of life and access to technology, expanded people’s everyday vocabulary and conversations. As Pramod K. Nayar would say, the virus has brought to the fore one of the key issues discussed in critical posthumanism, since it has become painfully clear that we need to rethink human subjectivity as “an assemblage, co-evolving with machines and animals” (Nayar 2014, 8). What are the ethics and politics toward our fellow humans, as well as other forms of life on the planet, have become ever-­ present questions not solely of science fiction narratives but also of the evening news. In this sense, the pandemic has made visible multiple fractures in the imaginary of social and political subjectivities. When thinking about the posthuman subject it is possible (and very easy) to enter the realm of identity politics and posit a new form of essential ontology that grounds subjects purely in the ethnic or cultural experiences of their local and historical developments. However, it is the phrase “we are in this together” that I find extremely interesting for it reveals the concealment of social and economic inequalities that directly impact a subject’s experience of state, power, and legal systems. We are not, as one might think, equally in this together. Extremely rich people who can guarantee their own access to testing, communications, food, water, and advanced medical care do not have the same experience of the quarantine as people who have lost their jobs and their safety nets, or as people who are now working from their homes in complete isolation. Yet, the experience of the virus, of

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information about how it came into being, and of how it impacts our freedom and our sociability has repercussions in how subjects and communities inhabit their present circumstances. Moreover, the quarantine has had an (at least temporary) effect in our planet’s climate, plainly revealing the consequences of greenhouse effect and other forms of pollution, and providing opportunities to think about how industries and business manage resources. We are in this together, but only barely. We should be in this together. The relationships subjects have with their natural and social environment cannot be answered anymore with vocabularies and conceptual frameworks imagined for steam machines, telegraphs, and radios. We are subjects in a cyberworld, it is true, but that world, as it has been so clearly proven, is deeply attached to the materiality of nature as much as to our own technological networks. Social and economic webs do not exist fully detached from nature, even when they can operate independently of it. Neither can subjects. This is not necessarily some sort of Romantic statement. It is, as clearly stated by early scientists of the eighteenth century, like Offray de La Mattrie, a rather simple rational observation that forces us to reframe our sense of subjectivity as part of a whole. We are flesh-­ bodies as much as data-bodies. Communities are both places and grids. How either is understood, discussed, and administered, what would be the meaning of nations, states, and borders within the current situation is difficult to foresee. For many, fear about the excesses of control dominates the debates. For others, the proliferation of technology in our everyday lives has become the main issue. And even, within other groups, the main question was the sovereignty and freedom of subjects within these new, changing spaces. However, these issues had already materialized by the time the virus arrived in our lives: the pandemic only made clear what are the topics to be discussed. The issue at hand is, therefore, what is to be done.

References Braidotti, Rosi. 2015. Yes. There is no crisis. Working towards the Posthumanities. DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 2 (1–-2): 9–20. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Manifestly Haraway. The Cyborg Manifesto. The Companion Species Manifesto. Companions in Conversation (with Cary Wolfe). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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———. 2015. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities 6: 159–165. Hayles, N.  Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kac, Eduardo. 2007. Life Transformation—Life Mutation. In Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, ed. Eduardo Kac, 163–184. The MIT Press. Ludmer, Josefina. 2007. Literaturas postautónomas. Ciberletras 17. https:// www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v17/ludmer.htm Accessed 6 May 2022. Nayar, Pramod K. 2014. Posthumanism. London: Polity. Offray de La Mettrie, Julien. 1796 “L’Homme Plante.” Œuvres philosophiques, Nouvelle édition précédée de son éloge par Frédéric II, roi de Prusse, vol. 2, 49-75. Paris: Charles Tutot. Oloixarac, Pola. 2015. Las constelaciones oscuras. Barcelona: Random House. Saítta, Sylvia. 2013. En torno al 2001 en la narrativa argentina. Literatura y Lingüística 29: 131–148. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. 2008. El giro (post)humanista: A manera de introducción. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 34 (68): 7–18. Sarlo, Beatriz. 2007. Escritos sobre literatura argentina. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zooey, J.P. 2019. Corazones Estallados: La política del postumanismo. Buenos Aires: Cía. Naviera Ilimitada Editores.

Index1

NUMBERS, AND SYMBOLS #MeToo movement, 92n2 9/11, 97n8 1492, 96, 99, 101 3% (TV show), 19, 20, 185–197 A Abenshushan, Vivian, 65 Abigarrado, 170 Abject, the, 219, 223, 232 Acevedo, Rafael, 152 Africa, 159, 202 Afro-Caribbean, 94, 96, 100–102, 115, 116 Afro-Cuban, 202, 209 Afrofuturism, 222 Afro-Latinidad, 209 Afro-Latinxs, 16, 94, 96, 101, 209 Afropessimism, 116

Agamben, Giorgio, 19, 186, 188, 194 AIDS, 202 Alien, 219, 220, 222–224, 226, 228, 231, 232 Amerindian perspectivism, 7 Andean neobaroque architecture, 173 Andrade, Oswald de, 187, 193, 193n6, 196 Android, 49 Anthropocene, 125, 131, 137–139, 240, 241, 243, 244 Anti-humanism, 76, 78 Antilles, 93, 95, 96, 99, 101 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 2, 8, 99 Aparapita, 167–175, 171n4, 179–181 Apocalypse, 93, 96, 101, 101n16, 115, 115n34, 116 Apocalypsis, 205, 205n2 Arbery, Ahmaud, 117 Arca, 21, 219–233

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Córdoba, E. A. Maguire (eds.), Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction, Studies in Global Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11791-6

251

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INDEX

Arenas, Reinaldo, 220n1 Argentina, 16, 123, 125, 129, 131, 239 Argentine dictatorship, 1976-1983, 126 Artificial Intelligence (AI), 233 Asia, 149 Atwood, Margaret, 10 Automata, 225 Avatar, 30, 43, 44, 46 Ayllón, Vicky, 177 Aymara, 167, 168, 171–175, 179, 182 B Balsamo, Anne, 76 Barad, Karen, 4, 5 Baradit, Jorge, 10, 54n5 Barcelona, 221 Bares, Bares, 73, 78–80, 83 Bares, Mauricio, 15 Baroque, 187, 192n4, 193, 193n6, 194 Barrientos Salinas, Alejandro, 173 Baudrillard, Jean, 57, 83, 242 Belchite, Spain, 137 Benjamin, Walter, 139 Berlant, Lauren, 215, 216 Berlin, 240 Berman, Marshall, 129, 130 Bhabha, Homi, 43n10 Bignall, Simon, 124, 125 Biopolitics, 104, 105n24, 108, 186, 188–192, 196n9 Biotechnology, 187, 188, 192–197 Björk, 221–223 Bloch, Ernst, 223, 223n2, 226, 228 Bolivia, 18, 167, 170, 173–175, 174n6, 177, 238 Botticelli, Sandro, 225 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10 Bowie, David, 222

Bowles, Paul, 79 Braidotti, Rosi, 33, 35, 51, 71, 71n3, 73, 124, 125, 244, 245 Branco sai, prieto fica (film), 193n5 Brazil, 19, 185–197 Brooklyn, 212 Bruja narratives, 203–208, 210, 212–216 Brujos (TV show), 20, 203, 207, 210, 213–216 Buenos Aires, 123, 126, 133 C Camagüey, 146 Campos, Haroldo de, 193, 193n6 Canada, 130 Cancer, 93 Cannibal, 102n17 Cannibalism, 187, 196 Capitalism, 104, 105, 105n23, 105n24, 112, 113n33 Caracas, 221 Caribbean, 12, 13, 16, 30, 31, 38, 42 Caribs, 102n17 Cartesian, 242 Catfish, 143–162 Catholicism, 209 Cavell, Stanley, 138, 139 Charisma, 148, 149 Charmed (TV show), 20, 203, 205, 207, 209, 210, 213–215 Chavismo, 238 Chernobyl, 124 Chicanofuturism, 9 China, 117 Climate change, 145, 148, 151, 152, 160 Clone, 77 Cloning, 77 Colonialism, 94, 97n8, 98n12, 99, 104, 106

 INDEX 

Columbus, Christopher, 94, 97n9, 98, 98n12, 102n17, 109 Confederacy, 117 Córdova, Zoraida, 20, 203, 207, 211–213 Cornell University, 91 Correa, Hugo, 10 Cortázar, Julio, 241 Covid-19, 4, 10, 22, 117, 247 Craven, Wes, 133 Creole, 102n18 Critical posthumanism, 71–73, 79 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 62, 65 Cuadra, Álvaro, 239 Cuba, 13, 17, 18, 38–40, 46, 47, 103, 202, 203 Cuban ferret, 143, 145–147 Cuevas Tellerías, Joaquín, 173 Cybernetics, 187, 195 Cyberpunk, 169, 176 Cyberspace, 34, 36, 37, 40n9, 43, 44 Cyborg, Andean, 167–182 Cyborgs, 2, 4, 6, 14, 18, 19, 21, 30, 34, 49, 50, 50n1, 53, 55–66, 56n11, 70, 70n2, 73–75, 77, 77n6, 78, 83, 168, 168n2, 169, 178, 181, 182, 224–226, 232 D DaMatta, Roberto, 195n7 Decorporalization, 75 Deleuze, Gilles, 124 Descartes, René, 71, 74 Detroit, 124 Dexler, Eric, 75 Diaspora, 98, 101 Díaz, Junot, 16, 18, 91–117, 92n2 Disability, 105 Disability studies, 30, 30n1, 32n4, 34, 35 Disembodied subjectivity, 72, 75

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DNA, 195, 241 Dominican Republic, 16, 91, 93, 93n3, 104n21, 106, 106n26, 209 Dussel, Enrique, 97n10 Dystopia, 132, 162, 185, 186, 188–192, 197 E Echeverría, Bolívar, 20, 84, 186, 187, 187n1, 192, 192n4, 193, 193n6 Ecuador, 212 Egypt, 129 El Alto city, 174, 174n6, 175, 177 Embodiment, 71, 72, 75, 77 Empiricism, 76 Enlightenment, the, 1, 9, 22, 241, 245 Environmentalism, 145, 152 Epidemic, 109 Escobar, Arturo, 2, 6, 7 Esquirol, Miguel, 18, 19, 167–182 Eurocentrism, 81, 84, 97–99 Extractivism, 104 F Faith, 219–233 Fanon, Frantz, 43n10 Favelas, 186, 188–191, 188n2 Fernández, Bernardo, 54n5 Ferranda, Francisca, 72, 83 Ferret, 143–146, 149–151, 153, 157, 159 Fidel, Castro, 143, 146, 156, 157, 159 Florida, 149 Floyd, George, 117 Foucault, Michel, 51n3, 76, 78, 79, 188 France, 244, 246 Francoism, 143 Franco, Marielle, 191, 192n3

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Freeburg, Victor, 134 Fukuyama, Francis, 77 Fungus, 104 G Gamboa, Ricardo, 213–215 García Canclini, Néstor, 239 García Linera, Álvaro, 177 Genetic design, 77 Genocide, 96, 98 Genre, 101, 115 Germany, 137 Ghersi Rodríguez, Alejandra, 221 Gil, Eve, 14, 49–67 Glissant, Édouard, 98, 99, 116 Glitch, 222, 228, 229, 233 Glocal/global, 239 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 129 Gómez Peña, Guillermo, 78 González Fernández, Maielis, 13, 29–47 Gordimer, Nadine, 127 Greenhouse effect, 248 Guatemala, 127 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 147, 157 H Haiti, 93, 93n3, 95, 102, 102n18, 103, 103n20, 104n21, 106, 113–115, 113n33, 209, 210 Haraway, Donna, 4–6, 15, 56, 58, 70, 70n2, 77, 77n6, 169, 243, 245 Havana, 36, 39, 40n9, 42, 144 Hayles, N. Katherine, 4, 6, 72, 73, 75, 77, 246 Heteronormativity, 222, 223, 229 Heyman, Frederick, 220, 224, 225 Hispaniola, 97n9, 115 Homo videns, 55, 55n9, 55n10

Hooper, Tobe, 133 Hope, 220, 223n2, 224–228, 232, 233 Horror film, 124, 131 Houdebine, Louis-Marie, 246 Humanism, 4, 14, 22, 49–52, 63, 67, 71, 72 Hurston, Nora Zeale, 103n19 Huxley, Aldous, 82, 185, 186 Hyper-reality, 242 I India, 127, 129 Indigenous futurism, 173 International Monetary Fund, 128 Invasive species, 143–162 Iraq, 132, 133 J Jameson, Fredric, 19, 45, 100n14, 203, 204 Japan, 130 K Kac, Eduardo, 246 Katrina, Hurricane, 137 Kincaid, Jamaica, 127 Kroker, Arthur, 75 Kundera, Milan Kundera, 83 Kurtzweil, Ray, 74 L Lake Epecuén, 126 La Paz, 167, 171–175, 171n3, 171n4, 179 La Paz (city), 18 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 102n17

 INDEX 

Latinidad, 20, 21, 201–216 Latinx, 1–3, 5, 7–9, 11, 12, 20, 21, 204–209, 205n2, 211, 212, 214, 215 Le Guin, Ursula K., 10, 11 Lettered city, 61, 63, 65, 66 LGBTQ+, 202 Liboy, José, 42 Limón, Ada, 7 Llano, Eduardo del, 152 Lorenzano, Sandra, 65 Lovecraft, H.P., 9 Ludmer, Josefina, 239, 243 Lugones, Leopoldo, 241 M Machado, Antonio, 223, 227 Malaysia, 153 Mamani Magne, Gabriel, 174 Mangrove world, 7 Marabú, 143–162 Martínez, Marion C., 9 MAS (political party), 238 Matrix, The (film), 45, 46 May, Brian, 124, 126 Mbembe, Achilles, 188 McKenna, Terrance, 75 Mejía, Iván, 15, 69, 72, 73, 76–78, 76n5, 77n6, 85 Mexico, 13–15, 50, 54, 54n7, 55, 57, 58, 58n13, 60, 61, 64, 66 Miami, 39 Miéville, China, 12 Mimicry, 43 Miscegenation, 150 MIT, 91 Modernity, 76, 79, 84 MoMA of New York, 233 Monáe, Janelle, 222 Monsiváis, Carlos, 239 Monsters, 31, 35–37, 43–47, 93, 102, 105–117

255

Monstrosity, 31, 38 Morales, Evo, 175 Moraña, Mabel, 5, 8, 52, 55, 56, 63, 191 Moravec, Hans, 74, 75, 80n8 Moringa, 159 Munif, Abdulrahman, 127 Muñoz, José Esteban, 21, 100n14, 220, 221, 223–229, 223n2, 233 Mutant, 17, 21, 144, 145, 153, 154, 219–233 Myth, 97–99 N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 231, 232 Nanobots, 143–162 Nayar, Pramod K., 71n3, 72, 247 Necropolitics, 188, 191 Nellie, Campobello, 62, 65 Neoliberalism, 107 Netflix, 132 Netherlands, 130 New Jersey, 39, 101 New Orleans, 124, 137, 138 New York City, 202 Nigeria, 127, 203 Nixon, Rob, 17, 125, 127–129, 131, 135, 136 Nokia, Princess, 201–204, 206, 207 Non-human, 124, 125, 138 Nuclear energy, 147 Nuyorican, 201, 202 O Offray de La Mettrie, Julien, 244 Older, Daniel José, 9 Oloixarac, Pola, 21, 22, 240, 241, 244, 246 Onetti, Luciano and Nicolás, 124 Ordaz Matos, Nuria Dolores, 152 Orwell, George, 185, 186

256 

INDEX

P Pandemia, 247, 248 Parés, Pablo, 124, 132 Parreno, Philippe, 233 Pentacostalism, 190 Perón, Juan, 126 Piard, Tomás, 152 Pinar del Río, 157 Piracy, 175–177, 182 Plantation, 95, 104, 105n24, 106–108, 113, 114 Plato, 57, 62, 64, 65n19, 74, 83 Pornography, 78 Portillo, Rafael, 81, 82 Postanthropocentrism, 72, 244 Postapocalyptic, 91 Postcolonial, 33, 43, 53 Posthumanism, 1–22, 30, 33–36, 51–53, 59, 67 Posthumanist, 237–239 Postmodern, 241–243 Post-structuralism, 78 Preciado, Paul B., 168n1 Progress, 98, 100 Prosthesis, 30–35, 30n2, 37n7, 75, 168, 169, 180 Puerto Rico, 149, 202, 203, 212 Pulitzer Prize, 92 Q Quarantine, 107, 108, 112, 247, 248 Quechua, 168, 174, 175, 179, 180, 182 Queer futurity, 219–233 Queirós, Adirley, 193n5 Quijano, Aníbal, 84, 97 Quya, Reyna, 174 R Race, 92n2, 97–99, 101, 107, 110, 112, 113 Radioactivity, 147, 153

Rama, Ángel, 52, 63 Reggaeton, 225, 231 Rio de Janeiro, 188n2, 189, 192 Rita Indiana, 152 Rivera, Alex, 54n5 Rivera Garza, Cristina, 62, 65 Rivero, Giovanna, 173 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 8, 10 Roca, Julio, 130 Rojas Medina, Alejandro, 16, 17, 143–162 Rosalía, 230, 231 Roy, Arundhati, 129 S Sábato, Ernesto, 241 Sacrificial, 105 Saenz, Jaime, 18, 19, 168–174, 171n4, 178–181, 180n9 Saint-Domingue, 102 Sánchez de Lozada, Gabriel, 175 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio, 5, 6, 50, 53, 238 Santería, 202, 203, 209, 210 Santo Domingo, DR, 96, 101 Sarlo, Beatriz, 239, 243 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 129 Sartori, Giovanni, 55, 55n10, 56, 56n11, 65n19 Science fiction, Bolivia, 173, 177, 178 Scientific method, 76 Seabrook, William, 103 Sepúlveda, Luz María, 15, 69, 73, 75, 76, 76n5, 83 Sierra Maestra, 146, 147 Simulacrum, 242 Singularity, 74 Sisyphus, 226 Slavery, 94, 102, 104n22, 105, 106, 110, 113–115, 117 Sleep Dealer (film), 54n5 Slow cinema, 135

 INDEX 

Slow violence, 17, 123–140 Sobchack, Vivian, 31, 32, 32n4, 35, 47 Sociogeny, 106 Sontag, Susan, 31 Soviet Union, 38, 147, 153 Special Period, Cuba, 38, 147 Spedding, Alison, 173 State of exception, 105 Subaltern, the, 34, 43, 97 Sugarcane, 143, 144, 158 Sun Ra, 222 Survival City, Nevada, 139 Sustainability, 145, 159 Suvin, Darko, 185 T Taino, 95, 96, 110 Taylor, Breonna, 117 Terraformation, 150, 151 Thailand, 153, 154 Tourist industry, 149, 152 Transexual, 77 Transhumanism, 4, 33, 71, 72, 79, 85 Trauma, 92, 100, 105, 107 Trías, Fernanda, 10 Trujillo, Rafael, 94, 94n4 Trump, Donald, 117, 205, 206, 214n8 Tsing, Anna, 1–3 U United States of America, 15, 130 Urzaiz, Eduardo, 82 Utopia, 193n6 V Valencia, Sayak, 176 Vampires, 50n1, 191

257

Vasconcelos, José, 64 Venezuela, 21, 221 Video-child, 55–63 Villa Epecuén, 123–140 Virtual reality (VR), 14, 37, 39n8, 46n12, 50, 54–59, 57n12, 61, 62, 64–66 Virus, 247, 248 Viscarra, Víctor Hugo, 171n3 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 2, 6, 7 Vodou, 103 VR, see Virtual reality W Western subjectivity, 72 Wolfe, Cary, 4, 5, 245 World Bank, 128, 129 World War II, 137 X Xenophobia, 149 Y Yahweh, 114 Yehya, Naief, 15, 69, 73–75, 76n5, 77, 80–83, 80n8 Yemayá, 202 Yoruba, 202, 203, 205, 209 Yoss (José Miguel Sánchez Gómez), 41 Z Zavaleta, René, 170 Žižek, Slavoj, 130 Zombies, 16, 18, 50n1, 93, 93n3, 95, 95n5, 101–109, 102n17, 102n18, 103n19, 105n23, 105n24, 111–116, 113n33, 191