Surviving the Anthropocene: Speculative Fictions from Latin America’s Past, Present, and Futures

This event is free and open to the public.

To attend in person, no advance registration is required.

To attend virtually, you must register at the following link located HERE.

This symposium aims to take stock of Latin America’s speculative fiction production—understood broadly as an umbrella term that includes a variety of genres, such as science fiction, horror, fantasy, and their subgenres and derivatives. “Surviving the Anthropocene” will address this early literary production in the 20th century until the cyberpunk boom of the 1990s but, most importantly, will put the focus on the past decade, when both the writing and the scholarly study of Latin American speculative fictions have exploded. This cultural phenomenon has coincided with the emergence of a variety of discourses around the “Anthropocene” —a concept alluding to the current geological epoch in which the human has become a dominant force on the environment— that have attempted to make sense of the accelerated global ecological changes.

Overarching framing questions include: What works, tendencies, preoccupations, and thematic axes comprise and characterize “speculative fiction” in/from Latin America during the era of the Anthropocene? What are the contours of the local contexts—political, economic, social, and cultural—that inform and inspire the works produced? How have authors from the region imagined ecological transformation in the era of global warming and mass extinction?

Panels, roundtables, book presentations, and keynote speeches compose the 10 sessions presented at this symposium (see the program below for details and profiles of participants).

Session themes include: Speculative Ecocriticism; New Weird and Gothic Horror; Science Fiction from the Past; Posthumanism; Necroliberalism; Women Authors of Speculative Fiction; Neoindigenist, Afrolatino, and Chicanx Futurisms; Less-studied regions/countries: Central America, the Caribbean (beyond Cuba), Paraguay, and Colombia. 

Keynote speakers: Alberto Chimal and Elizabeth Ginway.