Posthumanism And Latin X American Science Fiction

This volume explores how Latin American and Latinx creators have engaged science fiction to explore posthumanist thought. Contributors reflect on how Latin American and Latinx speculative art conceptualizes the operations of other, non-human forms of agency, and engages in environmentalist theory in ways that are estranging and open to new forms of species companionship. Essays cover literature, film, TV shows, and music, grouped in three sections: “Posthumanist Subjects” examines Latin(x) American iterations of some of the most common figurations of the posthuman, such as the cyborg and virtual environments and selves; “Slow Violence and Environmental Threats” understands that posthumanist meditations in the hemisphere take place in a material and cultural context shaped by the catastrophic destruction of the environment; the chapters in “Posthumanist Others” shows how the reimagination of the self and the world that posthumanism offers may be an opportunity to break the hold that oppressive systems have over the ways in which societies are constructed and governed.

Latin America is experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are highly innovative in their conceptual play and their reworking of the medium. Inventive artwork and sophisticated scripts have combined to satisfy the demand of a growing readership, both at home and abroad. Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America, which is the first book-length study of the topic, argues that the graphic novel is emerging in Latin America as a uniquely powerful force to explore the nature of twenty-first century subjectivity. The authors place particular emphasis on the ways in which humans are bound to their non-human environment, and these ideas are productively drawn out in relation to posthuman thought and experience. The book draws together a range of recent graphic novels from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, many of which experiment with questions of transmediality, the representation of urban space, modes of perception and cognition, and a new form of ethics for a posthuman world. Praise for Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America '...well-referenced and… well considered - the analyses it brings are overall well-executed and insightful...' Image and Narrative, Jan 2018, vol 18, no 4

The first-ever collection of Latin American science fiction in English.

Vision, Technology and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature interrogates an array of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk science fiction novels and short stories from Mexico whose themes engage directly with visual technologies and the subjectivities they help produce – all published during and influenced by the country’s neoliberal era. This book argues that television, computers, and smartphones and the literary narratives that treat them all correspond to separate-yet-overlapping scopic regimes within the country today. Amidst the shifts occurring in the country’s field of vision during this period, the authors of these cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk narratives imagine how these devices contribute to producing specular subjects—or subjects who are constituted in large measure by their use and interaction with visual technologies. In doing so, they repeatedly recur to the posthuman figure of the cyborg in order to articulate these changes; Stephen C. Tobin therefore contends that the literary cyborg becomes a discursive site for working through the problematics of sight in Mexico during the globalized era. In all, these “specular fictions” represent an exceptional tendency within literary expression—especially within the cyberpunk genre—that grapples with themes and issues regarding the nature of vision being increasingly mediated by technology.

Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism offers a typology of alien encounters and addresses a range of texts including classic novels of alien encounter by H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein; recent blockbusters by Greg Bear, Octavia Butler and Sheri Tepper; and experimental science fiction by Peter Watts and Housuke Nojiri.

Combining work by critics from Latin America, the USA, and Europe, Latin American Science Fiction: Theory and Practice is the first anthology of articles in English to examine science fiction in all of Latin America, from Mexico and the Caribbean to Brazil and the Southern Cone. Using a variety of sophisticated theoretical approaches, the book explores not merely the development of a science fiction tradition in the region, but more importantly, the intricate ways in which this tradition has engaged with the most important cultural and literary debates of recent year.

Exploring works of science fiction originating from Spanish-speaking parts of the Caribbean and their diasporas, this book shows how writers, filmmakers, musicians, and artists are using the language of the genre to comment on the region's history and present-day realities.