How writers and artists use science
fiction to speak to the current moment in the Caribbean
Exploring
the remarkable recent increase in works of science fiction originating in Spanish-speaking parts of the Caribbean and their diasporas,
Tropical Time Machines
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.
Discussing
how previous Caribbean literature and film has characterized places including
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic as “out of sync” with Western
time, occupying a repeating or static space, Emily Maguire argues that science
fiction breaks these cycles and resituates the region temporally and spatially.
In chapters on cyberpunk, zombies, post-apocalyptic narratives, and the ab-real,
Maguire shows how recent cultural production analyzes and critiques the ways
globalization and national leadership have reinforced the region’s
marginalization amid economic and climate crises.
Art
that employs the science fictional mode makes room for a new vision of the
Caribbean, Maguire demonstrates—an alternate perspective in which the region
has agency in shaping its own narratives and trajectories. The texts themselves
are time machines, enabling creators to protest inequalities of the present
from the point of view of an imagined, transformed future.
A
volume in the series Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o
America, edited by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez
Publication
of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American
Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.