Emily A. Maguire - Böcker

In the wake of independence from Spain in 1898, Cuba’s intellectual avant-garde struggled to cast their country as a modern nation. They grappled with the challenges presented by the postcolonial situation in general and with the location of blackness within a narrative of Cuban-ness in particular.In this breakthrough study, Emily Maguire examines how a cadre of writers reimagined the nation and re-valorized Afro-Cuban culture through a textual production that incorporated elements of the ethnographic with the literary. Singling out the work of Lydia Cabrera as emblematic of the experimentation with genre that characterized the age, Maguire constructs a series of counterpoints that place Cabrera’s work in dialogue with that of her Cuban contemporaries—including Fernando Ortiz, Nicolás Guillén, and Alejo Carpentier. An illuminating final chapter on Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston widens the scope to contextualize Cuban texts within a hemispheric movement to represent black culture.

How writers and artists use science fiction to speak to the current moment in the CaribbeanExploring 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 RodríguezPublication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities

How writers and artists use science fiction to speak to the current moment in the CaribbeanExploring 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 RodríguezPublication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities

This volume explores how Latin American and Latinx creators have engaged science fiction to explore posthumanist thought.