The Workings of Tropical Time Machines: Caribbean Science Fiction's Temporal Interventions
When and Where
Speakers
Description
We are proud to welcome professor Emily A. Maguire for a visit to our Department. Please join us for an invited lecture on the growth of science fiction in the Hispanophone Caribbean literature.
About the Presentation
The last two decades have seen a remarkable rise in both the presence and visibility of science fiction in the cultural production of the Hispanophone Caribbean. While some science fiction narratives introduce new worlds or envision radically different future environments, many recent science fiction texts from the Caribbean extrapolate from the particularities of contemporary experience. Why have Caribbean creators gravitated to science fiction as a mode of storytelling for this moment? Arguing that science fiction provides a new language with which Caribbean writers critique present conditions, this talk explores how recent Caribbean narratives use science fiction as a tool to destabilize narrative temporality. The future possible intervenes in Caribbean texts to highlight temporal stagnation, to make visible outmoded systems that continue to operate in the present, to offer alternative visions of Caribbean reality (both utopian and dystopian), and to argue for new ways of envisioning both socio-political futures and the literary canons on which national identities and histories are built.
About the Presenter
Emily A. Maguire is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, where she specializes in literature of the Hispanic Caribbean and its diasporas. She is the author of Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography (2011) and Tropical Time Machines: Science Fiction in the Contemporary Hispanic Caribbean (2024), and the co-editor, with Antonio Córdoba, of Posthumanism in Latin(x) American Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan 2022). Her articles have appeared in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Small Axe, A Contracorriente, ASAP/Journal, and Revista Iberoamericana, among other places.