Latin America Writes Back 2.0:Political & Environmental Crisis in Science Fiction

Smathers Library 100
University of Florida
October 21–22, 2021

“Latin America Writes Back 2.0: Political and Environmental Crisis in Science Fiction” commemorates and extends UF’s landmark 2005 symposium “Latin America Writes Back.” That symposium identified UF as an early pioneer in the growing field of Latin American SF studies and featured talks by author/scholar Edmundo Paz Soldán and scholar J. Andrew Brown. This new workshop brings back those key participants of the 2005 event and adds other scholars and writers who are helping to shape the future of SF in the Caribbean, the Andean region, the Southern Cone, and in Mexico, and Brazil.

The workshop will include readings, lectures, and roundtables to advance interdisciplinary dialogue and to further elevate UF’s profile in international SF studies. The workshop’s focus on political crisis and climate change and their effects on contested identities of race, class, gender, and indigeneity in Latin America, is well-timed, given the alarming evidence of worsening environmental crisis and resulting political and cultural unrest throughout the region. In this context, SF studies and the environmental humanities, the animating methods of the workshop, are well-positioned to confront the challenges of changing climate and – writing back – to envisage paths to a more sustainable, resilient, and just world.

This event is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.

Symposium Program

All events will take place in Smathers Library 100

Thursday, October 21, 2021

4 – 5:30 PM

Reading by Gabriela Damián Miravete, in Spanish and English translation. Moderated by Andrea Villa Ruiz (UF SPS)

Friday, October 22, 2021

8 – 8:30 AM

Registration + light refreshments

8:30 – 10 AM

Opening remarks by M. Elizabeth Ginway (UF, SPS) and Terry Harpold (UF, English)
J. Andrew Brown, “Science Fiction in Latin America: The State of the Discipline Since 2005”

Moderator: Terry Harpold (UF English)

10 – 10:30 AM

Coffee break

10:30 AM – 12 PM

Alfredo Suppia, “Ecodystopia and Climate Change in Brazilian Cinema”
Emily Maguire: “Imagining a Caribbean (Post)Apocalypse: The Case of Habana Underguater”

Moderator: Leah Rosenberg (UF English). Note: Professors Suppia and Maguire’s talks are virtual presentations.

12 – 2 PM

Lunch break

2 – 3:30 PM

David Dalton, “The Cyborg Virgin and Childhood Cancer in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints“
Pablo Brescia, “Dispatches from the Technological (Post)human: the TransAmerican Anxiety of Progress”

Moderator: Emily Hind (UF SPS)

3:30 – 4 PM

Coffee break

4 – 5:30 PM

Roundtable on “Writing Climate Change and Political Crisis,” with Gabriela Damián Miravete, Giovanna Rivero, and Edmundo Paz Soldán

Moderator: Antonio Sajid López (UF SPS)

6 – 7:30 PM

Closing Keynote Address: Edmundo Paz Soldán

Moderator: M. Elizabeth Ginway (UF SPS)

Face Coverings Expected During Indoor Campus Events

This event adheres to the University of Florida’s guidelines for campus events during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, including the expectation that all attendees will wear approved face coverings at all times during this event and within buildings even if they are vaccinated. We recommend that you familiarize yourself with and adhere to the University’s guidelines for campus operations during the pandemic.

About the Invited Speakers

Pablo Brescia is Professor of Spanish at the University of South Florida, where he teaches courses on contemporary Latin American literature. He is author of a book on Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (Borges: Cinco especulaciones, 2015), and another on the art of the short story (Modelos y prácticas en el cuento hispanoamericano: Juan José Arreola, Borges, Julio Cortázar, 2011). He has edited six critical anthologies on the McOndo and the Crack Generations, the Latin American short story, as well as collections on Borges and Sor Juana de la Cruz. He is a regular contributor to the journal Latin American Literature Today. In addition to publishing three of his own books of short fiction, he is the recipient of the 2013 Status of Latinos’ USF Faculty Award and the 2010 Jamie Bishop Memorial Award awarded by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

J. Andrew Brown currently serves as Vice Dean of Faculty Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is Professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature. He is author of Cyborgs in Latin America (2010) and Test Tube Envy (2005), and co-editor of Latin American Science Fiction (2012). As an expert on the interrelationships of science, technology and culture in contemporary Latin America, he has published over thirty articles on these topics, and his current project, Weirding Latin America, examines the ways that contemporary Latin American writers of the Southern Cone grapple with the continually evolving “weird” realities in their countries, including issues of neoliberalism, race, ecological disaster and the remnants of dictatorship.

David Dalton is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte where he teaches Spanish and Latin American literature. He is author of Mestizo Modernity, Race, Technology, and the Body in Postrevolutionary Mexico (2018). He has co-edited two volumes: Healthcare in Latin America (forthcoming, 2022) with Douglas Weatherford and The Transatlantic Undead for the journal Alambique (2018) with Sara Anne Potter. He has published over 20 peer reviewed articles in the Latin Americanist, Latin American Culture Studies, Revista de estudios hispánicos, Latin American Theatre Review, among others. He is currrently the editor of the journal Olmeca and is working on a new book on the transnational flow of bodies, capital and technologies, tentatively titled Necroliberalism and Cyborg Resistance.

Emily Maguire is Associate Professor of Spanish at Northwestern University where she specializes in modern Latin American literature and culture, with a focus on the Hispanic Caribbean and its diasporas. She is author of Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography (2011, 2^nd ed. 2018) which discusses the re-valorization of Afro-Cuban culture as the source of Cuban-ness. She is the co-editor of a special issue of the journal Discourse on Caribbean Aesthetics and Politics (2014), and is author of over 20 articles and chapters. Her current book project explores the uses of science fiction in recent Caribbean literature and film. Portions of this research project have been published including an article on José “Pepe” Liboy for the Revista Iberoamericana 2017) and a chapter on the film Juan of the Dead in Global Science Fiction Cinema (2015).

Committed to the genres of science fiction and fantasy, Gabriela Damián Miravete is an author, screenwriter, producer, and radio journalist. The translation of her 2018 story “They Will Dream in the Garden” won the 2018 James Tiptree Award for SF exploring and expanding concepts of gender. The story appears in The Silence of the Bodies: Stories about Femicides, edited by Sergio González Ramírez, and exemplifies the feminist themes that permeate Miravete’s writing. She currently teaches at Centro University in Mexico City, specializing in women’s writing and children’s literature, and for Under the Volcano, a guided writing residency for poets, fiction writers, journalists and essayists based in Tepotlán, Mexico. Along with artists and scientists, she founded the Cúmulo de Tesla Collection, which promotes the relationship between art, science, and science fiction. She has published stories in anthologies in Spanish and English, and among her latest projects is FutureCon, an online collective event that brought together science fiction authors and scholars from around the world in September 2021.

Edmundo Paz Soldán is a Bolivian author and professor of Latin American Literature at Cornell University where he currently serves as chair of Romance Languages. His award-winning works have garnered the Erich Guttentag Prize, the Juan Rulfo prize for short stories and Bolivia’s Premio Nacional de la Novela. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim award (2006). Among his most recent titles are Los días de la peste (The Days of the Plague, 2018), La mirada de las plantas (The Gaze of the Plants, 2019) Allá afuera hay monstruos (There are Monsters Out There, 2021). His new short story collection, La vía del futuro (Pages of the Future) will be published in late October of this year. In addition to his numerous academic publications and works of fiction, he is a cultural columnist for El país, The New York Times, and World Literature Today.

As part of a new generation interested in the genre of horror in the tradition of Poe, Bolivian author Giovanna Rivero’s latest book Tierra fresca de su tumba (Fresh Dirt from the Grave) has sparked international interest in her work. Translated into Portuguese in 2021, this collection will soon be available in English translation from the Charco Press. Her 2015 collection of stories Para comerte mejor (All the Better to Eat You), inspired by her interest in traditional stories, comics and the fantastic, won the Dante Alighieri Award in Bolivia. She is author of four novels and award-winning short stories, and her 2015 novel, 98 Degrees Without Shade has been made into a film by director Juan Pablo Richter. As a professor, scholar, writing instructor and researcher, Rivero has been active online and is currently teaching for the Escuela de Letras el Billar in Spain.

Alfredo Suppia is Associate Professor at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo, Brazil, where he teaches Brazilian and World Cinema and Film Analysis, Script Writing and Film Adaptation in the Department of Multi-Media Studies. He is author of over 40 articles on film, including the Oxford Bibliography on Latin American Science Fiction Film and two books on science fiction and Brazilian Cinema. He has organized five speaker series on film and science fiction at UNICAMP and has edited several anthologies of essays on science fiction and film, including Cartografias da ficção científica mundial (Cartographies of World Science Fiction, 2015) and Red Alert: Marxist Approaches to Science Fiction Cinema (2016). His current book project, Brazilian Science Fiction Cinema, is the first in-depth critical history of Brazilian science fiction cinema to be published in English.

“Latin America Writes Back” is sponsored by the Center for the Humanities in the Public Sphere, the Center for Gender, Sexualities & Women’s Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Departments of English and Spanish and Portuguese Studies, The George A. Smathers Libraries, Imagining Climate Change, the UF International Center, the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar, the Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities, and the Science Fiction Working Group.