Treatment of topic: This panel asks if the concept of indigenous futurisms, or “futurismos indígenas,” is useful for drawing comparisons and cohesion between 21^st-century aesthetic projects across Abia-Yala, or Latin America. The panel proposes to explore the concept via literary, performance, and architectural production from the 21^st century to add to ongoing discussions occurring amongst other native artists, scholars, and allies. The four papers each offer case studies of the work being done by different in indigenous groups in three different geographic areas: the Amazon, the Andes, and Mesoamerica. The term “indigenous futurism” was coined by Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe) in the context of Native American, First Nations, Aboriginal Australian, and New Zealand Maori authors in her edited book Walking the Clouds (2012). This first ever anthology of indigenous science fiction reframes some authors who have been previously read under the rubric of “magical realism,” a genre that originated in the territories now known as Latin America. Indigenous futurism might be described as an artistic movement that subverts colonialism by reimagining space exploration, whether on earth or beyond it, from a non-colonial perspective.

In the territories of Abia-Yala, what forms do indigenous futurisms take, in literature, music, film, or the visual arts in the 21^st century? Looking beyond, but including the science fiction genre, indigenous futurisms hinge upon combining new technologies with ancestral technologies in surprising and contradictory ways that expose the failures of a uniform Western “modernity.” Indigenous peoples might be said to already have survived a form of apocalypse in the unfinished project of colonization. Their territories have been invaded and they have been made to feel “alien” in their own lands, but they have nevertheless resisted and thrived through strategies of cultural, linguistic, and political activism and adaptation. Such strategies will be demonstrated through the works of the panelists.

Rationale for session: This session is timely for two primary reasons. First, the year 2019 is the International Year of Indigenous Languages, as declared by the United Nations to “raise awareness of the consequences of the endangerment of indigenous languages across the world.” This panel draws attention to the links between indigenous languages and world making by drawing on the Maya, Aymara, and Shipibo cultures of the Mesoamerican, Andean, and Amazonian regions of Latin America. Second, the theme of the MLA conference is “Being Human.” Indigenous languages and arts open us up to other ways of conceiving of what it is to be human that move beyond Western perspectives. Our panel engages directly with critiques of anthropocentrism by looking at the ways that indigenous-inspired arts draw attention to other ways of conceiving of the human as situated within ecosystems, and the limits of access to other ways of world-making. As the environmental crisis looms, indigenous knowledge systems may well be key to ecosystem survival, but they also present challenges to other ways of organizing the world. This panel interrogates the limits and possibilities of thinking about the future of the human through indigenous creative production.

Relationship to other scholarship: As mentioned in the first paragraph, the term “indigenous futurism” was coined in the context of North American native studies, in dialogue with Australian indigenous studies. However, the range of manifestations of the confluence of technology and indigenous arts in the Abia-Yala have not been studied within the notion of an indigenous futurism. This panel is an attempt to fill in a gap in scholarship and to mobilize commonalities and differences amongst the ways in which indigenous expression is mapping itself onto the future.

Paper summaries: In his paper, “Ecological Spaces and Indigenous Literary Studies: Clarifying Conceptual Limits and Ontological Contradictions” Arturo Arias interrogates indigenous understandings of their world and ours through his analysis of a new literary corpus that has appeared in print since the 1980s. The texts he analyzes offer a unique gaze into the configuration of Mayan ontologies, as well as their singular epistemological positionalities.

Tiffany D. Creegan Miller, in her paper “Kixajo’, yojcho’ pa qach’ab’äl”: Youth-Driven Language Revitalization Initiatives in Hip Hop and Rap in Mayan Languages in the Guatemalan Highlands,” looks at the ways that Maya activists in Guatemala use music and new media to educate younger generations about the importance of revitalizing indigenous languages. Adolescents create their own music, via rap and hip hop genres, to preserve their indigenous languages and heritage, adapting the marimba instrumentation of traditional Maya music to contemporary rap and hip hop beats.

In her paper, “Shipibo Indigenous Technology in Fidel Eljuri’s Ecological Installations” Tara Daly explores the ways that Fidel Eljuri, based in Quito, Ecuador, composes music and visual performances through collaboration with the shipibo communities of the Peruvian Amazon. Eljuri combines indigenous knowledge and cutting edge digital and sound technology to draw attention to natureculture as the two are mutually intertwined and co-constitute each other. This inquiry will take Eljuri as an example of creative work that contributes to the concept of indigenous futurity as simultaneously a time and an emergent space.

Lastly, Elizabeth L. Monasterios, in her talk “Bolivian Cholets, Italian loggias, German Bauhaus and pre-Hispanic urbanism: Who’s afraid of connecting architectural imagination?” argues that neo-Andean architecture emerges out of multilayered complexities that require transdisciplinary, trans-historical and trans-theoretical reflections. Monasterios studies the social, political, cultural and global impact of neo-Andean architecture from a heterodox perspective that explains why and for what reasons, in the architectural imagination and urban design, distorted and anti-hegemonic forms of vision, time and landscape are produced.

Format: Each talk will be limited to 15 minutes and circulated amongst the group before hand to ensure a rich discussion. The four participants are familiar with the broader stakes of the conversation, but their individual contributions will foster each other’s understanding of the myriad ways that technology and indigenous knowledge come together in the 21st century.