Latinx speculative fiction, as opposed to Chicanx speculative fiction, is defined by the insistence on the "Latinx," which prompts a move toward comparative approaches to the study of Latinx peoples, as articulated through the speculative mode of the "what if?" Groundbreaking anthologies, such as Altermundos (2017), Latin@ Rising (2017), and Speculative Fiction for Dreamers (2021), have helped expand critical scholarship on how contemporary speculative fictions shift ways of thinking and conceive new kinds of Latinx subjects. Organized around issues of neo/colonialism, immigration and globalization, and race and gender, these anthologies move from nationalist frameworks towards comparative and hemispheric ones in their contemplation of a broadly conceived Latinx community. Yet, as Renee Hudson, the editor of the ASAP cluster “Imagining the Futures of Latinx Speculative Fictions,” highlights, anthologies on Latinx speculative fiction can fall into the danger of subsuming specific Latinx identities under the general framework of Latinx. What Hudson reminds us of is that, while different Latinx populations (including Chicanx, Indigenous, Caribbean, and Central and South American populations) may have similar stakes in writing brown and black bodies into alternative pasts, presents, and futures, they do so against different forms of political, aesthetic, and material limitations. This panel topic has its conceptual roots in this critique of the subfield of Latinx speculative fiction. Rather than naming and delineating what counts as “Latinx,” this panel takes a fresh looks at this ethnic marker’s limitations through the material turn’s concern with “stuff.” How does that matter that precedes identitarian categories entail a reevaluation of how Latinx people relate to the world? How might we rethink speculative imaginaries as forms of material practices in which Latinx subjects and material objects are enmeshed and entangled?
Maia Gil’Adí sets the terms of debate by foregrounding the American landscape of Hernan Díaz’s In the Distance (2017) to imagine a proto-Latinxness. She argues that the text positions latinidad as a speculative endeavor outside the reach of language—unsayable and unknowable. Sprinkling the text with Latin American placenames and Spanish words laces the California landscape and the novel itself with a spectral latinidad that is speculative in nature. In the Distance is imbued with a proto-Latinxness that calls forth the long history of Latinx people in the region even before the term’s creation. Renee Hudson’s paper considers the aesthetic turn in Latinx Studies and how it sits, perhaps uncomfortably, alongside José Vasconcelos’s emphasis on eugenics and aesthetics in La raza cósmica. To that end, she considers how Silvia Moreno-Garcia explicitly takes up Vasconcelos’s ideas through her depiction of mushrooms in Mexican Gothic (2020) and hybrids in The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (2022). She suggests that the illegibility of the Latinx body engenders an emphasis on materiality and the material conditions of racial mixing. Moreno-Garcia’s work emphasizes the violence of colonization as a material practice in contrast to the eugenicist practice that Vasconcelos glosses over in La raza cósmica. Angie Bonilla’s paper foregrounds the material aesthetics of doorways in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Within Tolkien’s fantastic universe, the Doors of Durin symbolize the borders between the Elven and Dwarf worlds. Through the animating phrase, “Speak Friend and Enter,” the Doors of Durin re-envision the affective boundaries of friendship and, in turn, the racial and gendered landscape of the Tolkien universe. Bonilla argues that Díaz’s animation of the Doors of Durin opens the possibility of a queer utopia, what José Muñoz calls a reality “not yet here,” that, nevertheless, invites a different understanding of Latinx masculinity. Like the affective politics of the Doors of Durin, failed queer utopias point to the failure and persistence of hope in this age of Latinx disenfranchisement and political pessimism. Altogether, this panel sets the terms of how materiality, the way “things that speak,” articulate latinidad and the modality of the “what if?”