Between Science Fiction and Climate Fict

This course explores the entanglement between traditional science fiction and the emerging genre of climate change fiction (popularly known as “cli-fi”) in Latin American literature. Traditionally, while science fiction imagines future scientific or technological advances and significant social or environmental changes, climate fiction deals more specifically with climate change and global warming. By focusing on the ideological and aesthetic implications of the human/non-human binary, this course will explore how the history of colonialism makes Latin America a unique laboratory of experimentation that combines these two genres. We will ask questions such as: How are phenomena such as climate change, post-humanism, animal, machine, artificial intelligence regionalized in Latin American fiction? How is the relationship between colonization and the extraction of natural resources fictionalized in twentieth-century literature? What are the different ways in which Latin American authors negotiate issues such as “development,” “progress,” and technological and capitalist expansion in their fiction? How do they imagine a future after climate change? How do climate change and technological development affect gender, racial, and class relations in Latin America? We will examine how specific literary fiction varies in response to the long-term history of capitalism, patriarchal domination, and the technological domination of nature in Latin America.