Decolonial Speculative Fiction (Routledge Studies in Speculative Fiction)

Decolonial Speculative Fiction provides an analytical framework for situating speculative narratives from the margins. It approaches texts from literary movements made subaltern through processes of colonization and coloniality: Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, Latinx futurism, and Latin American speculative fiction. Works from these traditions often rest on paradigms and systems of meaning-making that differ from hegemonic (Euro-Western) notions of reality. As a result, speculative genres undergo profound transformations at the levels of both form and content. While recognizing the historicities of the different literary backgrounds, the book identifies common patterns in the representation of alternative spatio-temporalities, epistemologies, and politics of being in these speculative contexts. Some of these patterns include disruptions of historical timelines and a (post)apocalyptic imagination that transcends the figurative; centring Indigenous epistemologies to code and decode speculative genres; or the subversive position that racialized/gendered/sexualized others have vis-à-vis monsters and monstrosity. A dialogical study of these aspects reveals how decolonial speculative fiction envisions otherwise worlds that confound boundaries between fantasy and reality; possible and impossible; past, present, and future. Read more