This chapter argues that contemporary openings to utopian thinking are confronted by an array of different temporal frameworks that afford radically different possibilities for human agency and cohere with radically different political and ethical demands. These include, on the one hand, the geologic time scale of the Anthropocene, the long historical time informing social activism and social justice movements (e.g., the perspectives afforded by the histories of slavery, genocide, and colonialism), and the utopian perspective of hope or what Ernst Bloch calls anticipatory illumination. These must confront, on the other hand, the cyclical time of economic growth and recession, the exigent time of electoral cycles, and the frozen time of “capitalist realism.” This chapter explores conceptual and fictional responses to this matrix of possibilities, especially in narratives by Cormac McCarthy, Donna Haraway, Nisi Shawl, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Domingo F. Sarmiento was a nineteenth-century Argentine writer whose ideas and literature have had a wide-reaching and important impact on both the national and continental stage, particularly the opposition between civilization and barbarism, as formulated in his book Facundo (1845). This chapter poses that almost all of Sarmiento’s work can be understood through the tension between the short-term impact of politics and the long-term impact of literature, be it in the years of his exile in Chile, in the time of his presidential candidacy, or throughout his journalistic work. Also, it proposes a reading of Sarmiento’s trajectory and his most important literary production (1845 Facundo, 1849 Viajes, and 1850 Recuerdos de provincia) not only in relation to the different circumstances in which he lived but also in light of his particular representation of modern phenomena related to the spectacle and the attention of the masses. In this way, it seeks to offer a nuanced perspective of a fundamental Argentinian author and to engage in new dialogues and frame the contradictions within the romantic environment in which Sarmiento participated and the modernization to which he aspired.

This chapter maps out two decades of novelistic production starting with Respiración artificial by Ricardo Piglia in the midst of the dictatorship. An archival pursuit of a history of violence constitutive of national foundations, the narrative insinuates the possibility of a national project where silenced voices might have a hearing. Whereas in Piglia, modernist fragmentation signals an enigma that needs to be solved, in Reina Roffe’s La rompiente a shattered and disrupted memory both names the horror and promises a break away from archival sites of authority. Los Pichiciegos by Rodolfo Fogwill offers a vision of the Malvinas/Falklands War that is both hallucinatory and hyperreal, facing simultaneously the darkness of the present and a visionary glance revealing novel forms of destitution in the making. In novels published in the 1990s such as Matilde Sanchez’s El dock, Rodolfo Fogwill’s Vivir afuera, Sergio Chefjec’s El aire and Los planetas, the characters’ aimless wanderings might be said to explore the failure of memory as historical direction, as national reckoning, as a form of political representation, as harnessing community, yet memories of the horror persist beyond any general project of political reconstitution and the capacity of literature to repair or bestow meaning.

Primarily poets, writers Alfonsina Storni and Alejandra Pizarnik had in common being daughters of immigrants, and both committed suicide. Storni’s poetry during her lifetime was popular and accessible, with topics of women, love, and modernity. Poet, journalist, dramatist, and maestra (schoolteacher), she gained early fame but only partial critical success. She crafted a defiant public image and even staged her suicide after a long struggle with cancer. She protested the stigma of being an unwed mother and other injustices borne by women. In contrast, Pizarnik initially reached a smaller but influential reading public; many young readers identify with her elusive and fractured poetry-theater of interiority. Rebellious and bisexual, she was the daughter of Jews who had escaped the Holocaust but lost their world. Loss, mourning, and sometimes violence, abjection, and terror are recurring topics, as in The Bloody Countess. As with Storni, there is confessionalism, but Pizarnik’s “I” is not a stable subject but a wandering marker, emphasizing the body, sexual desire, and fragmentation. Pizarnik’s struggle with language becomes a battle against the breakdown of the world.

Toussaint Louverture, hero of the Haitian Revolution, occupies a key space in the imagination of Black masculinity across his own time up through the present day.This chapter traces the way Toussaint Louverture’s body, in particular, is reimagined and represented both as a symbol for Black heroism and, taken together as an oeuvre, as a figure that undoes this masculine paradigm of Black politics. In texts as varied as C. L. R. James’s, The Black Jacobins, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Édouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint, and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls, as well as visual art, cinema, public monuments, performances, children’s books, and his own memoir, Louverture’s body reads across various times, spaces, and forms as a site of desire, vulnerability, and contested lineage for Black masculine “freedom dreams.” His continued embodied celebrity is more complex than an individual text’s objectification, and instead acts as a recurring scenario of Black political negotiation across key historical moments.

Analyzing major and lesser-known utopian and dystopian literature from 1945-present, we define white supremacy as both a regime of exploitation and violence by people of European descent upon others deemed to be outside of whiteness and a process of centering whiteness. We look at the relationship between white supremacy and American culture from the period through two main trends. The first asserts white supremacy in either a default form assuming the centrality of whiteness or an explicit form that calls for white supremacist revolution. Texts here range from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold to McCarthy’s The Road to the notorious Turner Diaries. The second trend directly challenges white supremacy, including some notable texts such as Butler’s Parable series to a flood of post-Black Lives Matter works such as Ruff’s Lovecraft Country to Coates’s Between the World and Me to short works by adrienne maree brown and others.

This chapter argues that young adult (YA) fiction is, fundamentally, utopian in the broadest sense, given that it is produced for the consumption of adolescent and young adult readers who are looking for guidance or entertainment in the pursuit of their own better futures. At times, though, such work also engages larger questions that exceed the limited purview of individual self-betterment and that approach concerns about the proper – and better – organization and maintenance of society. Specifically, such work seems at times actively to theorize the cultivation of hope as a practice, even a method. This chapter examines how YA fiction engages hope as a method in three distinct modes: through critical dystopias, in failed or problematic utopias, and in utopias in process.

“The Black Body in Nature” considers writers who, in their critical and imaginative work, map the contours of an African American nature writing tradition. In this environmental canon, authors persistently attend to the violence associated with the outdoors, lurking in forests, woods, and other secluded areas.These geographies, while environmentally rich, can be threatening spaces, isolated and hostile.Yet, as the story of birder Christian Cooper attests, menacing areas needn’t always be sheltered, but are manifest in city streets, urban parks, and brightly lit neighborhoods. The African American environmental tradition is nuanced and, as such, the experience of danger and disenfranchisement is counterpointed by an equally strong and persistent affiliation with the natural world that offers, for some, a measure of relief from structural forms of oppression.Situated at the nexus of race and ecocritical thought, this chapter considers the complicated positionality of the Black body in nature through the lens of exile and belonging.

This chapter looks at politically defiant women’s theatre and performance in Argentina from the 1960s onward though the concept of the skin. It pays special attention to the varying ways in which women in theater and performance have engaged with the ever-pressing and pervasive issues of gender-based violence, power, the body, family, memory, and resistance. Drawing upon Griselda Gambaro’s visionary Información para extranjeros (1971/1987), we suggest multidirectional dialogues with the process of state-led terror and forced disappearance perpetrated during the 1976–83 military dictatorship. While discussing varying traditions of contestation and rebellion across feminist theater and performance, we build this dermography of contemporary women’s theatre and performance in which Piel de Lava (Skin of Lava) is not only the name of a group but the symbol of a new form of politically committed, “post-traumatic” feminist performance. In those terms, the chapter discusses some of the most audacious and innovative recent feminist pieces, including Lola Arias’ installations suggesting implicated forms of spectatorship, Romina Paula’s singular approach to motherhood through desiring mothers and dissident daughters, as well as the alternative forms of staging gender disobedience proposed by Albertina Carri and Analía Couceyro in their rereading of Tadeys (2019).

Borges is an Argentine writer whose work has deserved extensive and brilliant critical analyses. Reviewing the canonical interpretations (Ricardo Piglia, Sylvia Molloy, Daniel Balderston, Beatriz Sarlo, among others), this chapter seeks to rethink Borges’ work in the twenty-first century usiing two main approaches. The first will review the idea of “work” in Borges. As Annick Louis has studied, the unstable nature of his work demands a reconceptualization of the processes of construction of literature that expands the limits of the book, the author, and the text, and that circulates in different media (books, magazines, lectures, interviews, chats). A second way is to expand the dialogues and conversations that his textuality offers. Focused on the obvious literary bonds, most of his critics have read his work emphasizing the different forms of intertextuality. But Borges’ universe includes much more aesthetics and cultural practices, as Alan Pauls has shown. If Borges strongly questioned the ideas of the author and work, he also questioned the ideas of literature, art, culture, and media. The chapter also analyzes the place of Borges in the context of national culture and its relationship with world literature.

The year 1963 is special for Julio Cortázar: he publishes Rayuela (Hopscotch) and visits revolutionary Cuba. The year before one of his stories was adapted into a film (La cifra impar [Odd Number]) and, as Ángel Rama points out in his essay “El boom en perspectiva” (included in the volume Más allá del boom: literatura y mercado) the sales of his books start to increase steadily: 10,500 in 1964, 49,000 en 1967, almost 80,000 in 1969. The Rayuela phenomenon is but one in a myriad transformations that were taking place in the cultural and literary fields: the end of the chasm that had separated mass audiences from Argentinean literature, the Latin-Americanization of the intellectual and artistic fields, the transformation of the publishing industry with the rise of Editorial Sudamericana, among others (in 1962 Eudeba’s edition of Martín Fierro had become a bestseller). Starting with Rayuela and other works published those years (such as Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo, which shared the Kennedy prize with Cortázar’s novel), this chapter questions the relationship between fiction and politics in a very troubled period of Latin American history.

This chapter examines the relationship between Black literature and anti-Black medical violence. It argues that, since at least the eighteenth century, Black writers have tapped into the narrative and documentary power of Black writing to chronicle and archive the racialized operations of medical violence and its historical attempts to exploit Black bodies. Using literature to spotlight medicine’s role in the global economies of Black embodied terror, these writers have helped to construct an important site of memory that I call the Black medical archive. In doing so, they demonstrate the importance of medicine to the politics and aesthetics of the Black literary tradition, from its origins to the present. Further, they unfurl how Black literature has long been a crucial site for the transformational practices of storytelling that the field of narrative medicine has proffered as a radical intervention into the histories of violence, exploitation, and discrepant care that have informed the practices and epistemologies of modern medicine.