“Latin America Writes Back 2.0: Political and Environmental Crisis in Science Fiction” commemorates and extends UF’s landmark 2005 symposium, “Latin America Writes Back.” That symposium identified UF as an early pioneer in the growing field of Latin American SF studies and featured talks by author/scholar Edmundo Paz Soldán and scholar J. Andrew Brown. This new workshop brought back those key participants of the 2005 event and added other scholars and writers who are helping to shape the future of SF in the Caribbean, the Andean region, the Southern Cone, and Mexico, and Brazil.
Morning
After the reading on Thursday afternoon by Gabriela Damián Miravete, we had a full day of events running from 8:30 AM to 7:00 pm. The day began with an opening keynote by Andrew Brown (Washington U, St. Louis) who provided a survey of changes of the field of Latin American Science Fiction Studies from 2005 to the present. We then turned to our virtual presenters, who, for health reasons, could not travel, Alfredo Suppia (UNICAMP, Brazil) and Emily Maguire (Northwestern), who presented on environmental themes in Brazilian film and ecological apocalypse in Cuba, respectively.
Afternoon
After a lunch break, the afternoon session opened with Pablo Brescia (USF), who presented on the politics of posthumanism in Latin America, followed by David Dalton (UNCC) on environmental activism in the theatre of Latinx author Cherríe Moraga. The roundtable discussion by writers Gabriela Damián Miravete, Edmundo Paz Soldán, and Giovanna Rivero was the highlight of the afternoon. Each of the authors read a brief statement and followed up on the themes of the symposium with questions by the audience.
Evening
The event closed with a keynote by author/scholar Edmundo Paz Soldán, “Ways of Narrating Environmental Crisis in Latin American Literature,” which proposed climate fiction as a new lens of analysis of the genre. Panelists and authors were then invited to dinner by ICC.
Edmundo Paz Soldán also brought autographed copies of his books, selling 14 copies of his latest short story collection La vía del futuro (Oct. 20, 2021) and nine pounds of other works.
For more information about the symposium, visit their website.