The Routledge Handbook of Latinx Visions - Science Fiction, Fantasy, Gothic, and Horror

The Routledge Handbook of Latinx Visions captures the extraordinary boom in Latinx speculative texts from the early 2010s through the mid-2020s, a creative explosion rivaling the Latin American literary Boom of the 1960s and 1970s. This unique aesthetic genre continuously expands its boundaries, embracing new voices, geographies, and themes in response to world-altering the global pandemic, racialized violence, anti-immigrant rhetoric, apocalyptic climate disasters, rising fascism, and state-sanctioned oppression. These transformative events have reshaped contemporary consciousness, making the speculative turn in Latinx cultural production both urgent and necessary as artists reimagine existence beyond oppressive realities. The handbook critically theorizes, archives, and takes stock of this dynamic speculative corpus while charting pathways for future scholarly inquiry. It explores how Latinx cultural producers speculate―contemplating, radically envisioning, and “hallucinating” alternative futures interlaced with historical and present conditions. Examining new texts, subgenres, critical frameworks, and innovative approaches, the handbook maps the ever-growing terrain of Latinx speculative studies, documenting this pivotal cultural moment while encouraging scholarship that generates fresh insights for understanding how marginalized communities imagine liberation, resistance, and transformation through speculative storytelling. Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this handbook will interest scholars and enthusiasts of literary and cultural studies, Latinx studies, science fiction studies, Latin American literature, and post-colonial studies.