Satirical allegory and symbolic revenge: humour and speculative fiction in contemporary Brazilian cinema

In Other Worlds—SF and the Human Imagination

The Social Life of Speculation Gabriella Friedman (bio) Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic. By Michelle D. Commander. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 296 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $25.95 (paper). Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction. By Sami Schalk. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 192 pages. $89.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism. By Shelley Streeby. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 168 pages. $85.00 (cloth). $18.95 (paper). Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times. By Aimee Bahng. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 248 pages. $94.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). In the past two decades, scholarly and popular interest in speculative fiction has surged. Groundbreaking anthologies like Sheree Renée Thomas's Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and Grace Dillon's Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012), as well as scholarship by Ramón Saldívar, Curtis Marez, Dillon, André M. Carrington, Donna Haraway, and others, deploy speculative fiction to address the interconnected histories and current realities of racism, heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. The four books under review here showcase speculative fiction studies (or perhaps, more accurately, "speculative studies") as an emerging, interdisciplinary field engaging many of the key analytics of American studies: racialization, settler colonialism, imperialism, climate change, diaspora, (dis)ability, and the transnational turn. Our current scholarly moment is marked by a turn not only to nonrealist literature but to speculation in all its multitudinous forms. As Michelle D. Commander, Sami Schalk, Shelley Streeby, and Aimee Bahng illustrate, speculation evokes an extrapolative practice that articulates the repercussions of urgent global [End Page 205] problems, a set of political tactics that shape new worlds through activism, and an imaginative strategy that etches unexpected ways to organize social life. Of course, science fiction has an established presence in academe. The prominent journals Extrapolation and Science Fiction Studies were founded in 1959 and 1973, respectively, and the history of science fiction scholarship dates back even further. The editors of Science Fiction Studies, for example, maintain a chronological bibliography that lists Johannes Kepler's "Notes" from Somnium: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy (1634) as an early work of science fiction criticism.1 Since then, scholars have painstakingly historicized, contextualized, and debated the parameters and stakes of the genre. Some, like Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, Samuel Delany, and Joanna Russ, highlight science fiction's potential to unsettle hegemonic structures of power; others, such as John Rieder and Patricia Kerslake, analyze the colonial logics texturing the genre. But speculative fiction studies, though it overlaps with scholarship on science fiction, is a different animal: broader, more capacious, less concerned with technical literary and generic questions. While some have tried to demarcate the bounds of speculative fiction—with Robert Heinlein and Margaret Atwood proposing the most famous definitions—others find the ambiguity of the term attractive.2 In Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times, Bahng is "less interested in literary taxonomies than in the various modalities of writing and reading that can alter relations between writer and reader, shift ways of thinking, and produce different kinds of subjects"; she sees potential in speculative fiction's "promiscuity and disregard for the proper" (13, 16). Similarly, Streeby embraces the term speculative fiction in Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism "because it is less defined by boundary-making around the word 'science,' stretching to encompass related modes such as fantasy and horror, forms of knowledge in excess of white Western science, and more work authored by women and people of color" (20). In Commander's Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic, Afro-Atlantic speculation exceeds science fiction, or even Afro-futurism, which Commander regards as only one "subgenre of Afro-speculation of the twentieth and twenty-first century that is concerned with the artistic reimagining of the function of science and technology in the construction of utopic black futures" (6). Schalk's Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis) ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction...

156 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces Conference. On 5-7 December 2019, the Speculative Texts and Media Research Group, based at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center and headed by Pawe³ Frelik, held its first international conference. “Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces” began with a Thursday evening screening of Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce, 2015) that was introduced by Mark Bould. It continued on Friday and Saturday, offering eighteen sessions and two keynote lectures devoted to aesthetics and sense perception in a variety of works of sf (understood broadly). Taking place at a similar time of the year as 2018’s “Worlding SF” conference in Graz, “Senses” reunited many of the last year’s participants and offered another proof that early December is a good time for a midsize sf-related scholarly event. The topic proved specific enough to allow for a clear thematic consistency but also invited a broad range of perspectives. The presentations addressed the call to reclaim the place of the sensory in science-fiction cultures and called attention to the specificity of sf aesthetics across different media and lesser acknowledged sense perceptions. The presentations engaged with sight and sound but also other senses, including smell, touch, and taste. Topics included investigations of the aesthetic overlap between science fiction in representations of Mars and narratives of virality, the futurity of contemporary music videos, the role of aesthetics in representing asexuality, the connection between the culture of drug use and the development of sf literature, Lo-Fi Sci-Fi aesthetics in contemporary Brazilian cinema, and a cross-media aesthetic analysis of adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale. Of note was a stream of panels entitled “Ab-Sense: Sensation, Sense-Making, and the Absent in Science Fiction,” co-organized with the London Science Fiction Research Community and headed by Francis Gene-Rowe. The panels successfully managed to open up the topic of the conference even further by exploring various homonyms of “sense” while still staying close to the tenor of the event. Both keynote lectures were highlights. Coming from two distinct sensibilities and offering very different theoretical perspectives, both managed perfectly to take advantage of the keynote format. Amy Butt’s talk about the spaces of science fiction was richly rooted in her experience as an architect and impressive in its textual scope, theoretical relevance, and—last but not least—the beautiful economy of her presentation slides. Erik Steinskog’s appeal to conceptualize science-fictionality in aural rather than visual terms, illustrated by a number of examples ranging from Sun Ra to CopperWire’s Earthbound and clipping’s Splendor and Misery, to Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, was passionate, intellectually stimulating, and ambitious in its aim to splice together various theoretical perspectives. Largely due to the high quality of the contributions, the conference proved to be informative, inspiring, and aesthetically pleasing. A full program of the event is available at .—Filip Boratyn, University of Warsaw, Poland (Re)Thinking Earth: From Representations of Nature to Climate Change Fiction, 22-23 April 2020 in the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon. ...

156 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces Conference. On 5-7 December 2019, the Speculative Texts and Media Research Group, based at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center and headed by Pawe³ Frelik, held its first international conference. “Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces” began with a Thursday evening screening of Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce, 2015) that was introduced by Mark Bould. It continued on Friday and Saturday, offering eighteen sessions and two keynote lectures devoted to aesthetics and sense perception in a variety of works of sf (understood broadly). Taking place at a similar time of the year as 2018’s “Worlding SF” conference in Graz, “Senses” reunited many of the last year’s participants and offered another proof that early December is a good time for a midsize sf-related scholarly event. The topic proved specific enough to allow for a clear thematic consistency but also invited a broad range of perspectives. The presentations addressed the call to reclaim the place of the sensory in science-fiction cultures and called attention to the specificity of sf aesthetics across different media and lesser acknowledged sense perceptions. The presentations engaged with sight and sound but also other senses, including smell, touch, and taste. Topics included investigations of the aesthetic overlap between science fiction in representations of Mars and narratives of virality, the futurity of contemporary music videos, the role of aesthetics in representing asexuality, the connection between the culture of drug use and the development of sf literature, Lo-Fi Sci-Fi aesthetics in contemporary Brazilian cinema, and a cross-media aesthetic analysis of adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale. Of note was a stream of panels entitled “Ab-Sense: Sensation, Sense-Making, and the Absent in Science Fiction,” co-organized with the London Science Fiction Research Community and headed by Francis Gene-Rowe. The panels successfully managed to open up the topic of the conference even further by exploring various homonyms of “sense” while still staying close to the tenor of the event. Both keynote lectures were highlights. Coming from two distinct sensibilities and offering very different theoretical perspectives, both managed perfectly to take advantage of the keynote format. Amy Butt’s talk about the spaces of science fiction was richly rooted in her experience as an architect and impressive in its textual scope, theoretical relevance, and—last but not least—the beautiful economy of her presentation slides. Erik Steinskog’s appeal to conceptualize science-fictionality in aural rather than visual terms, illustrated by a number of examples ranging from Sun Ra to CopperWire’s Earthbound and clipping’s Splendor and Misery, to Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, was passionate, intellectually stimulating, and ambitious in its aim to splice together various theoretical perspectives. Largely due to the high quality of the contributions, the conference proved to be informative, inspiring, and aesthetically pleasing. A full program of the event is available at .—Filip Boratyn, University of Warsaw, Poland (Re)Thinking Earth: From Representations of Nature to Climate Change Fiction, 22-23 April 2020 in the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon. 157 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Earth Day was first celebrated in the United States on 22 April 1970. It now mobilizes citizens and communities worldwide, representing the first massive expression of public concern with the ecological sustainability of our planet and launching the modern global environmental movement. As much of the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020, our symposium, “(Re)thinking Earth,” aims to bring together plural perspectives under the collaborative interdisciplinary model of the environmental humanities. We invite papers on a range of topics that may include nature writing over time and space, global voices in ecopoetics, affect and ecocriticism, climate change in contemporary fiction, reimagined pastoral landscapes, space and scale in environmental writing, agro-ecological storytelling, the anthropocene, representations of environmental science in literature and film, the climate change crisis in visual culture, ecomedia and environmental science, climate change in utopian and dystopian literature, postcolonial and indigenous representations of environmental collapses, sf/fantasy and environmental crises, film and televisual representations of climate change, environmental ethics, and environmental education/literacy. Submit a 250-word...

156 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) The Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces Conference. On 5-7 December 2019, the Speculative Texts and Media Research Group, based at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center and headed by Pawe³ Frelik, held its first international conference. “Senses of Science Fiction: Visions, Sounds, Spaces” began with a Thursday evening screening of Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce, 2015) that was introduced by Mark Bould. It continued on Friday and Saturday, offering eighteen sessions and two keynote lectures devoted to aesthetics and sense perception in a variety of works of sf (understood broadly). Taking place at a similar time of the year as 2018’s “Worlding SF” conference in Graz, “Senses” reunited many of the last year’s participants and offered another proof that early December is a good time for a midsize sf-related scholarly event. The topic proved specific enough to allow for a clear thematic consistency but also invited a broad range of perspectives. The presentations addressed the call to reclaim the place of the sensory in science-fiction cultures and called attention to the specificity of sf aesthetics across different media and lesser acknowledged sense perceptions. The presentations engaged with sight and sound but also other senses, including smell, touch, and taste. Topics included investigations of the aesthetic overlap between science fiction in representations of Mars and narratives of virality, the futurity of contemporary music videos, the role of aesthetics in representing asexuality, the connection between the culture of drug use and the development of sf literature, Lo-Fi Sci-Fi aesthetics in contemporary Brazilian cinema, and a cross-media aesthetic analysis of adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale. Of note was a stream of panels entitled “Ab-Sense: Sensation, Sense-Making, and the Absent in Science Fiction,” co-organized with the London Science Fiction Research Community and headed by Francis Gene-Rowe. The panels successfully managed to open up the topic of the conference even further by exploring various homonyms of “sense” while still staying close to the tenor of the event. Both keynote lectures were highlights. Coming from two distinct sensibilities and offering very different theoretical perspectives, both managed perfectly to take advantage of the keynote format. Amy Butt’s talk about the spaces of science fiction was richly rooted in her experience as an architect and impressive in its textual scope, theoretical relevance, and—last but not least—the beautiful economy of her presentation slides. Erik Steinskog’s appeal to conceptualize science-fictionality in aural rather than visual terms, illustrated by a number of examples ranging from Sun Ra to CopperWire’s Earthbound and clipping’s Splendor and Misery, to Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, was passionate, intellectually stimulating, and ambitious in its aim to splice together various theoretical perspectives. Largely due to the high quality of the contributions, the conference proved to be informative, inspiring, and aesthetically pleasing. A full program of the event is available at .—Filip Boratyn, University of Warsaw, Poland (Re)Thinking Earth: From Representations of Nature to Climate Change Fiction, 22-23 April 2020 in the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon. ...

At first glance, contemporary Brazilian cinema seems to be the byproduct of a mid-1990s renaissance in national film production. Accordingly, to better understand contemporary Brazilian cinema, it is advisable to recall the Brazilian film industry’s situation in the 1980s. An unsteady period followed by a major decline in national film production in the late-1980s and early-1990s, these were years illustrated by the dismantling of Embrafilme (Empresa Brasileira de Filmes), culminating in the complete eradication of the state-run film production and distribution company in March 1990. Around 1993–1994, however, a renaissance of Brazilian cinema occurred, in terms of film production and ticket sales, which has been called “Cinema da Retomada.” A cinematic phenomenon, fundamentally fueled by the industry’s access to new sources of state funding, the Retomada was predominately brought about by fiscal exemptions allowed by the Audiovisual Law (Lei do Audiovisual), as well as by grants such as the “Prêmio Resgate do Cinema Brasileiro,” coming from the Ministry of Culture. Later, the Rouanet Law (Lei Rouanet) strengthened the funding not only for film, but for cultural projects and events as a whole. Likewise, municipal and state laws promoting fiscal exemptions also had a fundamental role in the recovery of film production in the country. All these laws allowed the private initiative to redirect funds from taxes to film production. This article will provide a basic bibliography of the aforementioned topics, addressing the economic, sociological, and aesthetic issues related to contemporary Brazilian cinema.

Death and the “Paradice within” in Paradise Lost and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake Lara Dodds In their introduction to Milton in Popular Culture, Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory Semenza suggest that it is the sublimity of Paradise Lost that accounts for Milton’s influence on fantasy and science fiction. Writers of science fiction (SF) have been inspired by the epic’s “otherwordly settings, grand conflicts of good and evil, heroes who determine the fate of their worlds, space travel, warfare, [and] futuristic visions.”1 Science fiction has become the generic repository for the marvels and wonders that were once the domain of the epic.2 In addition to the sublime, however, there is a second line of descent from Milton’s Paradise Lost to contemporary SF. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the first science fictional rewriting of Paradise Lost, focuses not on the otherworldly spectacle of Paradise Lost but on the ethical dilemmas of creation.3 As early as the seventeenth century, proto-science fictional works became vehicles for rethinking the myth of the Fall, and SF continues to offer a generic home for the rewriting of the Fall myth.4 In this essay I show how Margaret Atwood’s 2003 dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake, fits into this tradition. Milton’s version of the [End Page 115] myth of the Fall has been definitive for English-language literature, yet the epic’s substantial legacy in science fiction suggests that Paradise Lost has also provided material for the rewriting of this myth in new forms and to alternate ends. Oryx and Crake is the eleventh novel by the prolific and award-winning Canadian author Margaret Atwood, and her third that might be labeled science fiction. Oryx and Crake, like Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, uses the estranging techniques characteristic of SF to diagnose and critique the dangers of the contemporary political climate.5 In each case, Atwood creates a near-future fictional world in which the consequences of current cultural and technological trends—religious fundamentalism and nuclear radiation in The Handmaid’s Tale, human-made climate change in Oryx and Crake—can be explored through extrapolation. Atwood is not primarily a genre author, and she has frequently distanced her work from science fiction, preferring the term “speculative fiction.” Atwood distinguishes between the two based upon the degree of invention that each permits. Speculative fiction, she maintains, includes no impossibilities, “no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians.” Atwood believes that her novels differ from science fiction because they invent “nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent.” Atwood therefore defines Oryx and Crake as an extended game of what if: “what if we continue on the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope?”6 As I demonstrate in this essay, Oryx and Crake explores the possibility of environmental catastrophe—including the collapse of human civilization and its potential for rebirth—through an extensive engagement with the Fall myth, which is also a story of origins and of catastrophe. Previous to Oryx and Crake, Atwood’s most prominent allusion to Milton’s poetry appears in The Handmaid’s Tale, where Milton’s reflection on the parable of the talents in “When I consider how my light is spent” becomes part of the protagonist’s indoctrination into coerced reproductive labor.7 Milton’s poem (and by extension Milton) is aligned with the oppressive patriarchal authority that the novel details so terrifyingly: “They also serve who only [End Page 116] stand and wait, said Aunt Lydia. She made us memorize it. She also said, Not all of you will make it through. Some of you will fall on dry ground or thorns. Some of you are shallow-rooted.”8 Offred remembers the line from Milton’s sonnet, which is more threat than promise, during her ordeal as a Handmaid, and the allusion initiates the novel’s nuanced exploration of the possibilities of passive and active resistance. In Oryx and Crake Milton’s poetry appears in a more positive context, but here, also, a key line from the Miltonic canon signals Atwood’s reworking of some of Milton’s most characteristic concerns. Scholars have...

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The term “speculative fiction” has three historically located meanings: a subgenre of science fiction that deals with human rather than technological problems, a genre distinct from and opposite to science fiction in its exclusive focus on possible futures, and a super category for all genres that deliberately depart from imitating “consensus reality” of everyday experience. In this latter sense, speculative fiction includes fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but also their derivatives, hybrids, and cognate genres like the gothic, dystopia, weird fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, ghost stories, superhero tales, alternate history, steampunk, slipstream, magic realism, fractured fairy tales, and more. Rather than seeking a rigorous definition, a better approach is to theorize “speculative fiction” as a term whose semantic register has continued to expand. While “speculative fiction” was initially proposed as a name of a subgenre of science fiction, the term has recently been used in reference to a meta-generic fuzzy set supercategory—one defined not by clear boundaries but by resemblance to prototypical examples—and a field of cultural production. Like other cultural fields, speculative fiction is a domain of activity that exists not merely through texts but through their production and reception in multiple contexts. The field of speculative fiction groups together extremely diverse forms of non-mimetic fiction operating across different media for the purpose of reflecting on their cultural role, especially as opposed to the work performed by mimetic, or realist narratives. The fuzzy set field understanding of speculative fiction arose in response to the need for a blanket term for a broad range of narrative forms that subvert the post-Enlightenment mindset: one that had long excluded from “Literature” stories that departed from consensus reality or embraced a different version of reality than the empirical-materialist one. Situated against the claims of this paradigm, speculative fiction emerges as a tool to dismantle the traditional Western cultural bias in favor of literature imitating reality, and as a quest for the recovery of the sense of awe and wonder. Some of the forces that contributed to the rise of speculative fiction include accelerating genre hybridization that balkanized the field previously mapped with a few large generic categories; the expansion of the global literary landscape brought about by mainstream culture’s increasing acceptance of non-mimetic genres; the proliferation of indigenous, minority, and postcolonial narrative forms that subvert dominant Western notions of the real; and the need for new conceptual categories to accommodate diverse and hybridic types of storytelling that oppose a stifling vision of reality imposed by exploitative global capitalism. An inherently plural category, speculative fiction is a mode of thought-experimenting that includes narratives addressed to young people and adults and operates in a variety of formats. The term accommodates the non-mimetic genres of Western but also non-Western and indigenous literatures—especially stories narrated from the minority or alternative perspective. In all these ways, speculative fiction represents a global reaction of human creative imagination struggling to envision a possible future at the time of a major transition from local to global humanity.

The article is devoted to theoretical exploration of modern hybrid speculative fiction. This term comprises a huge body of creative works which are written at the intersection of genres related to speculative prose. On the one hand, hybrid speculative fiction is rooted in post-modern epoch, on the other hand, it returns to the principles of hybrid genre genesis, which flourished at the beginning of the 20th century. The tendency to genre eclecticism is a common feature of a great number of modern creative works and seems to be an efficient way out of conceptual crisis emerged in speculative fiction at the close of the 20th century, that is why the future development of speculative fiction is expected to be closely connected with the expansion of hybrid genre forms. The overall goal of the article is to scientifically comprehend hybrid genres in modern speculative fiction of the United States and Russia. The investigation of hybrid speculative fiction as a genre and cultural phenomenon leads to setting three goals. Firstly, it is necessary to determine genre taxonomy of such genres of traditional speculative fiction as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Secondly, it is necessary to investigate genre-forming models, which underlie modern hybrid works. Thirdly, it is important to understand common features of the works of hybrid speculative fiction. The study of the genre interaction in modern speculative fiction is based on the descriptive and functional methods. The comparison of Russian and American works involves the use of comparative, typological and cultural-historical methods. Using the genre blocks common for both literary criticism, readers’ expectations and publishing practice, it is possible to identify such genre-forming models of hybrid speculative fiction, as: science fiction+fantasy; science fiction+horror; fantasy+historical novel; fantasy+postmodernist novel. It is also possible to sum up such common features of the works of hybrid speculative fiction, as: irrational world outlook; distortion of the very structural basis of traditional science fiction; shift of sociocultural model of world outlook; polyphonic principle of narration and potentially an endless unravelling of the plot without a pronounced climax; postclassical narrative model; the complexity of storyline. To conclude, modern hybrid speculative fiction can be treated as a separate literary and sociocultural phenomenon in the literature of the U.S. and Russia. It destroys inner canons of traditional science fiction, it is deeply influenced by post-modern cultural paradigm, and could be described as a significant cultural movement, which is aligned with demands and values of modern society.

SUMMARYAnthropology and science fiction are interlinked traditions of knowledge production and overlap in several different ways, not least by the fact that each of these practices was shaped by the colonial encounter. This afterword to the special section “The Ordinariness of Cross‐Time Relations: Anthropology, Literature, and the Science Fictional” addresses those linkages and suggests that anthropology as a discipline stands to gain from an engagement with speculative and science fiction, for instance, through a questioning of ethnographic realism. [science fiction, speculative fiction, social theory, colonialism, ethnographic realism]

Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) straddles various genres typically shunted off into the category 'science fiction' or 'speculative fiction'. Partly a dystopia, partly an apocalyptic text, and partly, in her own words, 'an attempt at autobiography,' the novel is difficult to classify. Indeed, the novel sparked disappointment and confusion upon its initial publication in 1974, with critics taking Lessing to task for exchanging the realist rigor of her earlier works for vague mysticism, and for producing a confusing work that alienated the reader. In fact, to call it a novel at all is something of a contradiction. Speculative fictions do not address the new; they address the future - the 'proleptic analepse of future history,' in the words of Bernard Duyfhuizen. And yet in the twentieth century we have embraced a number of future histories - from Zamiatin's We (1924) to Orwell's 1984 (1948) to Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1963) to the experimental postmodern fictions of J. G. Ballard - as landmark novels. At the simplest level, these texts offer a critique of how we live and who we are now. Though they may not exactly be novels in the technical generic sense, we recognize that they speak in and to the present, if not of it.

In addition to carnival, soccer, and samba, two long-standing myths have contributed to the unification of Brazil’s heterogeneous population. The first revolves around the idea of racial democracy, that is to say, that all races are equally considered in a democratic nation. First associated with the work of sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), the term “racial democracy” later became a core pillar of the Brazilian state. 1 Closely related to the first myth, the second is the notion of Brazil as a country that has successfully integrated people of different ethnicities and nationalities, a view recently voiced by American investor James Dale Davidson (2012), who writes, “Brazil is a true melting pot of many cultures from different races and backgrounds” (259). Nonetheless, historians of Brazilian culture have called attention to the ideologies that supported racism in Brazil from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the 1940s. 2 Scholarship on Brazilian cinema and culture has investigated the representation of the country’s racial dynamic. For instance, Robert Stam’s seminal (1997) Tropical Multiculturalism is devoted to examining the ways in which Euro- and Afro-Brazilians and indigenous people have been represented throughout Brazilian film history (20).KeywordsCommunist PartyEuropean ImmigrantJewish ImmigrantCommunist RevolutionEastern European ImmigrantThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Reviewed by: Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction by Elizabeth M. Ginway Kathryn Houston Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction. By Elizabeth M. Ginway, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2020, p. 247, $34.95. In Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead, M. Elizabeth Ginway reads speculative fiction from Mexico and Brazil in relation to relevant sociohistorical, political, and economic contexts of these two highly industrialized Latin American countries. In a reading of a host of notable speculative texts, the analysis spans over a century, from the late 1800s up to the present day. Ginway breathes new life into the theme of the body in literature by attending to the treatment of speculative bodies (cyborgs, zombies, vampires, etc.) in non-realist modes such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The introduction sets out to distinguish between Anglo and Hispanic speculative fiction and outlines how the body signifies in Mexican and Brazilian letters. First, she describes how gender and sexuality will be analyzed throughout the monograph, positioning that nontraditional sexualities stand as a "state between or beyond the genders" (2). She then reads the fictional body as metaphor for the nation-state in political and industrial flux, with zombies and vampires "embody[ing] the paradox of a present haunted by an embodied past" (2). The book opens with a chapter on "Gendered Cyborgs", which introduces Bolívar Echeverría's "baroque ethos"—a concept that acts as a theoretical tenet throughout the monograph—to explain how speculative fictions resist capitalism while still being a product of it. Ginway identifies different corporeal and mechanical representations of the female body and female cyborg, exploring the Latin American posthuman and "new ways of imagining the body politic" (69). Chapter Two, "The Baroque Ethos, Antropofagia, and Queer Sexualities," then broaches a century's worth of speculative fiction, analyzing noncanonical texts from both Mexico and Brazil. She engages with Echeverría's theory of codigofagia—survival strategies from the colonial period that "reformulated social and cultural hierarchies" (71)—which builds upon a reworking of the concept of antropofagia—the repurposing of "culture and tools of the colonizer in order to produce original art and expression" (13). Through these two concepts, Ginway argues that baroque and non-linear representations of queer bodies in works of speculative fiction re-imagine forms of gender that "craft new tales of nation and community" (106), thus resisting traditional divisions of gender, race, and sexuality. Shifting from machine and queer bodies to the undead, Chapter Three analyzes zombies as the "embodiment of fear and trauma," in imagined apocalyptic scenarios of the 21st century which "presage economic, political, or social chaos" (107). She returns to the "baroque ethos" to explain the virality of capitalism and how it infects both dominant and subaltern classes, applying Roberto Esposito's theories of immunity and the body [End Page 364] politic. In Chapter Four, Ginway contextualizes the history of vampire narratives, the genres of the gothic and the monstrous, and the figure of the vampire in the literature of Mexico and Brazil. She describes the defensive or immunological response towards foreign invaders in vampire literature, accounts for the challenges towards a patriarchal order, and identifies a new vampire figure who re-configures communities to "reverse colonization and resistance" (154). A point of contention may arise from the way in which queer bodies are positioned on par with "cyborgs" and "zombified and vampire bodies" (167). The latter mythical bodies are powerful metaphors for temporal and social periods of change, yet locating the queer body next to those of monsters and machines might be misunderstood as a conflation of these real and metaphorical bodies. Perhaps analogously, the topic of sexuality as it relates to gender studies is well developed, but the inclusion of more queer theory would have complemented Ginway's thorough and insightful readings of the body in Mexican and Brazilian speculative fiction. Finally, despite the care with which theoretical terms are explained, the text does not provide a clear definition of speculative fiction. Although Ginway initially defines speculative fiction as a more general category than science fiction, which "includes fantasy and horror" (1), any further...