What is it about?

This text treats a specific Doctor Who storyline, The Aztecs (1964), as a catalyst for questioning Enlightenment-era notions of rationality, progress, and technologic advancement in relation to colonial constructions of non-European societies as crude, static, and futureless. Moreover, it looks at the role geography and travel (and time travel) have played in reifying Modernity as a series of traceable steps leading from the contemporary to the primitive. Additionally, postcolonial speculative fiction is formulated as a testing ground to interrogate past and current modes of imperialism, resist hegemonic social structures, and imagine egalitarian and alternative futures. In this regard, the fiction of Chicanx sci-fi writer Ernest Hogan is examined showcasing the obligations and complexities reclaiming pre-colonial or indigenous pasts stipulate. While such returns may act as counternarratives and recuperations of erased histories and genocidal traumas, they also need to be undertaken with extreme criticality and intense self-reflexivity. Lastly, this text attempts to define what a Chicanx technologic tradition might look like and how the legitimization of such a tradition could transform what and who gets to constitute and embody the future.

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This page is a summary of: A Possible Future Return to the Past, Somatechnics, March 2017, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/soma.2017.0206.
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