History’s return: distopic and postapocaliptic Argentinian narratives during the first quarter of the 21st Century

Abstract

The emergence of dystopian narratives in Latin America in general, and in Argentina in particular, represents a form of cultural diagnosis that seems to have continued a tradition started in the late 1980s, in which literature divorced itself from historical novel. However, both the problems of future history and temporality are central to all these narratives. In this paper, I analyze the extent to which science fiction projections produced in the last thirty years (with novels such as El sistema de las estrellas, La segunda lengua materna, etc) cannot help but reflect on historical temporality and why this reflection is part of a larger political, historiographical, and philosophical debate. Here, I explore the nature of the tensions between utopian thought and pessimistic tendencies about the historical future in the Argentine cultural field, how they have evolved, and what they mean from a cultural and political perspective.