Science Fusion draws on new materialist theory to analyze the relationship between science and literature in contemporary works of fiction, poetry, and theater from Mexico. In this deft new study, Brian Chandler examines how a range of contemporary Mexican writers “fuse” science and literature in their work to rethink what it means to be human in an age of climate change, mass extinctions, interpersonal violence, femicide, and social injustice. The authors under consideration here—including Alberto Blanco, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, Sabina Berman, Maricela Guerrero, and Elisa Díaz Castelo—challenge traditional divisions that separate human from nonhuman, subject from object, culture from nature. Using science and literature to engage topics in biopolitics, historiography, metaphysics, ethics, and ecological crisis in the age of the Anthropocene, works of science fusion offer fresh perspectives to address present-day sociocultural and environmental issues.
A Note on Translations
Introduction: Entangling Science, Literature, and Culture in Mexico
1 Entangled Matter: The Science Poetry of Alberto Blanco
2 Quantum Mechanics, History, and the Question of Scale in Volpi’s En busca de Klingsor
3 Automatons, Androids, and Androcentrism in Padilla’s El androide y otras quimeras
4 A Science of Good and Evil: Sabina Berman’s Darwinian Ethical Turn
5 In Search of a New Language: Autopoiesis and the Anthropocene in Maricela Guerrero’s El sueño de toda célula
6 Dimensions of Embodied Experience: Space and Time in Elisa Díaz Castelo’s Principia
Conclusions: Knowing and Belonging in an Entangled Universe
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index