Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination (PDF)

RUDYARD J. ALCOCER Assistant Professor of Spanish at Georgia State University, USA.

"In this insightful text, Rudyard J. Alcocer taps into time travel as a means of exploring the relationship between the past, present, and future of Latin America. Authors that portray time travel recognize that, in order to move forward, they must if not resolve at least address colonial history. Thus Alcocer's careful reading illuminates how Latin American authors explore not only alternate perceptions of the colonial past, but also their dreams for the future of their countries.This book will be of great interest to scholars of Latin American literary and cultural production." - Kimberle S. López, University of New Mexico and author of Latin American Novels of the Conquest: Reinventing the New World

"As in his previous book, Narrative Mutations, Rudyard J. Alcocer leads the way to the future of interdisciplinary studies. In this book, he leads readers into the future itself and into new visions of the past through very provocative reflections on time travel in recent Latin American literature, film, and popular culture. In Latin America, as Alcocer demonstrates, postcoloniality remains a fragile vantage point menaced by the traumas of the past - the exploitation and genocide of African and indigenous peoples. Readers are reminded that literature and art always have had the ability to cross borders of time and memory, and we learn, through the book's treatment of the cultural and political imagination, that the futurity of the past obtains upon the present." - Michael Janis, Associate Professor of English, Morehouse College

"This interdisciplinary study belongs within the fields of cultural studies and comparative literature, and deals with the topic of time travel in cultural production (regular literature, children's literature, film, television shows, etc.) of the Americas. Alcocer's study would be an outstanding tool to analyze a number of novels, such as Graciela Limón's Erased Faces; Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztek; Mario Acevedo's X-Rated