Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination

Combining in innovative ways the tools and approaches of postcolonial and popular culture studies as well as comparative literary analysis, this is an ambitious, interdisciplinary study that develops - across several related discursive sites - an argument about the centrality of time travel in the Latin American and Caribbean imagination.

"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 Blood Suckers; and García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch. Reading the manuscript has inspired me to teach some of this material differently. A well respected book in this subfield and others, as its methods of cultural critique are unquestionably unique." - Ignacio López-Calvo, Professor of Latin American Literature, Chair of the World Cultures Graduate Group, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of California, Merced

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