Chthulucene Cities: Using Latin American Speculative Fiction to Think Through Environmental Governance

Abstract (English)

Donna Haraway proposed the Chthulucene as an a conceptual tool for thinking beyond the Anthropocene framework--premised on linear progressive time and a singular humanity-- which has influenced popular imaginaries and shaped urban planning programs originating in the Global North, such as Climate Ready Cities. The Chthulucene refers to the irruption of biotic and abiotic forces of the planet, destabilizing illusions of human control. Working with these forces, indifferent to our survival, requires developing new modes of perception and engagement. My current project is an ethnographic history of environmental governance in 20th century Mexico, which traces the evolution of technoscientific tools for administering environmental aspects of urban growth. Part of this project draws inspiration from a new wave of speculative fiction reflecting on life in Latin American cities, where the everyday resembles dystopias imagined as humanity´s common future by mainstream scifi from the Global North. Authors like Gabriela Damian, Rita Indiana, Fernanda Trías, Andrea Chapela, and Luis Carlos Barragan weave innovative narratives of urban re-worlding that engage with the destructive and generative chthonic forces, such as earthquakes, floods and volcanic eruptions, alongside colonial extraction. The cataclysms that punctuate these narratives destroy infrastructures and fragment social forms, but also surface traces of entangled pasts that call into question the “liberal horizon” that animates environmental governance discourse, portraying catastrophe as a future event. Engaging with these narratives of Chthulucene cities enables me to take critical distance from imaginaries of the “real” and the “possible” embedded in late liberal environmental governance as a form of technoscientific worldmaking.