The Cyborg Caribbean: Techno-Dominance in Twenty-First-Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction by Samuel Ginsburg (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• The Cyborg Caribbean: Techno-Dominance in Twenty-First-Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction by Samuel Ginsburg
• Michael Niblett (bio)

The Cyborg Caribbean: Techno-Dominance in Twenty-First-Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction
By Samuel Ginsburg. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2023. Pp. 170.

Recent years have seen a remarkable surge in speculative fiction from the Caribbean. This is not without precedent, of course. The unfathomable violence of the plantation complex and the brutal estrangements of colonial society have long pushed Caribbean authors toward fabular, allegorical, and irrealist forms of representation, from the “marvellous realism” of Alejo Carpentier or Jacques-Stéphen Alexis, for example, to the genre-defying novels of Wilson Harris or Simone Schwarz-Bart. But since the turn of the century, a rich seam of explicitly science fiction work has appeared by writers as diverse as Karen Lord, Stephanie Saulter, Rita Indiana, Tobias S. Buckell, Curdella Forbes, Cadwell Turnbull, Kacen Callender, Yoss, and Rafael Acevedo. Much of this work is concerned with using the conventions, tropes, and devices of science fiction to register and challenge the racism, classism, sexism, and ecocide on which the modern capitalist world-system is founded. But why use science fiction to this end, and why now?

A version of this question animates Samuel Ginsburg’s timely and important study, The Cyborg Caribbean. Focusing specifically on technology’s role in colonial and imperial domination, Ginsburg analyzes twenty-first-century science fiction narratives from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico to “better understand the cultural, political, and rhetorical legacies of techno-dominance and resistance” (p. 4). Science fiction has come to prominence as a means to address such issues, suggests Ginsburg, not only because it is generically well suited to exploring the relationship between technology and power but also because over the last decade or so “the line between real life and science fiction in the Caribbean” has become ever more blurred (p. 5). Ginsburg’s examples range from rumors of weaponized supersonic devices being used against U.S. embassy staff in Havana to the invasion of Puerto Rico by digital currency investors hoping to turn the island into a “crypto utopia” in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Add to this the impact of climate breakdown and the apocalyptic scenarios it threatens, and it becomes clear why, in the words of Dominican science fiction writer Odilius Vlak, “it is the genres of science fiction and fantasy that have the resources to contend with our reality” (quoted in Ginsburg, p. 6).

The four central chapters of The Cyborg Caribbean each address the history, legacy, and literary representation of a different technology: electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), nuclear weapons, space travel, and digital avatars. In chapter 1, Ginsburg examines texts by Pedro Cabiya, Alexandra Pagán Vélez, and Vagabond Beaumont to explore the use and abuse of ECT [End Page 1006] in the Caribbean. The references to ECT in these fictions function to connect the historical manipulation of medical and scientific discourse by colonial regimes to the violent reconfiguration of racial, sexual, and class oppressions in our own crisis-wracked late capitalist moment. Chapter 2 turns to nuclear technology, investigating not only its spectacular, explosively destructive power but also the “structural and social changes” that can occur “within a techno-colonial system built on the threat of nuclear war” (p. 49). Opening with a salutary analysis of the political and symbolic significance of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ginsburg then offers a series of incisive close readings of works by Rey Emmanuel Andújar, Yasmín Silvia Portales, and Erick Mota. Each of these authors dramatizes the devastating impact of nuclear technology on bodies and landscapes, while simultaneously challenging the damage done by the political rhetoric surrounding nuclear weapons.

In chapter 3, Ginsburg’s focus on space travel allows him to explore how the figure of the alien has been used to question the historical treatment of those labeled as nonhuman. In fictions such as Haris Durrani’s Champollion’s Foot (2017) and Yoss’s Condonautas (2013), new understandings of interstellar travel and alien contact are proposed that contest the colonizing and nationalist rhetoric that is often used to celebrate...