Paper for the 2024 Annual Conference of the Science Fiction Research Association
Tartu (Estonia), Mayo 7-11.
Panel: What’s in a name: from Afrofuturism to Prietopunk
Chair: Patrick Brock (University of Oslo)
Presenters: Erick J. Mota, Aníbal Hernández Medina, Lu Ain-Zaila and Yasmín S. Portales-Machado

Abstract:
This paper discusses the strategies used by Erick Mota in his Habana Underguater (2010) to process the economic and political effects of the Berlin Wall fall (1989) on the collective Cuban psyche, positing that this crisis affected the idea of national unity and expectations of collective progress, and its association with European ideals of modernity and implicit social whitening. Mota’s Underguater reflects the post-crisis Cuban atmosphere of political uncertainty, climate collapse, and survival mentality through a postapocalyptic world where the national state project has completely fallen apart and the hegemony of European cultural supremacy with it. In the middle of this, he imagines the emergence of more diverse familiar and community structures that reknit the social fabric by recognizing Cuba’s African cultural roots and its impact on the population’s cultural, political, and sentimental practices. Mota inscribes his work within the Prietopunk movement, a Spanish Caribbean version of Afrofuturism. In this Cuban-African Pride revival, narrative and rhetorical strategies introduce a critical perspective to the notions of family and identity defended in Cuban Western government discourse. In Habana Underwater, queerness acceptance is not a modernity trait but part of the repressed African legacy that can finally shape Cuban society.

Diario de viaje: Conferencia anual de la Asociación de Investigación de Ciencia Ficción #SFRA2024

Cited works

González Fernández, Maielis. “Afrofuturismo y ficción especulativa en el caribe. Dos casos de estudio”. Kamchatka. Revista de análisis cultural, n. 22, 2023, pp. 237-261.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Routledge Classics. New York (NY): Verso, 2005.
Mota Pérez, Erick J. Habana underguater, completa (Novela y cuentos). Atom Press, 2010.
Mota Pérez, Erick. “El Caribe que soñamos: un futuro culturalmente mestizo”. Kamchatka. Revista de análisis cultural, n. 22, 2023, pp. 221-235.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (10th Anniversary Edition). Sexual Cultures. New York (NY): NYU Press, 2019.

Download the slides here in PDF format.