This chapter examines key works of contemporary literature to argue that Black American literature has borne witness to how medical advancement has, and continues, to be made over and through Black bodies. Whereas dominant historical narratives erase the (often coerced) contributions of Black people, and Black folks, by and large, have failed to reap the social, financial, and embodied benefits of the technological progress enabled by their abused and sacrificed flesh, Black literature forces us to confront the impoverished ethics of medical practice. Authors such as Kwoya Fagin Maples, Bettina Judd, and Toni Morrison feature characters whose bodies document the long history of racist medical indifference and violence against Black bodies, despite this history’s archival misrepresentation and erasure. These writers craft a counter-history of Black life that refuses to gaslight those whose bodies continue to founder within racist medical systems in the wake of slavery.

The erosion of democracy has shown itself to be a necessary political precondition for the implementation of neoliberalism. Utopian culture quickly attuned itself to this crisis of democracy, and while there certainly are not many works of utopian culture that uncritically embrace the dominant post-1989 narrative that hails democracy as the universal cure for whatever ailment may exist in the world, we begin to see the emergence of works that foreground the profound danger inherent in the waning of democracy precisely in times of its instrumentalization by Western capitalist nations and the forces of economic globalization. Authors reveal neoliberal utopias as antidemocratic dystopias against which democracy must be defended. Moreover, we also see the emergence of novels that address a second pressing question: how can democracy survive when populations decide to democratically abolish it?

This chapter proposes a reading of Argentine-Jewish literature that stresses key moments of production. It begins with a focus on Alberto Gerchunoff´s The Jewish Gauchos as the foundational text (and of modern Jewish literature in Spanish) and the moment of massive immigration. Gerchunoff is read alongside Borges, who is treated as a contrapunctual figure, a canonical writer who engages with transnational Jewish literatures and draws strategies from Jewish reading and writing to devise his own literary models.  The second part examines the impact of the Shoah on Argentine Jewish literature of the 1950s and 1960s focusing on playwright Germán Rozenmacher and in the world of Yiddish and Ladino publishing. Tamara Kamenszain is subsequently described as an author that espouses “reluctant belonging,” someone who has engaged with different subjects and different styles but never ventures very far away from Jewishness. The third part treats the use of the Holocaust metaphorically to discuss state terrorism in the works of Reina Roffé and Sergio Chejfec. It concludes with a reflection on contemporary writing and the variety of literary genres.

“The evil of the Argentine Republic is its extension”: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento´s famous admonition in Facundo (1845) was not only a program for the modernization of Argentina but a figurative horizon for the literary genre that was going to critically analyze that very modernization until the mid-twentieth century: the “national character essay.” This genre had analogous developments in many parts of Latin America, but did not establish the link between territory and national identity as strongly as it did in Argentina. In the century that leads from Sarmiento to Ezequiel Martínez Estrada the genre displays a series of literary resources that seek to take the geographical configuration of the country as a measure of its people’s soul. This can be seen both in the invention of a physical sphere of the nation to set the stage for his political drama (Sarmiento) and in the metaphorization of the map as the nation’s body (Martínez Estrada). This corpus is analyzed here in relation to real and imaginary geographies that produced it and were produced by it.

This chapter looks at how the notions of black escape and black wishland have been conceptualized in African American utopianism since the post-WWII conception of the Beloved Community, a conception mostly associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. Through its discussions of Sun Ra’s “Space is the Place” (1971), Parliament’s “Chocolate City” (1975), Reginald Hudlin’s “Space Traders” (1994), Octavia E. Butler’s “The Book of Martha” (2003), and Chesya Burke’s “The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason” (2011), this chapter argues that these texts, if read collectively, not only reveal that the debates between black utopians and antiutopians parallel those between the opponents and proponents of Afropessimism, but they also suggest that liberating black life from social death requires combining the best of Afropessimism and black antiutopian critique with the best of black aliveness, Afro-fabulation, and the black utopian imagination.

Technology has served a recurrent role as a utopian imaginary for speculative fiction writers and consumers. As a utopian promise, technology appears to provide individuals, communities, and whole societies with the means to overcome nature – whether it is base human natures, relationships with one’s environment, or the perceived limitations of one’s body. This chapter focuses on two similar technological fantasies, James Cameron’s Terminator films and Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. In both series, central figures – namely the T-800 played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Murderbot – approximate being human but are limited by their technological being. Yet, in being not-fully-human, they expose how technology always serves as a false utopian promise: there is no way out of our humanness through technology. In this way, technological fantasies serve as a form of horror, at once tempting readers with possibilities, but revealing those possibilities to be empty – or malignant.

The myth of Argentina as a uniquely white European nation dominated throughout the twentieth century. This myth gave rise to the belief that race and racism do not exist in and are irrelevant to Argentina. The literary canon not only reflected these dominant narratives but played an instrumental role in their construction and dissemination. Early canonical works lay the groundwork for Argentina’s long-running fictions of extermination, insisting on the physical disappearance of nonwhites while redefining “negro” as an implicitly dark-skinned symbol of the politically dangerous masses. Rewritings and parodies of these fictions have abounded in Argentine literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Contrary to the widespread insistence that race and racism are extraneous to Argentina, these works show that race and the trope of racialized class struggle – in which the survival of one hinges on the elimination of the other – have been a central concern in Argentine literary and national imaginaries. Meanwhile the unquestioned assumption of racelessness forged a critical silence and blindness that did not comply to the notion of whiteness. Recently, however, literary works and criticism have begun to pose a significant challenge to narratives of white Argentina.

A long tradition of pandemic – or plague – literature, dating back at least as far as classical Greece, has used catastrophic communicable disease as a backdrop to explore the human condition: what it means to live in a community of other humans, and, as awareness of the crises of environmental devastation and climate change grows, on a planet with other living organisms. In different ways, and with differing resolutions, twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of pandemic fiction show how pandemics stem not only from human practices, but also from the values, beliefs, and stories about the past – the histories – in which they are rooted. Whether dystopic or utopic, apocalyptic or contained, literary pandemics warn that in order to change the way humans collectively inhabit the world, we need to change the dominant stories we tell about it.