First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas

Examining the power of speculative fiction to reimagine historical accounts of the conquest of the Americas

The historical conquest of the Americas resides at the core of all first-contact narratives, which stage colonization and resistance in the generic guise of speculative fiction. Starting from this axiom, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period’s historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac Zimmer examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. First Contact thus poses a foundational question: Can we understand the conquest as an originary world-historical event without eclipsing the other cosmologies that existed, and continue to exist, within the contact zone? Can we decolonize the speculative imagination itself?

ZAC ZIMMER is an associate professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.