Sci-Fi Ain't Nothing but Mojo Misspelled: Latinx Futurism in Smoking Mirror Blues

Abstract:This essay, through a reading of Ernest Hogan's Smoking Mirror Blues (2001), challenges the entrenched subordination of fantasy and supernatural to the supposed rationality of science fiction. It explores how Chicanx and Latinx futurisms, of which Hogan's novel provides an exemplary text, reimagine the present as a world that no longer adheres to or is strictly determined by the tenets of western rationalism and scientific thought. Smoking Mirror Blues opposes a strictly scientific way of looking at and understanding (organizing and hierarchizing) reality that has roots in the racist and patriarchal histories of modernity and colonialism. Drawing on the groundbreaking work of Catherine S. Ramírez, Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson, B. V. Olguín, and other scholars of Latinx futurism, I argue that Hogan's novel twists the scientific and the supernatural together into a Möbius-like strip, not only to exemplify the combinatorial poetics of Latinx futurism, but to demonstrate through that fusion the emancipatory potential of what Merla-Watson and Olguín call "the Latin@ speculative arts" The recombinatorial nature of Hogan's novel, and Latinx futurism in general, has ethical as well as aesthetic significance. Smoking Mirror Blues aligns with and, I claim, can be productively studied through the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel's transmodern ethics of liberation.