The tender longing for the stars, an impulse familiar to many, has unfolded alongside another trajectory in modernity: from Captain Cook’s pursuit of Venus to NASA’s Space-Age invocation of Christopher Columbus, tracing a historical course intertwined with imperial expansion. The cultural imagination of space exploration, arguably most concentrated in the genre of science fiction (sf), is also haunted by what Gerry Canavan calls a “bad [colonial] conscience.” While scholars such as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., John Rieder, and Jessica Langer have examined the colonial and postcolonial operations within the genre, others, including Sheree Renée Thomas, Grace Dillon, Lou Cornum, and Taryne Jade Taylor, have turned to minoritarian SF traditions—Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, and Latinx futurism—that foreground speculative geographies illuminating decolonial concepts of temporality and subjectivity.

Engaging with this constellation of scholarship on colonial speculation and alternative futuring in the Anglophone sphere, this presentation turns to early revolutionary Cuba, whose anti-colonial, socialist, and Cold War conditions offer a unique historical, linguistic, and cultural vantage point for speculative imagination. Specifically, I focus on Ángel Arango’s 1964 short story “El cosmonauta” (“The Cosmonaut”)—an early exemplar of Cuban science fiction—and ask: How does Arango’s playful engagement with Indigenous narratives, Caribbean postcolonial writing, and European colonial travelogues reconfigure the genre’s inherited traditions? In what ways does it invite us to rethink our relation to history and the human subject? In other words, what alternative visions might it bring to complicate prevalent capitalist techno-utopian discourses of space exploration?

Lu Han is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Romance Studies. Her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Hispanophone Caribbean and Mexican literature, visual culture, and intellectual traditions. She is currently developing a project on alternative perspectives of space exploration in Latin American speculative imagination, from the 1950s to the present. This project emphasizes non-Western ideas of temporality, technology, ecology, and the human, while also highlighting how space ambitions create complex dynamics among postcolonial modernity, decolonization, and racialization.