Intersections of memory and sustainability in the Caribbean cyberpunk imagination

Memory and sustainability in the Caribbean share common concerns with justice making and reparation, with human and environmental wrongdoing being inseparable since the early sixteenth century. In recent decades, Hispanic Caribbean literatures have challenged the anthropocentric readings of time, space, nature, and matter, offering new stories to speculate on the meaning of reparation from the perspective of environmental futurity. In Erick Mota’s Habana Underguater (2010) and Rita Indiana’s La Mucama de Omicunlé (2015), the future is both the time when climate change has become irreversible, and the source which holds the knowledge to safeguard the future of the future for all human and more-than-human worlds. Drawing on Afro-creole spiritualities, both speculative novels envision reparation in the present as a form of embodiment of the future rather than the repetition of the past, thus challenging the reader’s imaginative ability to empathize with different times, spaces, and bodies at the same time.