“Both spirits argue over humans' settlement on the virgin island of Rapa Nui”. Ojeda-Labourdette & Hernández. Varua 1. El hundimiento de Hiva. RapaNui Press, 2014. 19.
I map speculative graphic narratives from Brazil and Chile published in the 21st century. The case studies are narrative sequences through images, such as comics and graphic novels, and align with speculative fiction—a cultural field that expands on science fiction by including fantasy, folk tales, legends, and myths. The sequential layout of graphic narratives fuels the involvement with displaced scenarios, whose worldbuilding reimagines alternatives across time and space at the material level. While speculative fiction emerged from western voices, it has been repurposed by Indigenous people and non-western minorities to offer alternatives to the rhetoric of modernity. I use the decolonial perspective of power to relate material conditions that have mediated the creation of cases that address the fallacies of human homogeneity and nonhuman agency engendered by the Anthropocene in terms of racialization, regionalism, developmental extractivism, and outsourcing. The project also includes a sequential narrative—designed in collaboration with the artist Panchulei—that stimulates an intermedial reflection through the analysis format and mediates an overview of the dissertation.