Emily Maguire
· ProfessorVerifiedNorthwestern University · Spanish and Portuguese
Active 1996–2024
About
Emily Maguire is a professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at Northwestern University. She specializes in modern Latin American literature and culture, with a particular focus on the Hispanic Caribbean and its diasporas. Her scholarly work includes her first book, Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography, published by the University Press of Florida in 2011, which examines how Cuban writers in the first half of the twentieth century integrated ethnography and literature to valorize Afro-Cuban culture as a core element of Cuban identity. Her second book, Tropical Time Machines: Science Fiction in the Contemporary Hispanic Caribbean, published by the same press in 2024, explores the engagement of recent science fiction with Caribbean temporality. Additionally, she has co-edited special issues and books on Caribbean aesthetics, politics of relation, and Latin American science fiction, contributing significantly to these fields. Professor Maguire is affiliated with the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program and is a core faculty member of the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium at Northwestern. She actively participates in scholarly initiatives such as The Future of Facts in Latin America, an SSRC-sponsored working group. She welcomes inquiries to advise undergraduate and graduate projects on topics related to Caribbean and Latin American literature, science fiction, poetry, and popular culture from the 20th and 21st centuries.
Research topics
- Humanities
- Sociology
- Art
- History
- Art history
- Literature
- Philosophy
- Aesthetics
- Epistemology
- Linguistics
- Anthropology
Selected publications
University of Florida Press eBooks · 2024-05-16 · 2 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingRevista de estudios hispánicos · 2024-03-01 · 3 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingAbstract: Afrofuturism is understood as encompassing critical, narratival, aesthetic, and activist practices that, in the words of Ytasha Womak, "redefine culture and notions of blackness for today and the future." While the Caribbean might seem a natural site for Afrofuturist cultural exploration, until recently, few works of Hispanophone Caribbean literature had been identified as belonging to this subgenre. That situation changed with the publication of Prietopunk: antología de afrofuturismo caribeño (2022), which announces itself as the first Spanish-language anthology of Caribbean Afrofuturism. This article explores the collection's articulation of Afrofuturism through an analysis of four of its stories: Rafael Acevedo's "La orisha 2034 es tremenda máquina," Erick Mota's "En candela con Ochosi," Aníbal Hernández Medina's translation of Junot Díaz's "Monstro," and Gretchen López Ayala's "Crioulo." It argues that these stories present a specifically Caribbean futurism, one that, while it may not center explicitly on Black imaginaries, reveals an Antillean desire to engage the future possible in a way that highlights the importance of African-derived cultural elements, explores the region's complex racial dynamics, and underscores the weight of Caribbean histories.
Anti-Exceptionalism in Detective Fiction, Speculative Fiction, and Graphic Novels
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-07-31
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingTapuya Latin American Science Technology and Society · 2024-09-26
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAccording to literary critic Darko Suvin, science fiction demonstrates a “supposedly factual” approach to imagining new worlds. In Latin America, however, the factual basis of lived experience from which such fictions are crafted has not always been taken as a given. This essay shows how contemporary Latin American science fiction makes use of the tensions derived from the encounter between the pliable nature of fact and the supposed rigor of cognitive logic through an analysis of two contemporary texts from the Hispanophone Caribbean: Puerto Rican writer Pedro Cabiya’s (1971) novel Malas hierbas (2010) and Cuban director Arturo Infante’s (1977) film El viaje extraordinario de Celeste García (2018). A fragmented zombie tale whose narrator may or may not be a zombie, Malas hierbas explores the science of zombification even as it draws upon both folklore and the corpus of zombie literature and film. El viaje extraordinario engages the genre conventions of romantic comedy and the Cuban emigration film, using the familiar landscape of these genres in the story of a group of Cubans who are invited to visit a distant planet. Cabiya’s and Infante’s texts keep the reader or spectator suspended in the liminal zone where truth is an open-ended series of multiple possibilities. As they reveal the constructed nature of facts and the narratives that support them, these texts illuminate the ways in which the possibilities around us are already the work of constructed fictions.
Review Literature and Arts of the Americas · 2023-01-02
article1st authorCorrespondingClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsEmily A. MaguireEmily A. Maguire is an Associate Professor of Latin American literature and culture at Northwestern University. She is the author of Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography (2011). Her academic articles have appeared in Small Axe, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, ASAP/Journal, and Revista Iberoamericana.
Andean Non-Fiction: Notes from an Imprecise Geography
Review Literature and Arts of the Americas · 2023-07-03
articleSenior authorPosthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction
Studies in global science fiction · 2022 · 14 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Literature
- History
Introduction: Posthumanism and Latin(x) American Science Fiction
Studies in global science fiction · 2022 · 3 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Humanities
- Sociology
- Literature
From <i>Somnambulist Archaeology</i>
Review Literature and Arts of the Americas · 2021-07-03
articleSenior authorWorking Juju: Representations of the Caribbean Fantastic, by Andrea Shaw Nevins
New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids · 2021-03-30
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThe Caribbean has historically been constructed as a region mantled by the fantastic," Andrea Shaw Nevins states in the introduction to Working Juju.While some scholars have seen this labeling as a strategy intended to marginalize the region, Nevins argues for understanding the fantastic as an expression of Caribbean potentiality, even when a recognition of that power is "in contradiction to [a] text's ideological posture" (p.2).Defining the fantastic as anything that "defies an explanation anchored in empirical knowledge" (p.20), her engaging study brings together a broad range of texts-film, literature, nonfiction, folklore, and visual art-to trace connections between early characterizations of the Caribbean as an irrational, mystical space and contemporary texts that offer reworkings of those early stereotypes, what Nevins terms "acts of discursive juju" (p.2).Following an introduction that surveys the fantastic in Caribbean cultural production, two chapters show how a characterization of the Caribbean as fantastic or monstrous was imposed on the region from outside.Chapter 1 explores the treatment of Obeah in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British literature.Nevins details how the depictions of African-derived religious practices in texts such as Edward Long's The History of Jamaica (1774) and Journal of a West India Proprietor by Matthew "Monk" Lewis (1834) worked to characterize enslaved Africans as inferior and their religious practices as depraved.Given the recent bibliography on Obeah produced by scholars such as Simon Gikandi, Diana Paton, and Laura Putnam, there is not much more that Nevins can add in a chapter of this brevity, and at times her argument risks getting lost in her engagement with this scholarship.Nonetheless, this chapter does the important work of showing the historical underpinnings of the Caribbean's characterization as a fantastical space.Moving on from the colonial era, the second chapter examines American films' portrayal of the Caribbean as supernatural.Nevins traces a cinematic arc that runs from zombie movies of the 1930s and '40s to crime thrillers to Pirates of the Caribbean, and shows how Hollywood has sold the American public an image of the Caribbean as a racialized and exoticized fantastic space.The juxtaposition of these diverse cinematic genres is the chapter's greatest strength, and Nevins's analysis sheds new light on these films, even as she emphasizes their consistency in positioning the Caribbean as a monstrous other.If Hollywood's characterization of the Caribbean as fantastic "reveal[s] levels of anxiety about Caribbean bodies and indeed the region" (p.77), Working Juju's final three chapters show how the fantastic mode can be a tool for shap-
Frequent coauthors
- 4 shared
Deborah A. Kapchan
- 4 shared
Felipe Smith
- 4 shared
Keisha‐Khan Y. Perry
- 4 shared
Ellen Moodie
- 4 shared
Maritza Quiñones
- 4 shared
Peggy Brunache
- 4 shared
Faye Harrison
- 4 shared
Jessel Saladriga
Tulane University
Education
- 2004
PhD, Spanish and Portuguese
New York University
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