Patrick Anthony Barbosa Brock

• Barbosa Brock, Patrick Anthony (2023). Brazilian Afrofuturism as a Social Technology. In Taylor, Taryne Jade; Lavender III, Isiah; Dillon, Grace L. & Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms. Routledge. ISSN 9780367330613. p. 319–328. Show summary

  Afrofuturism in Brazil operates as a politico-aesthetic subjectivity whose forms of organization intervene in the technoculture of speculative fiction and the rich world’s failure to conceive different possibilities. Operating within the mass-cultural genre system, these communities merge the availability of publishing tools and widespread dissemination of visual and narrative repertoires with the social and political networks honed by their activist predecessors. Considering that Afrofuturism, like other CoFuturisms, has found responses to everyday dystopia or the foreclosure of any other present through solidarity, protest, and resistance, the conjunction of speculative thinking, art, and social activism can be considered a type of social technology or collective “social practice”.

• Barbosa Brock, Patrick Anthony (2023). Genre Infrastructure as Speculative Method in Latin America. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. ISSN 0897-0521. 34(3), p. 277–303. Full text in Research Archive
• Barbosa Brock, Patrick Anthony (2023). Brazilian Afrofuturism, Heuristic Function, and the Mass Cultural Genre System. SFRA Review. ISSN 2641-2837. 53(3).
• Barbosa Brock, Patrick Anthony (2021). Research article as guest author. Zanzalá - Revista Brasileira de Estudos sobre Gêneros Cinematográficos e Audiovisuais. ISSN 2236-8191. 8(1), p. 8–18. doi: 10.34019/2236-8191.2021.v8.36736. Show summary

  Futurism and Genre Genesis in Brazilian Science Fiction Abstract The recent emergence of futurism movements seeking agency over the imagination of the future often has the communities of readers and writers of science fiction as one of its pillars. Its proponents seek to stake their claim on a new movement by mobilizing the SF community and the memory work of fandom but whether they can achieve enough critical mass to enact broader collective action is uncertain. Taking as example the sertãopunk subgenre of Brazilian SF, this paper will discuss the internal coloniality of Brazilian regionalism that resulted in the creation of a spatial identity for the northeast region now being challenged, before arguing that political intent is merging with genre intervention to form one infrastructure of futurism. Keywords: Brazilian Science Fiction; Futurism; Genre Studies; Fandom.

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• Barbosa Brock, Patrick Anthony (2023). Feminist speculations and boundary collapse in Latin American science fiction. Show summary

  Three recent novels and one short story by female writers from Latin America approach the meaning of science and of the scientific method in ways that both dialogue with and collapse the boundary objects of science fiction. These disruptions encode political and artistic intent while signifying the genre and hierarchical fluidity of the continent’s contemporary fiction. Through close reading of the novels and their historical context, we will see how these Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking writers appropriate SF’s tropes as a mass-cultural and global shared language. In doing so, they break down the constitutive elements of the genre to challenge literary hierarchies between speculative and realist literature.

• Barbosa Brock, Patrick Anthony (2023). Afrofuturismo brasileiro, função heurística e o pós-apocalipse feminino. Show summary

  O Afrofuturismo brasileiro opera como uma subjetividade político-estética, e suas formas de organização intervêm não apenas na tecnocultura da ficção especulativa (SF) como no fracasso do Ocidente de conceber futuros alternativos. Funcionando dentro do gênero cultural de massa (Rieder 2017), essa comunidade cultural combina a disponibilidade de ferramentas de publicação com a disseminação ampla de repertórios visuais e narrativos da SF, com as redes comunitárias e políticas acalentadas por seus predecessores no ativismo negro brasileiro. A duologia de Lu Ain-Zaila, Brasil 2048 (2016 e 2017) não apenas exemplifica tais estratégias como também prova a função heurística da SF, ou seja, de ensinar como solucionar problemas. Publicada de maneira independente, o romance em dois volumes emprega polifonia textual e hibridez de gêneros narrativos para narrar a refundação do Brasil no pós-apocalipse do clima, onde a mudança depende mais da ação coletiva do que da individualidade “libertadora” do capitalismo. O resultado da construção de mundo de Ain-Zaila se insere na tradição identificada por Susan Watkins em 2020 de ficção pós-apocalíptica de autoria feminina em língua inglesa, tradição esta que se opõe às distopias de autoria masculina e suas visões despolitizadas e comerciais do futuro. Esta comunicação combina diferentes aspectos de uma tese doutoral em andamento sobre a SF e ativismo social na América Latina.

• Barbosa Brock, Patrick Anthony (2023). CoFuturism and synchronization: The toxic temporality of forever chemicals.
• Barbosa Brock, Patrick Anthony (2023). Brazilian Afrofuturism, heuristic function and the mass-cultural genre system. Show summary

  This presentation expands on some ideas introduced in a forthcoming chapter from the Routledge Handbook of Cofuturisms. Afrofuturism in Brazil operates as a politico-aesthetic subjectivity whose forms of organization intervene not only in the technoculture of speculative fiction (SF) but the West’s failure to conceive different futures. Operating within the mass-cultural genre system (Rieder 2017), these communities merge the availability of publishing tools and widespread dissemination of visual and narrative repertoires with the social and political networks honed by their activist predecessors, configuring an emerging culture where imperial subalterns re-purpose SF “mode of thinking” as well as its tropes from their earlier role as purveyors of the progress narrative of empire. By playing with such elements as temporalities, technology, and outer space, at times they actively seek to shape the genre’s conventions to gain agency over the imagination of the future and of representation. In this sense, Isiah Lavender III’s strategy of reading earlier texts as Afrofuturism (2019) certainly can be applied to the broader Black rights movement in Brazil: it has always been Afrofuturist. Also, considering that Afrofuturism, like other cofuturisms, has found responses to everyday dystopia or the foreclosure of any other future through solidarity, protest and resistance (Chattopadhyay 2020) and if Afrofuturism is a way of reading texts in the same way that SF is, the conjunction of speculative thinking and social activism becomes a signpost of the genre’s mechanics as a type of social technology leaning on distributed cognition, as proposed by Edwin Hutchins (1995) as well as the fabulation (Williams 1978) and heuristic functions of SF. The way cognition is socially distributed, moreover, is naturally rhizomatic. This convergence of factors merits further examination as the potential testbed for a formalist theory of cofuturisms which blends cognitivist and mass-cultural genre approaches.

• Barbosa Brock, Patrick Anthony (2023). Lecture at Florida Atlantic University: On Brazilian Afrofuturisms.
• Barbosa Brock, Patrick Anthony (2022). Member of host committee: Science Fiction Research Association 2022 conference co-hosted by CoFutures - Futures from the Margins.
• Barbosa Brock, Patrick Anthony (2022). Epistemological spirituality in Brazilian Afrofuturism: "Mythologerm" and boundary objects. Show summary

  Epistemological spirituality in Brazilian Afrofuturism The Brazilian Afrofuturist movement emerges from a longstanding tradition of black resistance to hegemonic notions of racial harmony that denied coevalness while making up the social imaginary’s compact of national identity. Once this tradition met the diasporic culture of Afrofuturism and its “networked consciousness” of the Black Atlantic, as defined by Isaiah Lavender III, it intersected with recent declines in the marginal cost of computation and communication technology, allowing writers and readers of science fiction to take a more active role in shaping the genre. Their politically oriented practice then recentered Afro-Brazilian spirituality as coeval to the techno-scientific knowledge system. This techno-spirituality is an epistemological alternative to the Eurocentric scientific order, constituting both a decolonial praxis and boundary object through which new mass-cultural genres emerge. This paper will show how the works of Fabio Kabral, Lu Ain-Zaila, and other Afrofuturist writers from Brazil depict spirituality and African culture in a play with temporalities that calls attention to past legacies through the imagination of the future or parallel universes.

• Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva; Thorsson, Bergsveinn; Brock, Patrick; Wang, Kanyu & Tveit, Marta (2021). Imagination Workshop.

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