ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Syzigias y Quadraturas Lunares: Science Fiction in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

• In Event: Utopian and Dystopian Sciences

English Abstract

Everyday people contributed to the production of science in the early modern period. In colonial Mexico, Indigenous knowledge systems and Creole ideas, although suppressed and overlooked, were wedded to the production and circulation of science. The paper takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the discourse and ideas of science in the viceroyalty of New Spain through a microhistorical analysis of the social and intellectual words of the late-colonial period. Centered on the first known work of science fiction written in the Americas, a manuscript called the Syzigias y quadraturas lunares produced by a Franciscan friar in 1775 in Yucatan, this paper examines how local understandings of science drew upon deep traditions, including Indigenous ideas of the heavens and social relationships. Ensconced in the archives of the Inquisition since the eighteenth century, the story is largely unknown to scholars and the public. The account focuses on a journey to the utopian landscapes Moon in the year 2510 by a French scientific explorer. Maya ideas of the heavens––the moon as a paradise and the sun as the site of danger––intersected with emergent Spanish ideas about rationality and empiricism. This paper will examine the ways that science served as a language to imagine an idealized future and examine the discourse of science by non-elite members of colonial society.

Author

• RA Kashanipour, University of Arizona