Colonialism and Brazilian Steampunk

• In Event: Colonialism and Latin American Science Fiction

Abstract

Steampunk (2009) and Vaporpunk (2010) are recent collections of steampunk that demonstrate Brazil’s interest in this subgenre, and which have considerable potential producing insights into contemporary Brazilian thinking about proto-cyborgs in their rewriting of history. In this paper I examine four stories from these collections, each having to do with the legacy of colonialism and the issues of embodiment and technology as seen in the modified bodies of slaves, soldiers, zombies and robots. Octavio Aragão’s “A fazenda-relógio” is a story about newly robotized coffee plantations and slave uprisings. Roberto Causo’s “O plano de Robida” is a variation on the colonial Vernian “voyage extraordinaire” set in the Amazon. Carlos Orsi’s “A extinção das espécies” speculates about the uses of nanotechnology as Darwin travels to Argentina during 1830s, while Jacques Barcia’s “Uma vida possível atrás das barricadas” explores the theme of reproduction by a male automaton and a female golem during anarchist uprisings in Barcelona at the turn of the twentieth century.
In Brazilian steampunk interface of machine and human is not just a utopian reconciliation or facile celebration of hybridity that naturalizes the cyborg prosthesis, but one that flaunts it by re-writing the traditional passivity of the periphery, transforming the exotic Other of Latin America into the technological Other of the global order. In this sense, the cyborg is neither not a traditional allegory of colonial victimization nor simply a vehicle of political liberation, but a metaphor of the tensions of Brazil’s body politic as it struggles with its colonial legacies in the twenty-first century.

Author

• Mary Elizabeth E Ginway, University of Florida