The forensic and the fantastic: Latinx writers in the UK

Guest edited by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

The forensic and the fantastic: Latinx writers in the UK

‘As Latinx writers in the UK, the forces that pulled and pushed our ancestors shatter any linear perspective. Another land of our childhood emerges. No longer the place of magical realism, we see and hear in retrospect what our parents were doing: creating a space for us to see the forest. The world. The planet.’

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

Introduction: Forensic procedure/fantastic critique

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

‘Cleansing, or limpieza, had come to mean the killing of defenceless people – a purge of the unclean. But the word was also used for healing a person or place from spirit attack. We can draw in and out the inner life of words like these. They enable a fantastic critique.’

Magnetic islands

Ana María Reyes Barrios

‘What you can sense outside is the smell of a new bird’

My dreams

Gaby Sambuccetti

‘Our waste is made of rivers;
desert is not the Sahara anymore,
it is inside our veins’

Future imperfect (an anti-novel manifesto)

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

‘John Squirrel is dead,
Judge Lord said,
Looking down on the Ashinaabe wordsmith Charles Aubin from his judge’s chair,
And you cannot say what a dead man said… hearsay.’

Tres seasons

Juana Adcock

‘¡Look at how I stand
out from the crowd!’

Common fantasy

Carolina Alonso Bejarano

‘Fantasy becomes a medium through which anti-colonial worlds can be reimagined and realized, yet the fantastic also operates to maintain the status quo.’

Gerald Martin in conversation – Forensic fantastic

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera & Gerald Martin

‘Latin Americans meeting outside of their territory – in many parts of Europe as a whole, but especially in Paris – had the first modern experience of discovering what a Latin American was.’

Somebody has to do it

Juan Toledo

‘One misconception is that all Latin American literature is synonymous with magic realism, which is, in reality, a social and historical critique. Some of our most admired and innovative writers never wrote a novel, preferring instead the innovation, irony and refined humour of the short story.’

The three lessons

Lester Goméz Medina

‘The first time I crossed a line it was on foot,
I didn’t know it was a border I was crossing’
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