In Doom Patterns, Maia Gil’Adí takes up speculative fiction as a site for theorizing Latinx identity across national and ethnic borders and shows the vital role of historical trauma in its formation. Her analysis moves beyond reparative modes of reading to consider how literary representations of violence, destruction, and pain also elicit pleasurable affective and aesthetic experiences. Gil’Adí theorizes the paradox of pleasurable violence through the notion of doom patterns—narrative devices that include thematic repetition, nonlinear narration, character fragmentation, and unresolved plots. Doom patterns return the reader to instances of historical violence and destruction, revealing them as excessive and otherworldly processes that require the tropes of speculative fiction. Examining novels by established Latinx authors such as Junot Díaz and Cristina García as well as multiethnic writers such as Colson Whitehead and Sesshu Foster, Gil’Adí challenges definitions of what constitutes Latinx literature and notions of the speculative by dismantling generic boundaries and entrenched definitions of race, ethnicity, and nationhood. In so doing, she allows for a more capacious consideration of the speculative, realism, history, and the role of violence in literature.

Maia Gil’Adí is Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Acknowledgments and Agradecimientos  ix
Introduction. The Reading Protocols of Latinx Speculative Fictions  1
1. Doom Patterning the Postcolony and the New Caribbean Mythology  33
2. Sweet Apocalypse: Sugar and Monstrosity at the End of the World  60
3. Approximation, Horror, and the Grotesque on the US-Mexico Border  90
4. Rekonkista: Brownface, Time Travel, and Cyberfascism in “Greater Mexico” 121
5. Her Body, Our Horror: Self-Abnegation; or, On Silence, Refusal, and Becoming the Un/Self  150
Coda. Thinking from the Hole: Latinidad on the Edge  178
Notes  195
Bibliography  225
Index  253