Álvaro Menen Desleal's Speculative Planetary Imagination
Science fiction has long held a marginalized status within the Latin American literary canon. This is due to myriad assumptions: its supposed inferior quality, sensationalist content, and disconnect from socio-historical reality. In this article, I argue for the recuperation of Salvadoran author Álvaro Menen Desleal as a foundational writer of Central American speculative fiction. I explore why Menen Desleal turns to sci-fi - abstracting his fictive worlds to far-off futures or other planets - at a moment when the writing of contemporaries of the Committed Generation was increasingly politicized and realist. I argue that Menen Desleal's speculative planetary imagination toggles between scaling up localized concerns and evading them altogether to play with "universal" categories. By thinking with the categories of the human or the planet from an ex-centric position, Menen Desleal playfully appropriates generic convention, only to disrupt it from within. ; La ciencia ficción tradicionalmente ha tenido una posición marginada dentro del canon latinoamericano. Esto se debe a varias suposiciones: su presunta baja calidad, contenido sensacionalista y desconexión con la realidad sociohistórica. En este artículo, abogo por la recuperación del escritor salvadoreño Álvaro Menen Desleal como autor fundacional de la ficción especulativa centroamericana. Examino por qué Menen Desleal recurre al género de la ciencia ficción - y abstrae sus mundos ficticios a futuros lejanos o galácticos - en un momento cuando la escritura de sus contemporáneos de la Generación Comprometida era intensamente politizada y realista. Propongo que la imaginación especulativa y planetaria de Menen Desleal alterna entre ampliar preocupaciones locales a escalas más grandes o evadir completamente lo nacional para retomar categorías y debates "universales". Al pensar las categorías de lo humano o lo planetario desde una posición ex-céntrica, Menen Desleal se apropia lúdicamente de las convenciones del género especulativo y las trastoca desde adentro. ; Science fiction has long held a marginalized status within the Latin American literary canon. This is due to myriad assumptions: its supposed inferior quality, sensationalist content, and disconnect from socio-historical reality. In this article, I argue for the recuperation of Salvadoran author Álvaro Menen Desleal as a foundational writer of Central American speculative fiction. I explore why Menen Desleal turns to sci-fi - abstracting his fictive worlds to far-off futures or other planets - at a moment when the writing of contemporaries of the Committed Generation was increasingly politicized and realist. I argue that Menen Desleal's speculative planetary imagination toggles between scaling up localized concerns and evading them altogether to play with "universal" categories. By thinking with the categories of the human or the planet from an ex-centric position, Menen Desleal playfully appropriates generic convention, only to disrupt it from within.
