In Transplanetary Americas, Robb Hernández launches a propulsive pathway for Latinx cultural studies by exploring how the modern space race has driven artists to look up and attune to expressions derived from the solar system and beyond. By advancing a theoretical and methodological framework he calls “transplanetary relationality,” Hernández shows how artists’ ascendant attentions unhinge Latinidades from their terrestrial bindings in an aerial pursuit of being with this and other planets. Speculation, science, and technology fuel creative activities about the cosmos, taking Latinx art history into unexpected territory. Science fiction B-movie aesthetics empower political statements of the third kind. NASA’s Apollo program sparks muralist imaginations about other planetary vistas. Private aerospace companies are prompting new generations of artist-activists to defend not only land but sky. By showcasing visionaries who frustrate categories of time and place, Hernández’s investigation transcends the typical limits of border studies with a vertical scale, proving that the color of space is not only black but brown as well.
Robb Hernández is Professor of English at Fordham University. He is the author of Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde and VIVA Records, 1970–2000: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles.
“Transplanetary Americas is a welcome addition to the field of Latinx speculative cultural studies – the first book-length study emphasizing visual art. Robb HernÁndez excavates the unexpected influence of the US space race on Latinx art, shifting from the horizontal axis of the border to the vertical axis of outer space to center Latinx creatives who look up to contemplate other worlds.”—Curtis Marez Producing Precarity: The Costs of Making TV in Poor Places
