Down with Gargamel! The Science Fiction of Recent Insurrections

Abstract

As fiction, as a work of the imagination, science fiction brings into consciousness objects, figures, and scenarios that do not yet exist. It builds whole, entire worlds that allow us to take distance from our own, worlds where we can start to conceive everything that seemed impossible only because the limitations of our world did not allow us to imagine them. Therein lies the force of science fiction and fiction in general: in its reverberations, its continued effects on the "real life" of both inner and material realities. My contribution to this special section traces the shape and impact of micropolitical tools of insurrection as imagined in Othoniel Rosa's Down with Gargamel! It does so by exploring the implicit and explicit links between the fictive spaces of the novel and the uprisings that have emerged in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Americas in the twenty-first century. [science fiction; Latin American literature; protest anthropology; activism; micropolitics] Thought models, models for thought: this is how Alfredo Jaar and Raúl Zurita describe the power of the objects produced by artists and writers. The description emerged in conversation during a series of roundtables (Delgado Moya et al., 2022) between them and other leading figures of Chilean art: some friends, some former friends, all of them acquainted with each other in some shape or form. This image, this idea, is as simple as it is powerful. And though it isn't exactly groundbreaking or especially original (see, for instance, Clifford Geertz's discussion of Galanter and Gerstenhaber' extrinsic theory of thought, in Geertz 1973, 77), it still dazzled when it emerged in the words of these artists, perhaps because it rose in the context of a conversation. The back-and-forth between the person who offered this image (Jaar) and the one who took it up (Zurita) is what brings out the potency of this image, activating it in a way that electrified the rest of the roundtable, the whole of the conversation.Science fiction functions precisely as one such model for thought in literature as in the arts. As fiction, as a work of the imagination, it brings into consciousness objects, figures, and scenarios that do not yet exist. It builds whole, entire worlds that allow us to take distance from our own, worlds where we can start