152 book reviews © supriya m. nair, 2015 | doi: 10.1163/22134360-08901025 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc 3.0) License. Rudyard J. Alcocer Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination: Re-reading History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xv + 238 pp. (Cloth us$85.00) If the preoccupation with history—or the absence thereof—is inescapable in LatinAmericanandCaribbeanliterature,a fixationwithtemporalitycanseem justas inevitable.TimeTravel intheLatinAmericanandCaribbeanImagination examines the links between fictional time travel and the history of Hispanic conquest, slavery, and servitude in the Americas, with particular attention to the regions mentioned in the title as against the British colonization of the northern part of the continent. The prologue, which begins with epigraphs invoking the cyclical nature of time, is fittingly titled “Time Out of Joint,” sug- gesting that temporal dislocations from the past will haunt the present and future of this hemisphere. Rudyard Alcocer argues that the primary rupture of the Conquest (and the Middle Passage for African diasporic communities) creates a wound so deep that a substantial corpus of time travel has emerged in literature and popular culture to reconsider, and perhaps overcome, the enduring legacies of those traumas. The question is whether narratives of time travel serve as “escapism” or as “surgical intervention” (p. xiv), and Alcocer’s critical readings of these narratives seem to find both possibilities. One of the book’s strengths is its nuanced perspective of the contemporary compar- ative literatureonthetheme, inflectedbymultipletheoreticalanddisciplinary approaches (psychoanalytic, postcolonial, deconstructive, historical, anthro- pological, cultural studies). The book has four main chapters. The first includes an analysis of a number of texts, including North American fiction (e.g., S.M. Stirling’s Conquistador: A Novel of Alternate History and Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus) and Mexican film and fiction (e.g., Gustavo Loza’s Al otro lado [To the Other Side], Homero Aridjis’s La leyenda de los soles [The Leg- endoftheSuns]),andafewofCarlosFuentes’sshortstories.Thesecondchapter focusesonTrinidadianauthorKevinBaldeosingh’smassiveAnglophonenovel, The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar, and Cuban writer Daína Chaviano’s El hombre, la hembra y el hambre [Man, Woman, and Hunger]. The third revis- its the myth of La Malinche in the Mexican writer Marcela del Río’s play El sueñodeLaMalinche[TheDreamofLaMalinche]andNicaraguanauthorGio- condaBelli’s firstnovel, Lamujerhabitada[TheInhabitedWoman].Thefourth chapter moves to popular culture versions of time travel in films, children’s stories, gaming, and pedagogical sources (language learning) that cement the variousstereotypesofthe“conquered”peoples: theMayansandtheIncastime- lessly frozeninalostworld,pronetosavageviolence,orannihilatedbycultural Downloaded from Brill.com04/06/2021 01:09:24AM via free access http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ book reviews 153 New West Indian Guide 89 (2015) 89–230 apocalypse and superior invaders. Alcocer claims that popular culture largely repeats colonial discourse of the archives, historiography, and high culture in locating modernity and advanced civilization in the era of European coloniza- tion and settlement. The afterword, which discusses how heritage tourism in Puerto Rico dis- turbingly combines a reification of Taíno culture with a corresponding elision of African elements, demonstrates the continuing obsession with the rein- vented past, here romanticized by ethnocentric and consumerist nostalgia. Although multiple titles mentioned in passing can occasionally be bewilder- ing, the book’s impressive range makes a compelling case for its significance. Despite the varied terrain, the lucid prose, helpful translations, and clear tran- sitionsfromonechaptertothenexthelpreadersnavigatethebookwithouttoo much confusion. While the book does not engage time from a philosophical angle as Wilson Harris does in his notion of “infinite rehearsal,” it considers various classifica- tionsof time. “Inotherwords,whatmodernreadersandwritersare inclinedto categorizeundersciencefictionor fantasy(i.e., contactbetweendifferenttime periods) may in fact have held similarities to certain pre-Columbian under- standingsofhowtimeworks…Fictional, interventionistvisitstothepast…can alsohavepracticalobjectivesinthepresent,”Alcocerconcludes(p.158).Writers like Alejo Carpentier who flout conventional notions of clock-and-calendrical timemayin factbelieve inthecoexistenceof temporalcategories thatareusu- ally considered distinct from each other, pointing to nonlinear routes of time travel. One therefore doesn’t travel back to the past when it is believed that thepastalreadyinhabitsthepresent.Occasionally, timecanmovebackwardor standstillas intheproblematicrepresentationofastagnantpostrevolutionary Cuba, which Alcocer does not critique as much as he does the mythification of indigenous peoples or the idealization of origins in African diasporic returns tothe“homeland.”Conversely, revisionistnarrativescanactuallyreify theview of the past as a fated curse, a pessimistic notion that engages in a “negative determinism,” inflexibly tying the problems in the present to a blighted past (p. 34). The uncanny re-turns to the past imply unresolved issues that demand repeatedvisits tomomentsofcrisis.Sometimesthesevisitscongeal thepast,at others they rewrite it and critique the dysfunctional present, and at still others they gesture toward a hopeful future once these fictional “interventions” con- front traumas. Alcocer situates time travel in these regions by emphasizing continuous historical trauma, but he does not then account for other contexts of time travel narratives that do not share this history as, for example, in Western fiction. Although it is unclear how these non-Western fictional “interventions” Downloaded from Brill.com04/06/2021 01:09:24AM via free access 154 book reviews New West Indian Guide 89 (2015) 89–230 materially alter the present, the book makes an important contribution to the scholarship of time travel by including Latin America and the Caribbean. Supriya M. Nair Department of English, Tulane University, New Orleans la 70118, u.s.a. supriya@tulane.edu Downloaded from Brill.com04/06/2021 01:09:24AM via free access mailto:supriya@tulane.edu