My first book, Doom Patterns: Latinx Speculations and the Aesthetics of Violence (forthcoming with Duke University Press), examines representations of violence in Latinx speculative fiction to show how portrayals of destruction paradoxically foreground pleasure in humor, narrative beauty, and the grotesque. I show how using the tropes of Latinx speculative fiction as a protocol for reading—literature in genres such as science fiction, horror, and alternate history—reveals destruction through what I term narrative “doom patterns,” devices such as thematic repetition, non-linear narration, character fragmentation, and unresolved plots that consistently returns the reader to instances of violence and destruction. The powerful appeal of such doom patterns is how they establish alternative worlds or “elsewheres” in stories of colonization, slavery, and the trauma of U.S. migration. These alternative worlds, however, upend stereotypical accounts of minority literature that emphasize upward mobility and the celebration of hybridity by revealing the ongoing nature of imperial, racial, and ethno-national violence. I suggest that these elsewheres offer the possible pleasurable effects in reading and rereading about the end of the world.

My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Latino Studies, MELUS, ASAP/Journal, Studies in American Fiction, and edited collections with Palgrave McMillan and Cambridge University Press. In my second book project, The Devil’s Recipe: Protest and Destruction in Hemispheric Venezuelan Imaginaries, I trace the scenes and sites of Venezuelan protest in a transnational context. Through literary, visual, and cultural analysis, my project investigates the mobilization of the “unfinished” to understand how Venezuelan subjects in Miami, Caracas, and beyond incite radical political identities. This interdisciplinary project resituates Venezuela in Latinx literary and cultural studies, through its attention to manifestations of disturbance, unrest, and failure. Beginning with my family’s migration to Venezuela because of two cataclysmic events—the Holocaust and Spanish Civil War—The Devil’s Recipe investigates photography, blueprints, soap operas, modern dance, film, and literature to show how unfinishedness cohere oppositional publics in Venezuela and its global diaspora.