Call for Papers: Ends of Worlds, Contested Futures: Latin American Speculative Fictions and the Political Ontology of Finitude

2026-11-02

Edited by 

Natalia López, Escuela de Historia y Centro para las Humanidades, Universidad Diego Portales
André Cabral de Almeida Cardoso, Universidade Federal Fluminense

This special issue proposes to explore how Latin American science fiction, climate fiction, and other forms of speculative narrative, including Afrofuturism, the Gothic, horror, the fantastic, and dystopia – in literature, cinema, the arts, and graphic narratives – interrogate the ending of worlds and the possibilities for their continuation and transformation. In keeping with the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scope of confluences - Journal of Critical Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the proposal brings together the social sciences, the arts, the humanities, and the environmental humanities, connecting ecological questions, temporalities, power relations, and practices of artistic creation. In dialogue with political ontology and with reflections such as those of Ailton Krenak, Déborah Danowski, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, it shifts the question of “the end of the world” towards an inquiry into which worlds come to an end, for whom, and through what processes.

Finitude is approached here as an open question, rather than a condition whose meaning can be assumed to be universal. We are interested both in the unequal distribution of violence and destruction and in divergent understandings of what it means to disappear, persist, or transform. This perspective engages with the political ontology of Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena (2017) and Blaser (2026): the concern is not simply with different experiences of the same loss, but with questioning what counts as disappearance or transformation in worlds constituted through different relations. The aim is thus to examine how these narratives bring different temporalities, forms of knowledge, and relations between humans and other beings into contestation.

The proposal is organized around the following questions:

  • Which world comes to an end? How do these works distinguish or conflate the disappearance of life and the exhaustion of a colonial, capitalist, or anthropocentric order? Can the end of a particular order open up possibilities for the continuation or emergence of other worlds?
  • Whose end makes others’ futures possible? How do these narratives address processes through which territories, ways of life, and relations are destroyed or sacrificed in the name of progress, development, or the survival of particular groups? Who can lay claim to a future, and who is denied that possibility?
  • When does the end occur? Does catastrophe appear as a future threat, an experience already lived, or an ongoing process? How do these works bring historical, ecological, and ancestral times into relation and challenge the idea that we all inhabit the same present and are moving towards a common future?
  • What persists, and what transforms? What roles do memory, ancestrality, and relations with non-human beings play in experiences of loss and continuity? How can narratives convey forms of existence that do not fit a simple opposition between survival and extinction?

The special issue welcomes contributions that place literary and cultural analysis in dialogue with social research, philosophical reflection, and the study of socioecological conflicts and transformations, as well as work that brings academic research, artistic practices, and situated knowledges into conversation. Rather than treating fiction as an illustration of concepts, we seek to understand how its narrative and aesthetic forms generate thought and destabilize the categories of “world”, “life”, “end”, and “future”. This dialogue requires that Indigenous and Afro-diasporic worlds neither be equated with fictional universes nor have their thought and practices reduced to repertoires available for speculative creation.

The question guiding the proposal is: how do Latin American speculative narratives engage with the ending of worlds, and what political possibilities for continuity, transformation, and coexistence do they make imaginable?

Practical Information and Timeline

Papers will undergo peer review, with review reports published openly. Accepted papers will be published in confluences under the Diamond Open Access model, with no publication fees for authors or their institutions.

Submissions must meet the criteria set out in the journal’s author guidelines. Please consult these guidelines for full details.

Author workshop: December 1, 2026.

Participation is warmly encouraged but is not a requirement for submitting a paper in response to this call. For further information, please contact frank.mueller@fu-berlin.de.

  • First draft due: January 15, 2027
  • Peer review: January 15–March 1, 2027
  • Reviewer feedback returned to authors: March 1, 2027
  • Second draft due: March 31, 2027
  • Peer review: April 1–20, 2027
  • Reviewer feedback returned to authors: April 20, 2027
  • Final draft due: May 10, 2027
  • Editorial production: May 10–June 15, 2027
  • Publication: June 15, 2027