Transplanetary Americas

Art, Outer Space, and the Latinx Imagination

Robb Hernández

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781478039228
  9781478034186
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478062769
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: Social Sciences

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 upward 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 Earth and with other planets. Speculation, science, and technology fuel creative activities referencing the cosmos, taking Latinx art history into unexpected territory. Science fiction B-movie aesthetics empowers political statements of the third kind. NASA's Apollo program sparks muralist imaginings about other planetary vistas. Private aerospace companies are prompting new generations of artist-activists to defend both land and sky. By showcasing visionaries who frustrate categories of time and place, Hernández's investigation transcends the typical limits of border studies via a vertical scale, proving that the color of space is not only black but brown.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Art at the Outer Limits of Latinidades
• 1. Planet Anew: Toward a Transplanetary-Relational Approach
• 2. Barrio Futurity: Public Art in the Age of Apollo
• 3. Terraforming the Gallery: In Search of Central America
• Gallery
• 4. It Came from Beyond the Border: Tequila Science Fiction and the Latinf/x Sensibility
• 5. Rage Against the Machine: The Art of Latina Space Feminism and Protest
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index