Transplanetary Americas Art, Outer Space, and the Latinx Imagination
By Robb Hernández (Ethnic, Jour’02)
(Duke University Press, 336 pages, 2026)
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.