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Future Readers and the Anthropocene: Dr. Mat鱈as Oviedo Presents at the Bellini Colloquium
Dr. Matías Oviedo, Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Hispanic Studies, presented “Anticipatory Memory and the Future Reader in ‘Todo se está despidiendo’ by Cristina Rivera Garza” at the Bellini Colloquium. His talk examined how a short story set in 2096 imagines a “future reader” who discovers a 1992 travel notebook, linking this narrative device to Anthropocene temporality and to the idea of our present as a future past already becoming archive.
By situating Rivera Garza’s work within debates about climate change, memory, and narrative form, the talk highlighted how contemporary Latin American fiction engages with planetary crisis and the long temporal scales of the Anthropocene, inviting the audience to consider how present-day readers might themselves be imagined as future readers looking back on our moment from a time marked by environmental transformation and loss.