Temporalities Of Collapse In Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy: From Disaster Capitalism To Cli-Fi
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30827/tn.v9i1.31718Keywords:
Futurabilities, Disaster capitalism, Temporality, Climate fiction, Michel NievaAbstract
This paper analyzes Michel Nieva’s novel Dengue Boy (2023) within the framework of Latin American climate fiction (cli-fi). It examines how the novel reconfigures notions of time, catastrophe, and agency in contexts of environmental crisis. Nieva disrupts the linear temporality of progress and offers a critique of the techno-optimism characteristic of disaster capitalism. The paper argues that the novel frames catastrophe not as a future event but as a structural condition of contemporary capitalism, in which ecological collapse becomes a mode of accumulation. In response, the “childhood of the world” functions as a utopian image that recovers the Earth’s ancestral potency and reimagines modes of coexistence among humans, machines, and geophysical forces.
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