Decolonizing the Novum

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network — "Decolonizing the Novum"

Host: Kim Adams (with Sarani Bhoshu)
Guest: Zach Zimmer
Date: April 13, 2026
Episode Theme: Decolonizing the Novum – Rethinking 'Newness' and Speculation in the History and Literature of the Conquest of the Americas

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Kim Adams of New Books Network (co-branded with High Theory) interviews literary scholar Zach Zimmer about his recent book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas. The conversation explores Zimmer’s concept of "decolonizing the novum," examining how speculative fiction—especially works from Latin America and Indigenous perspectives—can challenge or rethink the notion of “newness” (the novum) as rooted in colonial encounters, particularly the European conquest of the Americas.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing "Decolonizing the Novum"

• Definition of Novum:

  • "The novum is just the new component of a SF narrative, most simply put." (Zach Zimmer, 02:10)
  • Zimmer references the work of theorist Darko Suvin, where "novum" is central to what defines science fiction (SF): something essentially 'new' or novel within the narrative's world.

• Zimmer's Application:

  • Zimmer examines works primarily by Latin American authors and artists that reinterpret the conquest and colonization of the Americas using speculative and science fiction modalities.
  • Example approaches include reimagining the Conquest as alien invasion or alternative histories where “the Aztecs go to Spain in the 1480s” (05:02).
  • The works ground their speculation in historical archives and seek to open up the idea of “novelty” as a decolonial project.

2. Historical Context and the Invention of the New World

• Concept as Invention:
  • The "New World" is not a natural discovery but a constructed concept; its invention is linked to Iberian colonial projects (Zach Zimmer, 05:33).
  • The Mexican philosopher Edmundo Ogorman is cited: "the New World is invented" (05:33), emphasizing its constructed, not organic, nature.

3. Decolonization, Metaphor, and Scientific Discourse

• Is Decolonization Metaphorical?

  • While Tuck and Yang assert “decolonization is not a metaphor,” Zimmer notes colonization itself is entrenched in metaphorical scientific language:
    • Example: In scientific literature, the first life to appear after a lava flow are “colonizer species” (06:51).
  • He calls for grappling with these embedded metaphors, especially when considering methodologies like “decolonizing science.”

• Temporal Framing:

  • Zimmer suggests most postcolonial theory is anchored in 19th-century (Anglo) empire and industrial capitalism, but the conquest of the Americas marks an arguably even more foundational moment (08:37).
  • He underscores the advanced technologies at play in the 16th-century Americas, such as mining in Potosí (09:11).

4. Speculative Fiction as Historiographic Critique

• Alternatives to Historical Determinism:

  • The examined novels and art "create space to think about contingency in history, to think about how other possible worlds might have come out of this moment" (10:25).
  • Contrasts with deterministic grand narratives, e.g., Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.

• Historiographic Metafiction:

  • Related Latin American tradition of metafiction (10:55): self-conscious, postmodern novels that draw attention to narrative construction.
  • SF narratives take this further through alternative histories and "displacements to aliens or inversions" (05:35).

5. Grounding Speculation in Historical Archives

• Importance of Archives:
  • “If there is a true commitment to decolonizing this moment... the historical grounding is paramount.” (Zach Zimmer, 12:08)
  • Example: Carmen Boullosa’s time travel novel, in which Moctezuma returns to 1989 Mexico City, deeply engages the indigenous Nahuatl sources compiled in Broken Spears (13:01).

6. Opening up Possibilities and Imagining Otherwise

• Speculation as Resistance:
  • It’s not only about “thinking the world otherwise, but trying to understand both the limits and the potentials within archival sources” (12:12).
  • The act of speculative re-imagining is seen as reconnecting with “moments when the New World... was shattering open a lot of received wisdom in Europe, and also being both challenged and nurtured... by indigenous and native ontologies” (10:54).

7. How Can “Decolonizing the Novum” Save the World?

• Rupturing Determinism:

  • “Just because it happened one way doesn't mean it was always going to happen that way.” (Zach Zimmer, 15:20)
  • Engaging speculative imagination "can show us... the possibilities of the unfolding of history were wide open" (16:03).

• Cosmovision & Repeating Patterns:

  • The concept “cosmovision” (ontological worldview) allows for recognizing how Mesoamerican frameworks of space and time might have been more sophisticated than the Spanish colonial mindset (16:58).
  • Newer novels like Álvaro Enrigue's Now Dream of Empires show overlapping timelines and rupture the linearity of colonial history.

• Resisting Triumphalist Narratives:

  • By moving beyond “celebratory triumphalist, universal march of history” and reanimating other temporalities, these works “nurture resistance movements... and help create better stories, better films” (17:34).
  • Sometimes, adding “aliens or time travel... can make that point more poignantly. At least my students tell me when we read these books together.” (18:35)

8. Pedagogical Power of Speculative Fiction

• Engagement & Accessibility:

  • Kim Adams shares an anecdote: students "were like way more down when they were reading about it in SF narratives than... historical texts" (18:38).
  • Zimmer: “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” and “a light touch of the music hall allows for the telling of the darkest of tales”—the oblique, creative methods get students to deeply engage with difficult histories (19:14).

• Unlocking Present and Future Potentialities:

  • Referencing Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Saidiya Hartman, Zimmer advocates for speculative fiction as a method of “inhabiting” alternative historical possibilities, thereby making the past “unwritten” in new, liberating ways (19:54).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "'The novum is just the new component of a SF narrative, most simply put.'"
  — Zach Zimmer (02:10)

• "The concept of novelty itself has an intimate relationship with colonization as a process."
  — Zach Zimmer (07:33)

• "Just because it happened one way doesn't mean it was always going to happen that way."
  — Zach Zimmer (15:20)

• "If there is a true commitment to decolonizing this moment and also speculative and science fiction as genre, I think the historical grounding is paramount."
  — Zach Zimmer (12:08)

• "A light touch of the music hall allows for the telling of the darkest of tales."
  — Zach Zimmer, quoting from a novel's epigraph (19:14)

• "[Speculative fiction] can actually reconnect to potential... understand that things could have been otherwise can unlock potentialities also in our present moment."
  — Zach Zimmer (20:13)

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Key Timestamps

• 01:47 – Zach Zimmer’s introduction and academic background
• 02:10 – Definition of "decolonizing the novum" and the project's genesis
• 05:00 – Examples of speculative re-imaginings of the Conquest
• 06:23 – Discussion of decolonization as metaphor and scientific language of colonization
• 08:37 – Critique of postcolonial theory’s temporal framing
• 10:25 – Alternative histories and the limits of determinist narratives
• 12:08 – Importance of grounding speculative fiction in historical archives
• 13:01 – Carmen Boullosa’s novel as a case study
• 14:36 – "How will decolonizing the novum save the world?"
• 15:20 – Challenging inevitability in history
• 16:58 – Cosmovision and Álvaro Enrigue’s novel
• 18:38 – Pedagogical impact of SF for teaching colonial history
• 19:54 – Potential histories, archival violence, and present/future liberation

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Tone and Style

• Engaged, Inquisitive, and Slightly Irreverent:
  • Host and guest approach deep theoretical questions with both rigor and humor ("getting weird is what might help save us" – 14:36).
• Grounded but Imaginative:
  • Zimmer insists on historical and archival grounding for speculation, yet encourages imaginative, non-linear approaches to history.

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Summary

Zimmer’s work on "decolonizing the novum" merges postcolonial critique with the tools of speculative fiction—blurring genres, times, and perspectives to unsettle conventional narratives about the Conquest of the Americas. By rooting speculative imagination in archival materials and indigenous cosmovisions, he hopes both creators and readers can see history as a space of radical contingency and possibility. This, in turn, can nurture resistance, new stories, and alternative futures—creating a meaningful intersection between memory, imagination, and justice.

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For further reading: Zach Zimmer’s First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas and related works by Carmen Boullosa, Álvaro Enrigue, and others detailed in the episode.

Transcript

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[Zach Zimmer]

It is an honor to share.

[McDonald's Promo Host]

No, it's our honor.

[Sarani Bhoshu]

It is our larger honor.

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No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side

[Zach Zimmer]

the and participate in McDonald's while supplies last. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Kim Adams]

Hi siri.

[Sarani Bhoshu]

Welcome to High Theory.

[Kim Adams]

In this podcast we get high on the substance of theory.

[Sarani Bhoshu]

I'm Sarani Bhoshu.

[Kim Adams]

And I'm Kim Adams.

[Sarani Bhoshu]

We are two tired academics trying to save critique from itself.

[Kim Adams]

Welcome to High Theory. Today I'm speaking with Zach Zimmer about Decolonizing the Nova. Zack, can I ask you to introduce yourself to our listeners?

[Zach Zimmer]

Thanks for having me on. My name is Zach Zimmer. I'm an associate professor of literature at University of California, Santa Cruz. I teach classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, and limit concepts approached through literature and aesthetics.

[Kim Adams]

Okay, so then tell us what the heck is decolonizing the Novum?

[Zach Zimmer]

So decolonizing the Novum is an idea that I address in a book that I just published called the First Contact Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas. And some of your listeners may know that the novum is a concept that was elaborated by Darko Suvin and very much connected to speculative and science fiction that maybe just agreed to call SF generally. So the novum is just the new component of a SF narrative, most simply put. And so that's one of the definitional components of what makes something science fiction for Dark OC or SF more broadly. For me. In my book, I'm looking at 20th, 21st century contemporary artists and Writers from all over the Americas, mainly, but specifically Latin America, although I'd get into some French Canada and work with indigenous writers and a couple wild cards, like a Mexican novelist who writes in Catalan. But all of these writers, the thing that unifies them in my book is that they're looking back to specific historical and archival materials from the conquest and colonization of the Americas and using a speculative modality to rethink histories of contact and colonization. This is in the genesis of what came to be known as the New World. Right, the conquest of the Americas. And so I make an argument in the book that the New World, as an event that is historically connected to 1492, Columbus arriving in the Caribbean, is actually structurally central to what we understand in modernity when we talk about novelty as such, newness as such. So I look to these authors because they are developing a literary and aesthetic practice of trying to think through novelty as a concept in the genre of science fiction, grounded in this historical specificity of the conquest of the Americas. So that is why this rewriting histories of colonization in the New World can be one mechanism to try to open up the concept of the novum to a project of decolonization.

[Kim Adams]

All right, so then we're sort of shifting the novum. We're taking it from its SF context, and we're sort of sort of putting it into thinking about this colonial history that.

[Zach Zimmer]

That is part of the project. But all of the texts that I'm looking at, all of the artworks and installations, they are somehow engaging in speculative or science fiction as a modality. So it's like rewriting the Conquest as an alien invasion or doing an alternative history or alternative temporality. One of the novels is Mesoamerican folks sail to Spain in the 1480s and have a kind of like, just so madcap colonization attempt that ends up unsuccessfully, leading to all kinds of wild adventures. But then that is the thing that sets into motion what we understand as, like, the actual history of the conquest.

[Kim Adams]

Huh.

[Zach Zimmer]

Okay, so, like, these displacements to aliens or inversions or trying to bring indigenous mapping techniques to describing, like, projects of exploration and things like this, but it's all historically grounded in this specific moment. That is the moment when, as the Mexican philosopher Edmundo Ogorman said, the New World is invented. The concept of the New World is not something that happened organically, was a project of invention. And so that's a very important concept in all of Latin American literature and culture.

[Kim Adams]

So then thinking about that, and I'd love to sort of hear more about these specific Examples, how do I use decolonizing the novum?

[Zach Zimmer]

You know, I'm sure again, many of your listeners will be very familiar with Tuck and Yang's influential article and intervention that decolonization is not a metaphor. And I very much appreciate their intervention and agree with it on a political level. That said, colonization itself is a concept that works in the metaphorical register. So one example that I give to, to show the kind of depth and penetration of colonization as a grounded concept in scientific discourse is after a volcano erupts and the lava flows down and kills all of the flora and fauna by the hotness of the lava, basically nothing can survive direct contact with the lava. There's no life in that region for many years, generations and generations. And then eventually life will be receded in that area, maybe through seeds blowing or animals kind of running over and defecating or things like that. And those first species that are repopulating a lava flow are in the scientific literature called colonizer species. Okay, Right. And I think this is something that people who are insisting decolonization is not a metaphor and looking to do something like decolonize science as a methodology or a practice need to grapple with in ways that are not necessarily like, direct or straightforward. So the concept of novelty itself has an intimate relationship with colonization as a process. And nowhere is that more justified or nowhere is that more visible than in the history of the invention of the New World itself that comes out of iberian colonization in 1492, beginning at that point. So one of the ways I think we can use that concept. Well, one, it's just. It's a good way to help me recommend good books and films and artworks for your listeners to check out which we can get into. But I also think that a lot of post colonial theory is very much grounded in the 19th century experience of Anglo empire English speaking. Some of the most profound and canonical foundational works in post colonial theory are specifically addressing that time which very much meshes nicely with our understanding of like industrial capitalism and these kinds of like macro historical development. But by insisting on this earlier moment of colonization that is tied up in our idea of the New World, we get to kind of go back to an era that people might consider like a pre technological era, but it really isn't. This is when writing as a technology and bureaucracy, as a way of organizing the world is intimately linked to the unfolding of the colonial project in the Americas. The mining technology that's extracting the silver from the Potosi silver mine in South America and Zacatecas in Mexico, this is the forefront of technology in the world, is being developed in the Andes, in Peru, or in Mexico at the time. And I think by going back to this moment and looking at these novels and this art, using the historical material from this period as like the building block for speculative narratives, it actually creates space to think about contingency in history, to think about how other possible worlds might have come out of this moment. Possible worlds, other worlds, new worlds. But it's all coming out of this moment when the New World itself was a concept that was shattering open a lot of received wisdom in Europe, and also being both challenged and nurtured initially by the indigenous and native ontologies in the Americas, like Mesoamerican cosmovisions, Andean cosmovisions, and Amazonian cosmovisions. So it's really a moment when a lot is happening, there's a lot of potential, and that potential gets very foreclosed. And it's very easy to fit that into a techno determinist narrative that gives us the airport bestsellers like Guns, Germs and Steel and the kind of just so story about colonization, but that's not how it was experienced at the time. So there's this trend that's this very important in Latin American literature and the end of the 20th century called historiographic metafiction, tied to postmodernism. And it's putting self conscious narrators into situations where they kind of understand the construction of a literary narrative itself is happening in the book that they're talking about. So, like a lot of the classic kind of postmodern Latin American novels, your readers might know, but I think there's something really particular about these SF narratives that instead of trying to have like a knowing or ironically distanced narrator doing historical fiction and turning it into historiographic metafiction to just like blow through everything and have alternative histories of Aztecs going to Spain or aliens coming down and reenacting these stories that we know from a different perspective.

[Kim Adams]

Okay, so what I'm hearing is that we might use this to imagine otherwise.

[Zach Zimmer]

I guess that would be a shorter answer. Yeah,

[Kim Adams]

fair enough.

[Zach Zimmer]

If there is a true commitment to decolonizing this moment and also speculative and science fiction as genre, I think the historical grounding is paramount. Right. So it's not just thinking the world otherwise, but trying to understand both the limits and the potentials within archival sources. For instance, one of the novels that I write about is by a Mexican novelist named Carmen Bullosa. It's a time travel narrative and Moctezuma returns to Mexico city, but in 1989. But he's reenacting a lot of the material that's collected in this very well known anthology called, in English, Broken Spears or La Vision de los the View of the Vanquished. That is an anthology that was collected in the 1950s by Miguel Leon Portilla, gathering all of the indigenous sources, mainly written in Nahuat, native perspectives of the Conquest. And that wasn't even really considered part of the Mexican cultural tradition until Leon Portilla collected those narratives. And so when Buyosa is rewriting her story and putting Moctezuma in Mexico City in the late 20th century, she's very consciously working through that material and also thinking about the possibilities of what it means to collect the stories of the residents of Tenochtitlan and the environs around there, and also their enemies and their allies, and the conditions of scholarly production of creating that anthology itself, how it connects to Mexican national discourses about mestizaje and racial mixing connected to the Mexican Revolution. So it's all, like, very densely interwoven with historical and archival materials, but creating these, like, openings to do it. So, yes, thinking otherwise, but thinking otherwise, starting from a point that is grounded in historical material, but knowingly understands the limits of the historical material itself that, you know, in the Walter Benjamin sense, that those documents that purportedly document the civilization of the New World are also documents of the barbarism of the Conquest.

[Kim Adams]

Yeah, that's really cool. And a beautiful segue to my third question, which is how will decolonizing the novum save the world?

[Zach Zimmer]

I think I gotta get very weird to answer that question. But getting weird is what might help save us. I think what these stories can do on the aggregate that I'm writing about in the book. And since I published the book, there have been some really notable examples, especially in the Mexican context, like Alvaro Enrique's book you Dreamed of Empires, or this film called 499, that are very much about overlapping timelines manifesting in a particular space where moments of the veil is kind of ripped and we can see direct links of connection between the past, the present, and the future. Since I already talked about Benjamin once, we can talk about, like, moments of the dialectical image coming into view. And I think what this material can do is it can show us one, that just because it happened one way doesn't mean it was always going to happen that way. It was not inevitable at the time. So there's not that deterministic framework. And also, these speculative and science fiction stories, when they're grounded in both the possibilities and the limits of the archive, when it's done by artists and writers who are committed to not just churning out conquest pornography, that kind of stuff, but actually like thinking about the real potentiality in these moments. Yeah, we can call it like celebratory triumphalist, universal march of history, which is really like that ends up authorizing these airport bestsellers, like the kind of Jared diamond variety, right. That's selling a kind of universalist myth. That is not how it happened. And also it is so disconnected from the other possibilities that might have come out of that moment. And so this is really. To get back to your question. How can decolonizing the Novum save the world? Is by engaging their speculative imagination to reconnect to previous moments and understand that in those moments the possibilities of the unfolding of history were wide open. And so you can actually make real direct connections between these kinds of spirits of anti colonial resistance in the time. And also put yourself in moments where in Spanish there's this word called cosmovision. Cosmovision that names like the ontological framework of a people or of a society. And one of the things in this novel that I mentioned, Alvaro Nuringe's novel, you Dreamed of Empires. The novel is really grappling with the possibility that because of the Mesoamerican understanding of space and time, there's a true chance that they might have been better positioned than the Iberian Spanish conquistadores that they were encountering of understanding actually what was happening at the time, what was unfolding at the time. And what Alvaro does in his book is he actually opens up a porthole to connect to the 21st century and showing that there is a framework for understanding the. The repetitive nature of the colonial encounter. And so making these real connections that can nurture resistance movements and things like that. It'll just help create better stories, better films when. When this defining definitional moment of enacting otherness in a colonial framework, in unparalleled moment of conquest and colonial violence, to understand that we're talking about human beings on all sides of the encounter. And for some reason, sometimes throwing some aliens in there or throwing some time travel in there can make that point more poignantly. At least my students tell me when we read these books together.

[Kim Adams]

Yeah, yeah, so this is kind of a detour, but I'm teaching a class on the history of eugenics and we talked a fair bit about mestizahe actually, but. But the students were like way more down when they were reading about it in SF narratives than when they were reading sort of more straight up historical texts.

[Zach Zimmer]

The way that I would explain that, other than just the general levity, that is an important component, you know, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down is pretty potent life advice. In fact, one of the novels that I talk about called the Destruction of each and Every Thing, La Destruction de todos las Cosas that I don't believe is translated, but it has an epigraph, but it's basically like a light touch of the music hall, allows for the telling of the darkest of tales. And so I think that framework is important in itself, right, and can make it more palatable for the students. It also gives a more kind of oblique approach to these issues instead of the head on. But finally, and this is the real argument in the book about the power of doing this, is it can actually reconnect to potential Azulay writes about when she talks about potential history and that things could have been otherwise. And to actually fully inhabit that space and understand that things could have been otherwise can unlock potentialities also in our present moment. Moving to the future the past is unwritten in a different way than the future is unwritten. The past is unwritten because of the violence of the archive. That's why Saadia Hartman is developing a methodology of critical fabulation, specifically in relation to stories of the Middle Passage in that excellent Venus in Two Acts article, if you're familiar with that. So there is a broader context in which this stuff is happening in ways that engage human imagination in understanding structures of power and historical contingency in ways that can be unexpectedly useful in trying to build communities in the present and move those communities forward into a more just future.

[Kim Adams]

I think that's a pretty good note to end on. Thank you so much for coming and talking with us today.

[Zach Zimmer]

Thank you for letting me share some of these weird texts and ideas, but I think it's weird in precisely the

[Kim Adams]

way that we need and thank you for listening to High Theory.

[Sarani Bhoshu]

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[Kim Adams]

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[Sarani Bhoshu]

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[Kim Adams]

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[Sarani Bhoshu]

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[Kim Adams]

we hope you have a highly theoretical day.

[Zach Zimmer]

Sam.