Speculative coalitions : Indigenous and Chican@ futurisms, narrative form, and decolonial approaches to international law

This dissertation analyzes an unprecedented era of Indigenous and Chican@ speculative fiction that advocated for the mobilization of international coalitions. During the first half of the 1990s, a critical mass of Indigenous and Chican@ authors wrote speculative texts that imagined how international coalitions of non-state actors can enact legal reform across North America. Attending to this boom of speculative fiction production, I will examine legal arguments made by Indigenous and Chican@ authors between 1990 and 1995. I address texts that identify specific targets for legal reform: international human rights law, international legal norms, citizenship criteria, electoral systems and collective land ownership. By studying this literary phenomena across both Indigenous and Chican@ literatures, this project offers a robust measurement of how non-state actors at the end of the twentieth century conceptualized legal reform on a continental scale. While the authors of the texts discussed in this dissertation were motivated by different political and cultural interests, they all, through Indigenous and Chican@ speculative fiction, identify international coalitions as essential to achieving their distinct goals; together, they express the belief that legal reform can be attained by mobilizing international alliances across diverse national and ethnic identities.