As the ethnologist Ernesto De Martino points out, it’s unlikely the fact that an ethnographic study doesn’t devote a chapter to how peoples and communities construct appropriate cultural scaffolding to mitigate the upsetting imminence of the ultimate end. Since the beginning of time and from any latitude, humans have been busy imagining (and provoking) the epilogue. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, we have witnessed countless surprising apocalypses: the nuclear anathema, the Nazi holocaust, the human environmental crisis and, more recently, the looming advent of artificial intelligence as the ultimate competition to man's prerogatives.

Yet we are possibly living in the era most obsessed with the end of the world. As the philosopher Rosi Braidotti meaningfully warns us, we are probably the generation of homo apocalipticus, for whom the collective imagination of the end strongly sustains our figurations of the present. Through philosophy, literature, cinema, art, certain sectors of contemporary thought seem on the one hand to be productively inspired by the idea of our finitude, and on the other, the Apocalypse becomes an image or icon reproduced a thousand times over by a mass media seriality that prevents any critical reflection.

This dossier is an open invitation to consider and reflect on the end of the world from the world that, at some point, someone defined as "New", decreeing the end of other native worlds. Latin America is postulated as the privileged outpost from which to observe the pyrotechnic spectacle of the grand finale. More than anywhere else, in fact, Latin America has had to confront, in order to build itself up, the edict of extermination pronounced by the colonial powers, elaborating an entire cosmovision, a "way of inhabiting", founded on precariousness and the valorisation of the uncertain and vulnerable.

The new issue of the journal "Quaderni Culturali IILA" will focus on the complex contemporary Latin American production (literary, cinematographic, performative, artistic...) dedicated to the conclusive event, between new utopias, dystopias and post humanist explorations, with articles that propose critical readings based on the following themes:

- Apocalyptic visions from and about Latin America
- New Latin American science fiction (neo indigenist, Afro futurist, etc.)
- Eco critical views towards and from the end of the world
- Critical Utopias, Dystopias and Post humanisms
- Native cyber cultures and techno religions in literature and the arts.

Papers of between 5000 and 7000 words in length should be submitted by February 1, 2025. The necessary documents for submission and the editorial norms of the journal can be found
on the website: https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/iila
The languages accepted are: English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and Portuguese.