Re-writing the Bhabhian “Mimic Man”: Akin, the Posthuman Other in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites

Cultural critics have sought to define the term posthuman1 as primarily a condition that does away with hierarchical forms of power and control. It recognizes a transformation of the human species into a subject position that moves from an oppositional politics of segregating the human “self” from the “other” to one of acknowledging the “other” as part of the human “self.” 2 With the advent of the posthuman condition comes the need to re-define human rights in a posthuman context. Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Adulthood Rites3 introduces us to Oankali, gene-trading aliens who travel through space. They intercept and save the human species that is dying in a world ravaged by nuclear war. The Oankali mission of salvation has a hidden agenda,4 though: whoever opts to be saved needs to forgo the right to reproduce. Reproduction, in this new world where human beings are a salvaged species and not the predominant one, is on the terms laid out by the Oankali aliens. The terms of Oankali reproduction that start off with genetic modifications of the human Lilith, the Oankali nominated progenitor of the posthuman in Dawn, enforces the birth of a hybrid—a human-alien construct, Akin, who is related to both humans and aliens, the posthuman other. Built on a “postcolonial” definition of a “mimic man,”5 a product of what Bart Simon and Jill Didur call “critical posthumanism,”6 who sees the other in the self, Akin modulates and modifies his sense of agency and choice as he contends with complex political and ethical issues. Deployed as an Oankali informer among humans, Akin ultimately emerges as the savior, a spokesperson for the human species who adroitly balances contradictory roles in a culture seemingly “colonial” in its intent

Posthumanist Education

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Breaching bodily boundaries: posthuman (dis)embodiment and ecstatic speech in lip-synch performances by boychild

Employing a sci-fi inspired aesthetic, queer, black, trans artist, boychild presents audiences with a future vision of human embodiment. Strobe lighting makes her appear fragmented or as if she were a hologram. An electronic light flickers behind her teeth. Her eyes are obscured by whited-out contact lenses. boychild’s is a body interfaced with technology. She is imaged as non-human, cyborgian. Whilst boychild considers her onstage persona to be female, her body reads ambiguously. Transgressing demarcations between the supposedly polarised categories of organic/machine, male/female, the queer form of embodiment she presents is posthuman. Implementing the theoretical principles of Rosi Braidotti’s anti-humanist concept of the posthuman and Donna Haraway’s cyborg politics, I argue that boychild’s engagement with the posthuman does not end with aesthetics, rather it extends to the plotting of a posthuman politics, posing a radical challenge to heteronormative body politics. Theorising boychild’s lip-synch performances, I argue for her style of performance as a technologised form of ventriloquism, as she ‘speaks’ with the voice of another or the voice of another speaks through her. Using Mladen Dolar’s and Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytical philosophies in conjunction with Steven Connor’s literature on ventriloquism, I unpick the intricacies of presence and power inherent to her ‘voice’ and indicate its broader political implications

The days of the human may be numbered : theorizing cyberfeminist metaphors ; rereading Kleist’s "Gliedermann" as Cyborg ; as "Ghost in the Shell"

A lot has already been written on Heinrich von Kleist's "Über das Marionettentheater" ("On the Marionette Theater"). I will engage in a reading that is based on deconstructivist approaches as well as on queer- and cyberfeminist-thoughtboth of which reform concepts of the subject by taking into question bodily and gender coherence and gender identity. Queer Studies provoke a thinking of the multiplication of difference as well as a thinking of difference within ('entities') rather than of difference between ('entities'). Cyberfeminism explores the possibilities of manipulating and changing the physical body and provides metaphors for thinking 'posthuman' identities. Donna Harawayin allusion to the hybridization of gender relations and gender conceptionsposits the cyborg as a leading figure/figuration of feminist politics

Manifestations of the post-secular emerging within discourses of posthumanism

This paper discusses the concepts of posthuman and post-secular in critical theory

Race as Technology: From Posthuman Cyborg to Human Industry

Cyborg and prosthetic technologies frame prominent posthumanist approaches to understanding the nature of race. But these frameworks struggle to accommodate the phenomena of racial passing and racial travel, and their posthumanist orientation blurs useful distinctions between racialized humans and their social contexts. We advocate, instead, a humanist approach to race, understanding racial hierarchy as an industrial technology. Our approach accommodates racial passing and travel. It integrates a wide array of research across disciplines. It also helpfully distinguishes among grounds of racialization and conditions facilitating impacts of such racialization

Anti-Bourgeois Theory

In his celebrated 2009 memoir Returning to Reims, the Parisian intellectual and theorist Didier Eribon travels home for the first time in thirty years following the death of his father. There he tries to account for the change in politics of his working class family over the period he has been away: from supporting the Communist Party to voting for the National Front. But Eribon also discusses the transition he himself has undergone as a result of having escaped his working class culture and environment through education, and how this has left him unsure whom it is he is actually writing for. He may be addressing the question of what it means to grow up poor and gay, however he is aware few working class people are ever likely to read his book.At the same time, Eribon emphasizes that his non-conforming identity has left him with a sense of just how important it is to display a ‘lack of respect for the rules’ of bourgeois liberal humanist ‘decorum that reign in university circles’, and that insist ‘people follow established norms regarding “intellectual debate” when what is at stake clearly has to do with political struggle’. Together with his friend Édouard Louis and partner Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Eribon wants to ‘rethink’ the antihumanist theoretical tradition of Foucault, Derrida, Cixous et al. to produce a theory ‘in which something is at stake’: a theory that speaks about ‘class, exploitation, violence, repression, domination, intersectionality’, and yet has the potential to generate the same kind of power and excitement as ‘a Kendrick Lamar concert’. With ‘Anti-Bourgeois Theory’ I likewise want to reinvent what it means to theorise by showing a certain lack of respect for the rules of bourgeois decorum the university hardly ever questions. I want do so, however, by also breaking with those bourgeois liberal humanist conventions of intellectual debate that – for all his emphasis on rebelling ‘in and through’ the technologies of knowledge production – continue to govern the antihumanist theoretical tradition Eribon and his collaborators are associated with. Included in these conventions are culturally normative ideas of the human subject, the proprietorial author, the codex print book, critical reflection, linear thought, the long-form argument, self-expression, originality, creativity, fixity and copyright. I will argue that even the current landfill of theoretical literature on the posthuman and the Anthropocene is merely a form of bourgeois liberal humanism that is padded with nonhuman stuffing – technologies, objects, animals, insects, plants, fungi, compost, microbes, stones, geological formations – to make it appear different. Can we not do better than this?<br/

The unbearable trauma of being : death, hope, and (in)humanity in the work of Cormac McCarthy

For as long as the self-christened homo sapiens has roamed the Earth, various mythologies and their respective afterlives have followed without fail. Through the work of Cormac McCarthy, this paper seeks to explore the connections (if any) between mortality, hope, and the intrinsically human need for narratives of the afterlife. The term “after(-)life” is understood to denote not simply the realm that supposedly awaits us after physical death; throughout this paper, the after-life is also investigated as that mode of being which occurs follow a point of trauma, be it physical, mental, spiritual, or epistemological in nature. Three of McCarthy’s most pivotal novels (The Road, Child of God, and Blood Meridian) will be discussed in relation to the question of trauma, hope, and inhumanity, and what it means to be after the human experiences a distinct collapse in meaning. Finally, this paper endeavours to discuss such questions as “why this human need for hope?”, “how does hope persist in the face of inhumanity?”, and “is it this resilience that makes us human?”peer-reviewe