| Posthuman Narratives: Ethnicity and Technicity | Foster | MW 11:30-1:20 | 13888 |
This course will focus on theories of posthumanism and speculative fiction about posthumanist transformations and modes of existence. We will be especially interested in reading posthumanist critical and fictional narratives through the lens of Gilbert Simondon’s concept of technicity, as a new ontological condition embodied by technical objects. Critics like David Tomas and Isiah Lavender III have applied this concept of technicity to science fiction and especially to the rethinking of race and ethnicity within post-cyberpunk fiction. In particular, these critics identify a tension between traditional modes of belonging, community, or differentiation and exclusion (ethnicity) and their displacement by or articulation with new technologically-mediated forms of recognition and self-identification (technicity). These new technicities can be equally problematic (color-blind or reductively post-racial) and productive of new critical perspectives on histories of racialization. The fictional texts we will read are intended to represent examples of three overlapping critical concerns within this framework: the status of embodiment in high-tech cultures (including gender and sexuality as well as race); metamorphoses of kinship and interrogations of the limits of belonging; and techno-social formations and the emergence of network societies.
Primary texts will be chosen from this tentative list:
Assignments for the course will involve choosing from three options for written work, depending on whether you wish to use the class primarily as a readings course (in which case you will write a set of short critical reflections and probably do some extra reading), a research seminar (in which case you will be expected to revise and develop previous work into a longer research paper), or something in-between those two (in which case you will produce a shorter final essay, something like a conference paper).
