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  5. Volume 43, Issue 3, 2024

European Journal of American Culture - Recent Reflections on the Posthuman Condition in American Literature and Culture, Sept 2024

Recent Reflections on the Posthuman Condition in American Literature and Culture

Recent Reflections on the Posthuman Condition in American Literature and Culture, Sept 2024

Language: English
  • Introduction

      • Introduction: ‘Recent Reflections on the Posthuman Condition in American Literature and Culture’

        https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00123_2

        The theories and notions around the posthuman have become, in recent years, a key framework to approach contemporary culture and its products. Inspired by the growing cross-disciplinarity in the field of critical posthumanism, as well as by the increased prevalence of posthumanist ideas in North American literature and culture, this Special Issue seeks to map some recent trends regarding the understanding of the posthuman at two different levels: in terms of critical approach and regarding the types of texts explored. Thus, the articles included in this Special Issue resort to the critical tools provided by critical posthumanism, trauma studies, new materialism, transhumanism and digital anthropology, bringing to the fore not just the outstanding critical currency of these disciplines by themselves and their usefulness to approach contemporary artistic products, but also the points of convergence and divergence among them. Apart from their emphasis on cross-disciplinarity, the articles that make up this Special Issue explore a wide breath of cultural products, giving readers a glimpse into the current relevance of posthumanist ideas in the North American literary and cultural scene. At the same time, the contributions in this Special Issue map recent aesthetic and narratological approaches to the posthuman, the non-human and the more-than-human world, pointing to posthumanism as a constantly evolving field. Overall, the articles bring together the most recent scholarship within the fast-changing field of critical posthumanism and explore different twenty-first-century understandings of the posthuman subject at a time when the task of (re)defining what it means to be human is perhaps more pressing than ever.

  • Articles

      • The posthuman trauma novel: Reconfiguring subjectivity in Patricia Lockwood’s (2021)

        https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00124_1

        Trauma studies and posthuman studies are two paradigms that became popular in the late twentieth century and have been used to define the culture of our time. Both fields deal with subjectivity, agency, embodiment and the relation with ‘the other’, viewing subjectivity and the self as shattered and fragmented. However, while trauma studies focuses on the process of acting out and working through to return to a sealed, complete conception of the self, posthuman studies explores the fluidity and interconnectedness that results from the decentralization of human subjectivity in our technological, boundary-blurring reality. This article introduces the concept of the posthuman trauma novel, which delves into the shared sense of vulnerability between trauma and posthumanism and the complex identity dynamics emerging from these paradigms. Formally, these novels favour complex timelines, non-linear narratives, interconnected plotlines, emotional detachment, machine-like narrators and thematic fragmentation, among other strategies. Patricia Lockwood’s (2021) is a representative example of the posthuman trauma novel that navigates virtual and real worlds. Through fragmentation, intrusive images and non-linearity, the novel represents the disintegration of the mind caused by the internet and social media in which the sense of self is engulfed by a collective consciousness emerging from the never-ending scrolling and the juxtapositions between the important and the shallow. It is a real-world trauma that pulls the protagonist out of the virtual world of disembodiment and detachment. While acknowledging the importance of social media and digital technologies, the novel also sees the blurring of digital and physical spaces as a wound of modern subjectivity, a suffering that needs to be worked through to achieve an embodied and embedded conceptualization of the self.

    • Ethico-onto-epistem-ology and traumatic memories in Rivers Solomon’s and

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00125_1

      Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism and her notion of ethico-onto-epistemology, based on the inseparability of ethics, being and knowledge, disclaim any immanent distinction between the human and the nonhuman, the mind and the body, and discourse and matter. The approach to reality as discursively-materially constituted brings together critical posthumanism, agential realism and new materialism, which comprise Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative ethics and Barad’s ethics of knowing – in line with their respective ethics of becoming and ethics of entanglement. Bearing these premises in mind, this article presents an analysis of trans-species, trans-corporeal ethico-onto-epistem-ology in Rivers Solomon’s latest Afrofuturist works, (2019) and (2021) as the posthumanist means that enable characters to cope with their ancestors’ traumatic memories. portrays the as a new species emerging from the entangled intra-action of relata (the unborn children of pregnant Black women thrown overboard slave ships) and their medium (the ocean). Simultaneously, the history of the oppressed is presented as discursive-material and embodied in the figure of ‘the historian’, who hosts the memories of all their ancestors liberating the other from their traumatic history. In , with a marked posthumanist neo-materialist stance, memories adopt a quasi-gothic haunting quality but are indeed the trans-corporeal result of scientific experimentation on an African American sect for the US government’s military interests. The protagonist’s symbiosis with wild nature appears as the novel’s brand of ethical entanglement in the face of racial exploitation.

    • Mediating otherness: The Afrofuturist planetary posthuman in

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00126_1

      Literature and film, as forms of cultural production, have consistently participated in public discourses by raising valuable questions pertinent to contemporary historical and cultural moments. Science fiction film and literature, particularly in the 2010s, have tackled cultural discourse on the human condition by thematically addressing human relationships with technology and articulating complex theoretical discussions in a way that translates into popular culture. This article brings the theoretical concepts of planetarity and the posthuman together in dialogue to conceptualize a planetary posthuman subject who positions their self not in opposition to the other, but in relation to the other, contextualized within the understanding of the planet as an interconnected whole, and embodied in the figure of the cyborg. It focuses on Afrofuturist science fiction and how it intervenes in discourses on race and otherness using this model of a planetary posthuman subject through the analysis of a popular example of mainstream Afrofuturist work. This article explores how the film (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler – a commercially successful and groundbreaking work of Afrofuturist Hollywood science fiction film – addresses cultural discourses on race and otherness while reflecting on the (post)human condition by presenting Afrofuturist planetary posthuman subjects. Finally, it explores how the film, using the theoretical model of the planetary posthuman, intervenes in public discourses on the human condition by mediating in current conceptualizations of race, otherness and technology, challenging neo-liberal global capitalism and its polarizing tendencies.

    • VanderMeer’s eco-weird doubles: (Post)human transformation and the tipping point

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00127_1

      Anthropogenic climate change is dangerously close to triggering climate tipping points, causing irreversible damage to the Earth’s ecosystems. To avoid these, we must transform the contemporary human into a yet unknown new sustainable human – a posthuman. The weird literary tradition has often resurfaced in times of crisis to express the fear of encountering the unknown and is now, as I will argue, taking on the new form of the ‘eco-weird’ in response to impending climate tipping points. Contrary to prior weird movements, the eco-weird allows for the strangeness of the weird to feel familiar, encouraging the readers to view the unknowns of human transformation with more hope than fear. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, I will trace the evolution of the weird literary tradition to the eco-weird and explain why this aesthetic is such a poignant response to tipping points. Second, I will analyse Jeff VanderMeer’s series through the eco-weird lens, focusing on how the author inverts the Freudian uncanny double to produce an eco-weird double that reifies radical transformation and encourages the readers to welcome the unknowns of becoming posthuman.

    • Beyond SF: Reading the posthuman in crime fiction

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00128_1

      Science fiction (SF)’s capacity to imagine alternative futures, embodiments and forms of agency is a crucial resource for the ethical project of critical posthumanism. In the twenty-first century, however, science-fictionality has surpassed its traditional generic boundaries to become a tool for comprehending and intervening in our changing reality, made concrete in different media and styles. This has translated into a rise of recombinant genre fiction, whereby themes and scenarios related to technoscience are addressed by genres other than SF. One illustrative instance of this tendency is the burgeoning body of works that integrate the conventions of SF and crime fiction, which have been steadily on the rise for the past five years in anglophone literary markets. Aiming to open up new avenues for the study of this critically unexplored corpus, this article sets out to assemble a critical apparatus for examining the representation of posthumanity in these hybrid texts. Drawing from an approach to crime fiction as a vector for dialectically exploring social and ethical questions, this article will argue that the constituent elements of the genre, namely its close interrelation with technological breakthroughs, its ambivalent engagement with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism and its affinity with interrogations of the exploitative workings of neo-liberalism, make crime fiction a productive locus for challenging dominant conceptions of the posthuman, as well as for articulating alternative visions indexed to critical posthumanist thought.

    • Posthuman icons: Virtual YouTubers’ bodies beyond the cyborg

      https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac_00129_1

      Virtual and artificial YouTubers (VTubers) show us digital embodiments that appear as computer-generated avatars and are animated by motion-tracking software. In their videos, their bodies traverse overlapping environments – streaming platforms, video games and even their physical environment. One figure through which one can understand these bodies as technocultural assemblages in their complex entanglements is the cyborg. As an analytical tool, the cyborg has emerged as a concept to think about bodies outside of mere juxtapositions such as nature and culture or man and woman. Instead, she emphasizes organic–machinic connections. By looking at the three examples of Miquela Sousa, Ai Angel and CodeMiko, I reconsider VTubers’ videos as . Accordingly, I re-examine the figure of the cyborg and its limitations as a tool for analysis. In doing so, I ask about the (dis)embodied and animated facets of VTubers and their avatars’ bodies. Finally, I discuss VTubers as posthuman icons beyond the cyborg, examining the relationship of VTubers’ bodies to transcendence and immanence.

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