Two broadly anthropocene concerns—the ‘human’ condition along with the
condition of this human planet, Earth—bear on all discursive practices central
to contemporary areas of research in humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
Both these concerns reconfigure ways in which humans have come to make sense of
themselves and of the world which they share with other forms of life. The
anthropocene—ramifications of Cartesian vision of human subject, the giver of
meaning, that ultimately subdues all nature and co-existing life-forms—however
is challenged by a posthuman turn in the latter half of 20th Century that
trenchantly undercuts the foundations of humanism catapulting from the set
boundaries established by the ideal of Enlightenment. The beginning of science
fiction and its global appeal, dawning around the latter half of twentieth
century, inspired a series of directors—Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg,
George Lucas, Ridley Scott, Lana and Lily Wachowski, Andrew Niccol, Spike
Jonze, Guillermo del Toro, Dennis Villeneuve, Alex Garland, and Timur
Bekmambetov among many others—who have given shape to the desire, fear, and
wonder of an amorphous future through this posthumanist turn.
Pramod K. Nayar characterizes posthumanism as a philosophical, political,
and cultural approach that addresses the “…question of the human in the age of
technological modification, hybridized life forms, new discoveries of the
sociality (and ‘humanity’) of animals and a new understanding of ‘life’
itself.” Discursive and imaginative openings of the posthuman vision within the
popular culture have disseminated this challenge across the collective
imaginary of people through stories from varied media like novels, films, short
stories, cartoons, comic books, television/web series, animation, musical
albums, etc. In the wake of these representations, basic assumptions connected
with human relationships, like building a community and connection between mind
and body, are challenged in the face of imagined potentialities of this peculiar
model of ‘human’ unconstrained by the forces of history as well as social and
cultural constructs. As riveting as material innovations of humanity’s
technological endeavours these narratives both disturb and alert us to
re-imaginings of life and cosmos that are engineered in ecological,
technological, and fantasized futures.
In its grand scheme, posthumanism most widely undertakes variations in
human form flowing across species, inanimate things, and synthetically created
life forms. Within the same sweep, it also addresses the increasingly tenuous
understanding of life in its ‘normal’ form. Scientific development as the
technological maelstrom of our civilization—bionics, machine learning,
interactive computer interface augmenting possibilities of assimilating human
within the domain of technology in a reified whole—has discredited humans’
faith in the established meaning of ostensible reality as well as larger
metaphysical model of causality. Defamiliarizing us to the present and the
overall structure of the universe as we know it, various representations of the
posthuman within popular fiction deconstruct and reconstruct the exceptionalism
of the anthropocene. Here space of popular literature, particularly science
fiction (speculative fiction), emerges as a textual site that engages,
ferments, and gives shape to transformative possibilities of posthuman world in
terms of either utopia or dystopia.
Representative motifs of this world, working at both material and
symbolic level, assess the myriad faces of a projected future.
The current Call for Papers invites original contributions to tease out
the nuances of posthumanist vision within popular culture. In light of the
above concerns, interested scholars can consider following topics (but are not
to be limited to them):
- Ethics of biotechnological interventions
- Narrative of truth claims in evolutionary sciences
- Operational Institutional surveillance
- Scope and limits of artificial intelligence
- Interaction with non-human others
- Quest to overcome singularity of death
- Technology/machine/animal: where is the human?
- Human inside the posthuman
- Tropes of posthumanism within popular culture
- Religion and posthumanism
- Multiple subjectivities within posthumanism
- Superheroes and posthumans
- Aliens and affective emotions
Only complete paper submissions will be considered for publication. The
papers need to be submitted according to the latest guidelines of the MLA
format. You are welcome to submit full length papers (not less than 3500 words)
along with a 150 words abstract, list of keywords, bio-note, and word count (in
a separate word doc) on or before 15th April, 2020. Please put the name of the
CFP you are submitting for in the subject line. Although the authors are free
to submit till the deadline, we really appreciate early submissions.
All necessary author guidelines. Please email your submissions and
queries to – llids.journal@gmail.com.
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