Author: Kristen Lillvis
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351237
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149
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Book Description
Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination examines the future-oriented visions of black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle Monáe. In this innovative study, Kristen Lillvis supplements historically situated conceptions of blackness with imaginative projections of black futures. This theoretical approach allows her to acknowledge the importance of history without positing a purely historical origin for black identities. The authors considered in this book set their stories in the past yet use their characters, particularly women characters, to show how the potential inherent in the future can inspire black authority and resistance. Lillvis introduces the term “posthuman blackness” to describe the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their simultaneous existence within past, present, and future temporalities. This project draws on posthuman theory—an area of study that examines the disrupted unities between biology and technology, the self and the outer world, and, most important for this project, history and potentiality—in its readings of a variety of imaginative works, including works of historical fiction such as Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Morrison’s Beloved. Reading neo–slave narratives through posthuman theory reveals black identity and culture as temporally flexible, based in the potential of what is to come and the history of what has occurred.
Author: Kristen Lillvis
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351229
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149
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Book Description
Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 Temporal Liminality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and A Mercy -- Chapter 2 Posthuman Solidarity in Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose -- Chapter 3 Afrofuturist Aesthetics in the Works of Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe, and Gayl Jones -- Chapter 4 Posthuman Multiple Consciousness in Octavia E. Butler's Science Fiction -- Chapter Submarine Transversality in Texts by Sheree Renée Thomas and Julie Dash -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index
Author: Maxine Lavon Montgomery
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350124524
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Exploring postapocalypticism in the Black literary and cultural tradition, this book extends the scholarly conversation on Afro-futurist canon formation through an examination of futuristic imaginaries in representative twentieth and twenty-first century works of literature and expressive culture by Black women in an African diasporic setting. The author demonstrates the implications of Afro-futurist literary criticism for Black Atlantic literary and critical theory, investigating issues of hybridity, transcending boundaries, temporality and historical recuperation. Covering writers including Octavia Butler, Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward and Beyoncé, this book examines the ways Black women artists attempt to recover a raced and gendered heritage, and how they explore an evolving social order that is both connected to and distinct from the past.
Author: Melvin G. Hill
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498583814
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture makes a series of valuable contributions to ongoing dialogues surrounding posthuman blackness and Afro-transhumanism. The collection explores the Black body (self) in the context of transhuman realities from a variety of literary and artistic perspectives. These points of view convey the cultural, political, social, and historical implications that frame the space of Black embodiment, functioning as sites of potentiality and pointing toward the possibility of a transcendental Black subjectivity. In this book, many questions concerning the transformation of the Black body are presented as parallels to philosophical and religious inquiries that have traditionally been addressed from a hegemonic viewpoint. The chapters demonstrate how literature, based on its historical and social contexts, contributes to broader thought about Black transcendence of subjectivity in a posthuman framework, exploring interpretations of the “old” and visions of the “new” human.
Author: Evan Mwangi
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472125702
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Despite the central role that animals play in African writing and daily life, African literature and African thinkers remain conspicuously absent from the field of animal studies. The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics demonstrates the importance of African writing to animal studies by analyzing how postcolonial African writing—including folktales, religion, philosophy, and anticolonial movements—has been mobilized to call for humane treatment of nonhuman others. Mwangi illustrates how African authors grapple with the possibility of an alternative to eating meat, and how they present postcolonial animal-consuming cultures as shifting toward an embrace of cultural and political practices that avoid the use of animals and minimize animal suffering. The Postcolonial Animal analyzes texts that imagine a world where animals are not abused or used as a source of food, clothing, or labor, and that offer instruction in how we might act responsibly and how we should relate to others—both human and nonhuman—in order to ensure a world free of oppression. The result is an equitable world where even those who are utterly foreign to us are accorded respect and where we recognize the rights of all marginalized groups.
Author: Amelia DeFalco
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192886134
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Over the past decade cultural theory has seen a number of 'turns' - the materialist turn, the animal turn, the affective turn - that address the human as an affective, embodied, and ultimately vulnerable animal embedded in dense webs of more-than-human relations, in short as a posthuman phenomenon. Care philosophy shares this focus on embodiment and vulnerability in its insistence on interdependence as the defining condition of human life, making it well positioned for a posthuman turn. To this end, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care draws together contemporary narrative fictions that challenge humanist conceptions of care in their imaginative depiction of more-than-human affective bonds, arguing for an expansion care philosophy's central figure: the embodied, embedded, and encumbered 'human'. Fictional narratives of care between humans and robots, bioengineered creatures, clones, nonhuman animals, aliens or inanimate things, highlight the limits of humanist ethical models' capacity to register and accommodate posthuman relational intimacies, while gesturing towards a model of care able to accommodate networked interdependencies that extend beyond the human realm. Texts by Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Louisa Hall, Eva Hornung, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bhanu Kapil, and Jesmyn Ward, along with films and television programmes like Robot and Frank, Under the Skin, and Real Humans, depict a range of scenarios in which more-than-human care relations not only supersede human-human relationships, but suggest new human/animal/machine ways of being that offer novel insights into the possible presents and futures of posthuman care. Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care reveals how these fictions do their own theorizing, imagining the politics, ethics and aesthetics of specific, contextualized scenarios of posthuman contact and companionship. Interweaving posthuman theory, care philosophy and contemporary fiction, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care offers generative visions of care that make room for the incredible range of affects, energies, behaviours, attachments and dependencies that produce and sustain life in more-than-human worlds.
Author: Melissa Kagen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262544245
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
A thought-provoking analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death—with examples from The Last of Us Part II and others. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator—a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete—semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ritual of the Moon, 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Death Stranding, and The Last of Us Part II. Exploring the connotations of wandering within these different game worlds, she considers how ideologies of work, gender, colonialism, and death inflect the ways we wander through digital spaces. Overlapping and intersecting, each provides a multifaceted lens through which to understand what wandering does, lacks, implies, and offers. Kagen’s account will attune game designers, players, and scholars to the myriad possibilities of the wandering ludic body.
Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476647461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Slow to rise in the literary world, Octavia Estelle Butler cultivated musings on earth's future, reaching massive critical acclaim in the process. This companion will complement book club discussions and classroom lessons for the closest possible readings of Butler's science fiction and her texts on racism and pollution. A maven of speculative fiction so prescient that it hovers between tocsin and prophecy, Butler survives through her print stories, essays, novels and musings on individualism and compromise. This book guides the reader on a variety of Butler pieces, from her most obscure titles to her historical entries and pieces that speculate upon science, metaphysics, linguistics, psychology, writing and religion. The text serves as a guide through the depths of Octavia Butler's works and reinforces the reasons for which her name so often appears on reading lists for higher learning.
Author: Nora Castle
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031416953
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Author: Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000627101
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
This book examines Afrofuturism in African American art, focusing specifically on images of black women and how those images expand the discourse of representation in visual culture of the United States. This volume defines a visual language of Afrofuturism that includes materiality, temporality, and black liberation. Elizabeth Hamilton discusses the visual progenitors of Afrofuturism. In the artworks of Pierre Bennu, Sanford Biggers, Alison Saar, Mequitta Ahuja, Robert Pruitt, Renee Cox, Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Alma Thomas, and Harriet Powers, the fantastic narratives of Afrofuturism are uncovered through in-depth case studies. These case studies engage with Afrofuturism as a black feminist visual theory that helps to unburden the images of black women from the stereotypical visual scripts that are so common in contemporary visual culture of the United States. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, American literature, gender studies, popular culture, and African American studies.
