Author : Samuel Ellis Ginsburg
Release : 2018
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Kind : eBook
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Book Synopsis The Cyborg Caribbean by : Samuel Ellis Ginsburg

Download or read book The Cyborg Caribbean written by Samuel Ellis Ginsburg. This book was released on 2018. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the genre of science fiction has origins in European and North American colonizing fantasies, many Caribbean authors are now imagining future worlds that highlight or challenge both historical and present oppressions. Many of these texts describe futuristic machines as a way to underline the historical connection between technology and the domination of marginalized bodies. In this project, I examine various 21st-century Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican science fiction texts, looking at how each author manipulates the genre to contest transhumanist, neoliberal narratives that link technological and social progress. Instead, these texts opt for a posthumanist understanding of hypertechnology that seeks the blurred line between body and machine as an opportunity for destabilizing normative binaries while recognizing the ways in which increased technology may amplify the marginalization of certain bodies based on race, gender, sexuality and other factors. As both a historical and literary study, this project seeks to trace the legacies of techno-colonialism and techno-authoritarianism. Each chapter in this dissertation is organized around a specific technological advancement that has challenged the conceptualization of corporeality in the Caribbean: electroshock or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), nuclear weapons, and the digital avatars. In Chapter 1, texts by Pedro Cabiya, Alexandra Pagán-Vélez and Vagabond Beaumont represent ECT abuse in ways that show the manipulation of narratives of health and science in order to justify state torture. Chapter 2 analyzes works by Rey Emmanuel Andújar, Yasmín Silvia Portales, and Erick Mota to explore the textual nature of nuclear power and the ways that nuclear rhetoric challenges acts of remembrance and mourning. In Chapter 3, texts by Maielis González Fernández, Jorge Enrique Lage, and Rita Indiana Hernández demonstrate the ways social inequalities may be amplified in digital worlds, along with the role that avatars can play in reshaping cyberspace. The goal of this dissertation is to show how Caribbean science fiction can be used to highlight and contest the rhetorical and social legacies of techno-dominance, while mapping out possible resistances for the future