Abstract
As a consequence of the rapid growth of technological innovations, the world has seen the emergence of discursive fields such as transhumanism and/or posthumanism. The origin of these discursive practices can be traced back to the Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment project envisioning a teleological progress of human civilisation, though it is customary to regard these developments as a point of separation from the Enlightenment or Renaissance humanism, particularly due to the inclusion of the nonhuman animals and the extra-human futuristic technological beings. However, its basic objective remains to be the realisation of the human potential through the extension of the field of science and technology. As it happens to be the case with many other postmodern discourses, the discourse of posthumanism seems to be a corollary of neo-colonialism. Once colonised, now third-world subaltern subject becomes the strategic object of the discourse, since the posthuman man will require its ‘other’ and the otherness will be realised in the pre-posthuman subaltern agency. The subaltern subject with its lack of accessibility to the newest innovations and because of its inability to participate in the discursive practices is fated to become the ‘techno-slaves’ in the hands of the ‘techno-masters’. The objective of this paper will be an exploration of the hidden colonial agenda in the discourses of posthumanism. Attempt will be made at an explication of the available instances of the process of working of the posthumanist colonial practices.
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Notes
- 1.
The theories of subaltern studies, feminist theories, Dalit discourses, minority discourses and disability studies are all part of the postcolonialist strategy that attempts to analyse the structure of dominance and subordination in its various manifestations and aim to counter dominant hierarchical constructions.
- 2.
This expression is borrowed by from the film The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), directed by Scott Derrickson.
- 3.
In the works of Cary Wolfe, however, there are more emphases on the nonhuman animals than on the machinic beings.
- 4.
Both postcolonialism and critical posthumanism draw its inspiration from radical questioning of the modernist notion of man and humanism by the postmodern and poststructuralist thinkers. One may recall some of the very famous Foucauldian expressions such as: “As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” or “one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (The Order of Things 387).
- 5.
Quoted by Carey Wolfe from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Foucault and Najibullah”, Lyrical Symbols and Narrative Transformations: Essays in Honor of Ralph Freedman, ed. Kathleen L. Komar and Ross Shideler (Columbia, S.C., 1998), 218–35, 219.
- 6.
Behind Southey’s observation was the large archive of the race theories that developed during the Enlightenment period. A theory of polygenesis of the man was advocated by the notorious slave owner Edward Long in his History of Jamaica (1774), and Charles White in his Account of the Regular Gradation of Man (1799) argued that the whites and blacks are the two distinct species. On the other hand, there was the theory of monogenesis, which held that human beings are one species, but there is a gradation among men. Blumenbach (1865) in The Anthrpological Treatises, for example, argued that “the white was the primitive colour of mankind, since it was very easy for that to degenerate into brown but much more difficult for dark to become white” (269). Charles White’s An Account of the Regular Gradation of Man, published in 1799, arranged the African and European in polar opposites. He placed Africans nearer to the ‘brute creation’ (42). Another important figure in the development of racial science was Casper Lavater, whose Physiognomical Fragments (1775–88), Essays on Physiognomy (1789–98) and Aphorisms on Man (1788) exercised much influence upon the theories of race.
- 7.
One may recall Said’s argument in Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Said argues: “It is possible to be critical of Humanism in the name of Humanism and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of Humanism that was cosmopolitan and text-and-language bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons of the past […] and still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic extraterritorial and unhoused” (11).
- 8.
Shu-mei Shih, “Is the Post-in Post-socialism the Post-in Posthumanism?” offers an interesting way of reading posthumanism and post-socialism through Marxist humanism. The three physical spaces Shih interconnects are China, France and America. She argues that Marxist humanism growing in China and accepted by Sartre in France and rejected by Althussar’s anti-humanism leads to the formation of the postcolonial and posthumanist discourses in America.
- 9.
Rosi Braidottti observations are made in her book The Posthuman as well as in her in her key note address to the conference “Beyond the Human: Monsters, mutants, and lonely machines (or what?)”. The video of the lecture is available in the conference website: www.beyondthehuman.com.
- 10.
See a recent article “Medicines in India, for India” by Pavan Srinath that discusses how tropical diseases are often neglected by pharmaceuticals because “the size of the drug market is smaller, people have lower income and companies are uncertain about IPR.”
- 11.
According to Lee M Silver “Reprogenetics refers to the use of genetic information and technology to ensure or prevent the inheritance of particular genes in a child.” For him the difference between reprogenetics and eugenics is consent (Eugenics—forced. Reprogenetics—consented to). However, Barabar H. Peterson calls it new eugenics and defines it as “the genetic engineering of man to create a human race according to scientific design.”
See Barbara H. Peterson’s “Transhumanism: Genetic Engineering of Man—the New Eugenics” http://farmwars.info/?p=11212. It is also interesting to note that the term ‘reprogenetics’ was first used by Julian Huxley, an advocate of eugenics.
- 12.
See Geoffrey Miller’s (Evolutionary psychologist, NYU Stern Business School and University of New Mexico; author of The Mating Mind and Spent) article “Chinese Eugenics” at <http://edge.org/response-detail/23838>.
See also “Imperfect Conceptions, Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects, and Eugenics in China” by Frank Dikötter in Hervard Asia Pacific Review <http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hapr/summer00_tech/bookreview.html>.
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Monirul Islam, M. (2016). Posthumanism: Through the Postcolonial Lens. In: Banerji, D., Paranjape, M. (eds) Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures . Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3637-5_7
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