Download or read book Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination written by Kristen Lillvis and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination written by Kristen Lillvis and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination written by Maxine Lavon Montgomery and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination written by Maxine Lavon Montgomery and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities written by Melvin G. Hill and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-08-02 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection explores the Black body in the context of transhuman realities from a variety of literary and artistic perspectives. Contributing to broader thought about Black transcendence of subjectivity in a posthuman framework, the chapters explore interpretations of the “old” and visions of the “new” human.
Download or read book The Postcolonial Animal written by Evan Mwangi and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-09-06 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Wandering Games written by Melissa Kagen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death. 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.
Download or read book Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art written by Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-12 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care written by Amelia DeFalco and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-27 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Octavia E Butler written by Mary Ellen Snodgrass and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2023-01-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Animals and Science Fiction written by Nora Castle and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics written by Arvin M. Gouw and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-03-10 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this book, the contributors examine how various religious traditions engage with transhumanism and its vision for the future"--
Download or read book Women Writers and Experimental Narratives written by Kate Aughterson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-23 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the history of women’s engagement with writing experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way to participate in such spaces. Experimentation—of style, mode, voice, genre and language—has enabled women writers to be simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from stories and cultures that have so often seen them as ‘other’. This collection shows that women writers in English over the past 400 years have challenged those ideas not only through explicit polemic and alternative representations but through disrupting the very modes of representation and story itself.
Download or read book More Than Illustrated Music written by Kathrin Dreckmann and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-02-23 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The genre of the video clip has been established for more than thirty years, mainly served by the sub genres of video art and music video. This book explores processes of hybridization between music video, film, and video art by presenting current theoretical discourses and engaging them through interviews with well-known artists and directors, bringing to the surface the crucial questions of art practice. The collection discusses topics including postcolonialism, posthumanism, gender, race and class and addresses questions regarding the hybrid media structure of video, the diffusion between content and form, art and commerce as well as pop culture and counterculture. Through the diversity of the areas and interviews included, the book builds on and moves beyond earlier aesthetics-driven perspectives on music video.
Download or read book Gender and Environment in Science Fiction written by Bridgitte Barclay and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender and Environment in Science Fiction focuses on the variety of ways that gender and “nature” interact in science fiction films and fictions, exploring questions of different realities and posing new ones. Science fiction asks questions to propose other ways of living. It asks what if, and that question is the basis for alternative narratives of ourselves and the world we are a part of. What if humans could terraform planets? What if we could create human-nonhuman hybrids? What if artificial intelligence gains consciousness? What if we could realize kinship with other species through heightened empathy or traumatic experiences? What if we imagine a world without oil? How are race, gender, and nature interrelated? The texts analyzed in this book ask these questions and others, exploring how humans and nonhumans are connected; how nonhuman biologies can offer diverse ways to think about human sex, gender, and sexual orientation; and how interpretive strategies can subvert the messages of older films and written texts.
Download or read book Searching for Feminist Superheroes written by Sam Langsdale and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2024-09-17 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It's no secret that superhero comics have historically included problematic depictions of women, racial and sexual minorities, and others who do not fit the standard straight white male model of a hero. Rather than focus on these negative depictions, Langsdale wants to take a more positive approach by looking at recent comics that can be called feminist, with female heroes and creators of all genders that tell new types of stories within the genre. Although these books have usually been marginalized and have suffered premature cancellation, she argues that this marginalization has enabled innovative stories to be told in ways that not only advance the genre but also interact with contemporary social justice concerns. Incorporating intersectionality and feminist theory, Langsdale analyzes complete stories focused on various heroes -- Spider-Woman, America Chavez, the Unstoppable Wasp, and Ironheart. By exploring different elements of these characters, e.g., Spider-Woman's pregnancy, America's identity as a queer mestiza, and the Wasp's creation of a female-run STEM facility, she examines what makes these texts feminist and how they interact with larger issues of inclusion and social justice in ways that more traditional superhero narratives don't and probably can't. She also examines how these characters' appearances in other media have played a part in their development. By focusing on marginalized runs of comics, Langsdale demonstrates how even these can make powerful statements about feminism and the world"--
Download or read book Neither the Time Nor the Place written by Christopher Castiglia and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2022-03-11 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neither the Time nor the Place considers how the space-time dyad has both troubled and invigorated Americanist scholarship in recent decades. Organized around considerations of citizenship, environment, historiography, media, and bodies, the book presents some of the most provocative new work being done in American literary studies today.
