South Asian Transhumanist Posthuman Ontologies

The Relationship between Vehicle Art and Mind Uploading in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing

Bibliographic Data

ID13119883
AuthorsQurratulaen Liaqat (0000-0001-6356-8814, Forman Christian College, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume6
Issue1
Pages33-52
Publication date2022-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Posthuman Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2471-4461 • E-ISSN: 2472-4513
PublisherThe Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5325/jpoststud.6.1.0033
OpenAlexW4322707503
LanguageEN
References cited27

One possible way to decolonize the posthuman field of literary criticism is to find possible stylistic and thematic affinities between the literatures from the less technologically advanced regions such as South Asia and mainstream Euro-American science fiction. This article invites and affirms alternative ways of perceiving and comprehending the transhumanist posthuman paradigms from the technologically underdeveloped world (South Asia) through a critically informed analysis of the motifs, symbols, and characters in the Pakistani writer Uzma Aslam Khan’s Anglophone novel Trespassing (2003). It argues that the nonhuman agency of truck art in Trespassing can be interpreted as a metaphor for a possible local technique for consciousness uploading. By applying the theoretical framework of transhumanist/posthumanist literary theory, this article demonstrates that the depiction of truck art in the novel can be analyzed as an analogy for the transhumanist posthuman dream of whole brain emulation

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Framing (construction · Mainstream · Metaphor · Political science · Posthuman · Posthumanism · Social science · Sociology · Technoscience · Transhumanism · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Philosophy · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life

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