19 research outputs found
Language and Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s \u3cem\u3eNever Let Me Go\u3c/em\u3e
No full textNetty Mattar discusses in her article “Language and Betrayal: Posthuman Ethics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” the complexities of ethical compassion in this biotechnological age. Mattar highlights how genetic technology creates new forms of life that dissolve the line between ‘human’ and ‘technology.’ In spite of this, contemporary ethical discussions do not take into account changing conceptions of human subjectivity and instead reinstate older assumptions about what ‘human’ is. Mattar argues that speculative fiction (SF), as a self-conscious play on signs and signification, can draw attention to how ethical responses are determined by the language we use. Mattar reads Kazuo Ishiguro’s SF novel Never Let Me Go as a critique of liberal humanist ethical discourse, which eliminates difference as it promises inclusion. She argues that Ishiguro’s uncanny narrative presents a posthuman ethics that forces the reader to confront their own dependence on exclusionary understandings of ‘human’
KONFLIK BATIN TOKOH UTAMA PADA NOVEL PEREMPUAN BAYANGAN KARYA NETTY VIRGIANTINI (PENDEKATAN PSIKOLOGI SASTRA)
No full textThis study examines the inner conflicts of the main characters in Netty Virgiantini's novel Perempuan Bayangan. The purpose of this study is to describe the form, causal factors, and forms of inner conflict resolution and physical and psychological analysis of the main characters in the novel Perempuan Bayangan.The methods used in this study are qualitative descriptive. The data in this study were sentence that contains the characteristics of the main character in terms of physical and psychological in the novel Perempuan Bayangan by Vetty Virgiantini. The process of collecting data in this study was through several stages, namely: preparation stage, implementation stage, and closing. Data analysis techniques used in this study. The interactive model is divided into four parts, namely (a) Data collection, (b) Data reduction, (c) presentation of data, and (d) withdrawal of conclusions.The results of the analysis showed that in the novel Perempuan Bayangan by Netty Virgiantini there is a main character described by the author of the novel by not showing too much physical characteristics through age and dress style. However, the author by directly showing the physical characteristics of the main character through sentences and words. Meanwhile, the form of inner conflict experienced by the main character includes destiny that is not in accordance with the expected, anxiety in making decisions, and expectations that are not in accordance with the wishes. The conclusions of the results that can be drawn from this study, namely: physical and psychological analysis and inner conflict
Diffractive spaces: An analysis of Malaysian cyberpunk
No full textThe impact of new information technologies on Malaysian spatiality today is complicated by the ongoing processes of colonialism, which have violently disrupted old attachments to the land, leading to the imbrication of racial divisions and global capitalism. Malaysian cyberpunk, an emergent literature, “maps” these new spaces of global informational capitalism. While theories of hybridity and syncretism have been used to explain the assimilation and negotiation of culture in Malaysia, this article proposes an alternative approach. It reads the nation’s fundamentally polyvalent nature through the concept of diffraction, arguing that reading diffractively allows us to be attentive to how spaces connected to diverse ontologies impede, pass through, or interfere with one another, with differences being upheld rather than reduced. Analysing a selection of Malaysian cyberpunk short stories, this article shows how diffractive entanglements are constitutive of Malaysia’s complex spatial identity, offering an alternative spatial imaginary
Absence as Resistance in Palestinian Speculative Fiction
No full textPalestinian identity is symbolic of the struggle against elimination, against becoming absent. The pervasive use of social media today has been pivotal in revealing this struggle, enabling the direct and unrestricted sharing of Palestinian suffering in the face of unremitting destruction and displacement. Across the globe, people bear witness to Palestinians fighting for survival amidst the mass bombings, field executions, and engineered famine in Israel’s current military operation in the Gaza Strip. This campaign, which began as a response to Hamas’ attack on October 7th 2023, has led to the extermination of Palestinian people at a level and pace that likely exceeds any conflict in modern history. Consequently, many experts consider this military operation a plausible genocide. Yet, despite its shocking and unfiltered nature, this recent incursion is only the latest example in a series of violent aggressions against Palestinians that have lasted nearly a century. This article aims to analyse works of speculative fiction that tackle these issues
Violent memory: Haruki Murakami's hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world
No full textModern information technologies have radically transfigured human experience. The extensive use of mnemonic devices, for instance, has redefined the subject by externalizing aspects of inner consciousness. These transformations involve the incorporeal but deeply felt, violent dislocations of human experience, traumas that are grounded in reality but which challenge symbolic resources because they are difficult to articulate. I am interested in how the unseen wounding of mnemonic intervention is registered in the “impossible” language of speculative fiction (SF). SF is both rooted in the “real” and “estranged” from reality, and thus able to give form to impossible injuries. This paper argues that Haruki Murakami uses the mode of SF in his novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, to explore how mnemonic substitutes interfere with the complex process of remembering World War II in Japan. I will demonstrate how, through SF, Murakami is able to give form to an unseen crisis of memory in postwar Japan, a crisis marked by the unspeakable shock of war and by the trauma that results from the intrusion of artificial memories upon one’s consciousness of history
Ontological absence and speculative presence in Palestinian Science Fiction.
No full textEconomic and technological globalization has created concerns that affect all of humanity. Transformations of space and time, the media’s hyperrealization of reality, and hypermodern capitalism, for example, are experienced by societies across the world. Speculative fiction (sf) is a genre that adequately expresses this new reality. While sf has often been regarded as the preserve of the west, it is increasingly regarded as a global phenomenon. As more diverse cultures embrace sf, more hybrid forms of the genre have emerged involving dissonant ontologies. I am interested in how these competing ontologies come together in Palestinian sf. Palestinian sf writers employ sf conventions that recast the ethos of modernity rooted in Western Enlightenment. These signifiers and referents, therefore, turn towards the West—elsewhere. However, the signified—who the works address—is the Palestinian people, who have been largely disregarded by the West and excluded from its discourse. The Palestinians have an ambiguous ontology, their identities, their past, and their ongoing struggles for self-determination silenced. Palestinian sf therefore is something of a contradiction: sf has become a way for Palestinian writers to bring what has been silenced and erased into present consciousness, but through a language that already turns away from them. Reading a selection of Palestinian sf short stories from the collection Palestine +100, I ask what the relationship between absence and presence is in Palestinian sf. I ask how the aesthetics of absence functions in Palestinian sf to evoke that which has been silenced in Palestinian history. In doing so, I examine how Palestinian sf challenges traditional oppositions between east and west, absence and presence, and replaces them by more nuanced and mixed concepts. I show how Palestinian sf thereby gestures towards shared histories and topologies of pain that lie outside of normative (Western) experience
Speculative Fiction, the Aesthetics of Discomfort, and Muslim Futurity in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West
No full textFor Muslims, the future is complicated by the persistence of the past. The Islamophobia of a post-9/11 world constitutes a continuation of the historical colonial suppression of Muslim identities and epistemologies. Islamophobia reproduces old Orientalist narratives that reduce complex Muslim identities into a violent and fanatical “Other” that needs to be contained and silenced. In order to resist such suppression, Muslims must re-possess their identities outside of binary Western ontological frames in which these Islamophobic constructions are rooted. I argue that speculative fiction (sf) provides a means of re-imagining Muslim experiences and identities outside of oppressive binaries. The “absent paradigm” of the SF world has no direct relationship with the empirical world, and this central absence allows writers to introduce difference into familiar narratives, thereby carving out possibilities for alternative identities and futures. Through a reading of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), I demonstrate how the absent paradigm of SF can establish aesthetics of discomfort that can unsettle old narratives and stereotypes. I argue that this enables Hamid to redefine Muslim identity in relation to in-betweenness and difference, thus breaking down the opposition between “self” and “other.” In this way, Muslim identity is reframed, paving a way for a hopeful Muslim future
There are no words: moral injury, disability and violence in Duncan Jones Mute
No full textNever before have we been so aware of suffering. Atrocity and the infliction of pain—of relentless military conflict, humanitarian crises, the steady rise in nationalistic aggression, persistent racial oppression, environmental catastrophe—have become more ubiquitous through social media networks. Our brutal encounters with pain constitute a new reality, one marked by a sense of ethical catastrophe that disturbs the boundaries of the subject. The trauma of bearing witness to and failing to prevent an act that violates deeply held beliefs about right and wrong constitutes what some have called ‘moral injury.’ This disconnect from our understanding of who we are is an experience common in (and perhaps fundamental to) war. Yet it is an ‘invisible’ wound that forces us to reconsider the very notion of trauma and of how it can be represented. This paper investigates how science fiction (sf) can portray the profound and unseen trauma of moral injury. Predicated on an ‘absent paradigm,’ sf is able to evoke complex variations of invisible injury through the construction of imaginary signs only understood in relation to the opponents they imply, which are ‘absent.’ I will examine Duncan Jones’ 2018 film, Mute, as an example of how muteness is an embodied translation of trauma that cannot be spoken and the inexpressibility of pain. I will further suggest that in this technologically-enhanced future Berlin, muteness and the refusal to be ‘fixed’ signifies a resistance to the hegemonic absenting of moral pain. In this way, the film relocates moral injury onto a complex network of power relations, signaled through the pervasive references to ongoing US military aggression, its past incursions and their aftereffects. Focusing on the characters’ struggle to maintain tenuous moral bearings in an apathetic world, Mute effectively weaves together moral injury, disability, techno-science and military violence, drawing our attention to the terrible damages we do to each other
Nomadic subjectivity in the selected works of Abdourahman Waberi
No full textReading world literature is,’ as Debjani Ganguly asserts, ‘to confront both plurality and the prevalence of difference, and a myriad of often unpredictable nodes of connectivity.’ This seems a challenging task, considering how “Western” critical approaches can work to suppress alterity or absorb difference into familiar patterns of understanding. Even Postcolonial theory, which seeks to uncover unequal power relations, inscribes the ‘other’ as radically unknowable and is unable to provide alternative ways of encountering difference. It is perhaps apt then to turn to more ‘authentic’ critical perspectives as a way out of this impasse. I am interested in how authentic experiences of the ‘other’ can be discerned by looking to the particular arts, belief systems, and patterns of behaviour within the matrices of the culture from which the text emerges. I will explore the figure of the nomad as a means of understanding subjective experience in selected writings of French-Djiboutian writer Abdourahman Waberi. The nomad is a figure of mobility, embodying a relationship between landscape and subjectivity that disrupts fixed boundaries of nation. Far from being a mere trope, the Djiboutian nomad is resourceful, resilient, individualistic and proud, relying on distinct patterns of movement to survive the unforgiving landscape. Crucially, the nomad is tied to specific locations, enforcing the importance of difference in subjective experience. Comparing the Djiboutian nomad to the travellers in Waberi’s texts generates a dialogue between culture and writer, opening up the possibilities for reading non-Western, African subjectivities that go beyond the scope of Western paradigms
