Posthumanism and India
Description
The book is about what posthumanism means in the contemporary Indian context and what different lines of consideration this can take.
The world today has universalized a Eurocentric history of the human with its privileges, oppressions, exploitations and exclusions. On the one hand, this has led to the triumphalist narrative of technology, the blurring of biological embodiment through prostheses and the dream of transhumanist self-exceeding. On the other hand, we are witness to the contemporary eruption of dystopian anomalies due to the dis-balance or revolt of the "others" of humanism - climate crisis, chronic pandemic, religious, ethnocentric and geopolitical violence, ideological and authoritarian state control. Posthumanism is both an acknowledgement of these blurred boundaries of humanism and a critical response to it.
The editors of this volume opine that the discourse of posthumanism in India warrants urgent consideration, if we are to adequately address both national and global emergencies and look for solutions that India may be in a unique position to offer. Essays in the volume are by scholars in the area dealing with representative directions relating to posthumanism in India. The essays are divided into five areas of cultural relevance - (1) internal selves and others; (2) technology, normativity and ethics; (3) human and animal; (4) bodies and their discards; (5) becoming-cosmos. Together they form the beginnings of an approach to a critical cartography of posthumanism as it pertains specifically to India.
More details
Persons
Debashish Banerji, Ph.D. is Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures, Doshi Professor of Asian Art, Chair, Department of East-West Psychology, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Md. Monirul Islam is an Assistant Professor in the Department English, Presidency University, Kolkata, India.
Samrat Sengupta, Ph.D. is Associate Professor, Department of English, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, West Bengal, India.
Content
1. Introduction: A Critical Cartography of Posthumanism in India
Debashish Banerji, Md.Monirul Islam, Samrat Sengupta
Section A: Internal Selves and Others
2. Some Observations on the Political Possibilities of Feminist Posthumanism
Ritu Sen Chaudhuri
3. Making and Unmaking of the Marginal Subject: How a Dalit Migrant Remembers the Nonhuman
Samrat Sengupta
4. The Posthuman Uncanny Materiality in Salman Rushdie's Novel Midnight's Children
Malgorzata Kowalcze
Section B: Human and Animal
5. Can Bulls be Cyborgs? Unmaking the Logics of Dispensability
Susan Haris
6. Being Macaque: Nonhuman Ethnographies of Urban India
Anindya Sinha, Maan Barua
Section C: Technology, Normativity and Ethics
7. Artificial Intelligence in India: Crisis of Collusion Between Technocapitalism and Religious Nationalism
Debashish Banerji, Md. Monirul Islam, Samrat Sengupta
8. The Spectre of Artificial Intelligence and Indian Cinema: Critical Perspectives on AI Ethics and Machine Agency
Md Monirul Islam
9. Indian Supercrip Cyborg: Deconstructing Normativity through Feminist Posthumanism
Jaya Sarkar
Section D: Bodies and Their Discards
10. Space, Race, Garbage and the Posthuman: An Intersectional Analysis of the Photographic Representations of the Wasteocene in Varanasi by European Tourists
Sayan Dey
11.'Dirt Accha, Hain': A Posthumanist Critique of Mahatma Gandhi's Doctrines of Sanitation and Sanitation Labourers
Soumili Das
12. The Posthuman in the Burial Grounds: Unravelling the Headless and the Crematorial Kali
Asijit Datta
Section E: Becoming Cosmos
13. Poems
I. A Journey into the Chakras: 7 Posthuman Visions
II. Five Fingers: In Touch with Reality
III. Posthuman Love
Francesca Ferrando
14. Posthumanism and Indian Spirituality
Debashish Banerji
15. Becoming Raga: From Posthuman Sono-Rituals to Transindividual Sound-Bodies
Jonathan Kay
16. Sri Aurobindo's Tales of Prison Life and the New Ethics of Selfhood
Subham Dutta
About the Editors and Contributors
Index