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Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture makes a series of valuable contributions to ongoing dialogues surrounding posthuman blackness and Afro-transhumanism. The collection explores the Black body (self) in the context of transhuman realities from a variety of literary and artistic perspectives. These points of view convey the cultural, political, social, and historical implications that frame the space of Black embodiment, functioning as sites of potentiality and pointing toward the possibility of a transcendental Black subjectivity. In this book, many questions concerning the transformation of the Black body are presented as parallels to philosophical and religious inquiries that have traditionally been addressed from a hegemonic viewpoint. The chapters demonstrate how literature, based on its historical and social contexts, contributes to broader thought about Black transcendence of subjectivity in a posthuman framework, exploring interpretations of the "old" and visions of the "new" human.
List of contents
Introduction: Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities
Melvin G. Hill
Chapter One. "European Mind. . .Engrafted upon the African constitution:" Robert Southey's Theory of Miscegenation in the Tranhumanist Context
Md. Monirul Islam
Chapter Two. The Mystery of the Invisible Drop: Pauline Hopkins's Transhumanist Challenge to Race Science
Sarah L. Berry
Chapter Three. Arthurian Legend, Algorithmic Code, and Racialized Technology: Technocultural Allusions in Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada
Myungsung Kim
Chapter Four. Transmedial Posthumanisms: Unmaking the Black Body in Octavia Butler's Kindred and its Graphic Novel Adaptation
Nicholas E. Miller
Chapter Five. "A Dangerous Idea:" Human Enhancement, Transhuman Desirability, Binary Identity Negotiation, and "Mistranthropy" in George S. Schuyler's Black No More
Melvin G. Hill
Chapter Six. Transhumanism in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
Rae'Mia Escott
Chapter Seven. Glossolalia: Lucille Clifton's Creative Technologies of Becoming
Bettina Judd
Chapter Eight. Soul in the Shell: Steven Barnes's Aubry Knight Trilogy, Black Cyborgs, and Cyberpunk Investigations of Technological Black Bodies
Alexander Dumas J. Brickler IV
Chapter Nine. Revising the White Cyborg: The Interstitial Heroism of Del Spooner in I, Robot and Charles Gunn in Angel
Christian Jimenez
Chapter Ten. On the (Un)Becoming of Cindi Mayweather: The Transhumanist Gynoid Performativity of Janelle Monáe
Kwasu D. Tembo
Index
About the Editor
About the Contributors
About the author
Melvin G. Hill is associate professor in the Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages at the University of Tennessee, Martin.
Summary
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.
