The biopolitics of languaging in the cybernetic fold: a decolonial and queer ear to the cosmo-poetics

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Prompted by Susan Sontag’s ‘The World as India’ (2002), in which the young employees at outsourced call centres in India figure the distinction between human and machine, this article explores languaging as a biopolitical process of racialization and speciation in an era of cybernetics. To this end, the article engages with Caribbean critic Sylvia Wynter and Asian American writer Margaret Rhee, whose works illuminate human linguistic practice as decolonial and queering modes of engendering and inhabiting the more-than-human world. First, this article attempts a decolonialist intervention into posthumanist performativity in conversation with Wynter’s theory of homo narrans, and especially her hypothesis on the cybernetic autopoiesis of diverse cosmogonies. Then, the article discusses Margaret Rhee’s poetry Robot, Love (2017) and her Kimchi Poetry Machine project (debut 2014), which engage with poetry as an intimate interaction between human and machine against a backdrop of the queer genealogy of artificial intelligence and the fractured affinities between robots and Asian Americans. In conclusion, this article calls for a decolonial approach to posthuman linguistic performativity, which is less a territory for securing humanity than a decolonial and diasporic feminist technology of listening to difference–which I call cosmo-poetics.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)9-20
Number of pages12
JournalJournal of Gender Studies
Volume29
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2020

Keywords

  • Biopolitics of language
  • decolonialist feminism
  • homo narrans
  • posthumanist performativity

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The biopolitics of languaging in the cybernetic fold: a decolonial and queer ear to the cosmo-poetics'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this