TY - JOUR
T1 - The biopolitics of languaging in the cybernetic fold
T2 - a decolonial and queer ear to the cosmo-poetics
AU - Yoon, Hyaesin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Biopolitics of language
KW - decolonialist feminism
KW - homo narrans
KW - posthumanist performativity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85076482154&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/09589236.2019.1692303
DO - 10.1080/09589236.2019.1692303
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85076482154
SN - 0958-9236
VL - 29
SP - 9
EP - 20
JO - Journal of Gender Studies
JF - Journal of Gender Studies
IS - 1
ER -