Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities

Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture

Edited by Melvin G. Hill - Contributions by Sarah L. Berry; Alexander Dumas J. Brickler IV; Rae'mia Escott; Md. Monirul Islam; Christian Jimenez; Bettina Judd; Myungsung Kim; Nicholas E. Miller and Kwasu D. Tembo

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.

Lexington Books

Pages: 236 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-8380-0 • Hardback • August 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-8382-4 • Paperback • October 2021 • $44.99 • (£35.00)

978-1-4985-8381-7 • eBook • August 2019 • $42.50 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Social Science / Black Studies (Global), Literary Criticism / American / Asian American, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / General, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies

Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities

Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

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.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 236 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-8380-0 • Hardback • August 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-8382-4 • Paperback • October 2021 • $44.99 • (£35.00)

978-1-4985-8381-7 • eBook • August 2019 • $42.50 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Social Science / Black Studies (Global), Literary Criticism / American / Asian American, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / General, Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies

Author

Melvin G. Hill is associate professor in the Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages at the University of Tennessee, Martin.

Table 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

Reviews

Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities presents a series of insightful essays, from both established and emerging scholars, that significantly advance many aspects of our understanding of Black identity in relationship to transhumanist thought. Incorporating scholarship on African-American literature, art, media, and music, this is an important collection for anyone interested in understanding the intersection between science, technology, and the Black body through a transhumanist lens.
— Ken McLeod, University of Toronto

Melvin G. Hill’s volume makes a valuable contribution to the emerging discussion of Blackness and transhumanism at a turning point in the early twenty-first century. At a time when black people are still negotiating what it means to be Black and human, Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities explores the frontier of blackness, politics and aesthetics of enhancement.
— Reynaldo Anderson, Harris-Stowe State University

With ten essays and an editorial introduction, Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture, edited by Melvin G. Hill, offers an array of insightful perspectives on the intersections of science, technology, and Black subjectivity, particularly in works of African American literature and culture. Focused on American histories and experiences of race, these essays present compelling frameworks for examining Black identity and being in an effort to transcend and enhance the human—understood as “transhumanism”—through medical, algorithmic, digital, and other technologies. The collection’s focus on transhumanism means that the essays also touch on the debates surrounding posthumanism and Afrofuturism.

— African Studies Review