Posthuman Fictions: Rethinking ‘the Human’ in Contemporary Culture

19-20 September 2024

Deadline for submissions: an abstract of 200 to 250 words should be sent by 7 July 2024.

Conference venue: Scuola di Scienze Umanistiche, Università di Genova, Italy

Contributions by Peter Boxall (University of Oxford, UK); Sonia Baelo (Universidad de Zaragoza, España); Mónica Calvo (Universidad de Zaragoza, España); Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes, UK); Sebastian Groes (University of Wolverhampton, UK); Miglena Nikolchina (Sophia University, Bulgaria); Ivan Stacy (Beijing Normal University, China); Peter Childs (Birmingham Newman University); Aki Kawamura (Aichi University, Japan); Vanessa Guignery (École Normale Supérieure de Lyon); Rocío Carrasco (Universidad de Huelva, España).

In the age where human beings are extended by superintelligent technology and attitudes to the environment and specieshood are radically changing, who or what is 'human', as for instance Rosi Braidotti has argued, has become debatable. How do fictional narratives in contemporary culture interrogate this so-called “posthuman” condition within the Anglophone world as well as beyond? Can we uncritically embrace posthuman rhetoric generated from a position of privilege when many communities have not even had the chance to be human yet? This symposium challenges the utopianist rhetoric of late postmodernist conceptualisations of the ‘posthuman’ and hopes to start opening a new language that might reframe our thinking of the state of our early twenty-first century world in novel ways.

Computer-animated movies have sometimes been described as ‘creepy’ and ‘unsettling’ because they are too realistic to be enjoyable. How does literature reflect upon personhood and the boundary between life and death? How do literary texts imagine what lies beyond the human? What role do ethical concerns play? How is agency, human or otherwise, represented in relation to the performance of technoscience? Is the increasingly pervasive reality of ‘artificial life’ inspiring new and hybrid genres of writing? How can we learn from other animal species – as Donna Haraway’s new books suggest – to be human in new ways?

Cyborgs, robots and androids populate the pages of science fiction texts, but they are also increasingly present in what is marketed as ‘literary fiction’, as in Ian McEwan’s, Kazuo Ishiguro’s and Jeanette Winterson’s latest novels. In addition, the notion of the posthuman is being explored across the globe and in a range of cultural contexts: this is particularly true in the case of writers involved in the current Chinese sci-fi boom such as Chen Quifan, Hao Jinfang and Han Song.

We seek proposals for papers that address any aspect of the literary engagement with the cultural and social imaginaries affected by and, in turn, affecting scientific and technological developments in Western and non-Western texts. We also encourage explorations between contemporary literature, films and video games. Papers can address the posthuman condition also in relation to the environmental crisis, disaster narratives, post-apocalyptic visions of the future.

Topics to be explored include but are not limited to:

- Ethics

- Class and digital inequalities

- The Uncanny Valley: ghosts, androids and us

- Digital technologies, politics and permacrisis

- The nonhuman and digital enhancement

- AI and gender

- Divergent politics of nostalgia and hope

Convenors:

Prof Laura Colombino, (Università di Genova, Italy); Prof Sebastian Groes (University of Wolverhampton, UK); Prof Ivan Stacy (Beijing Normal University, China)

For more information, please contact Prof Laura Colombino (laura.colombino@lingue.unige.it) and Prof Paola Nardi (paola.nardi@unige.it)