This seminar will familiarise participants with selected works of post-millennial dystopian and (post-)apocalyptic literature from Poland (in translation) and India (originally in English). It primarily focuses on representations of the (post-)human body, aiming to explore how queer and feminist readings might mobilise these texts to imagine scenarios of affect-mediated resistance. This thematic focus stems from the shared historical and political background of both nations – they are both part of the global semi-periphery (Wallerstein 1976; Morales Ruvalcaba 2020), and they both transitioned to capitalism in the 1990s. Due to their historical and political positioning, neither has played a significant role in earlier debates surrounding the (post-)human body, technology, and feminism, particularly those sparked by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. Four decades later, this seminar revisits these discourses from the perspective of semi-peripheral nations like Poland and India, which have recently experienced accelerated technological development and largely unchallenged integration into global neoliberal capitalism. In doing so, it draws on foundational work on embodiment and transhumanism by critics such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and Sherryl Vint, while leveraging the unique semi-outsider position of both Polish and Indian English-language cultures and literatures within the global techno-capitalist system.
- Trainer/in: Beniamin Klaniecki