Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner: 2049 (2017), the sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), explores many of the same topics, including the development of advanced biotechnology and the (in)ability to distinguish between humans and bioengineered replicants. Like Scott’s Blade Runner, Villeneuve’s 2049 considers how ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ identity is constructed. Because replicants’ physical appearances do […]
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‘The human is constantly created through the jettisoning of the Asian/Asian American other as robotic, as machine-like and not quite human […]’. These words, lifted from the extract of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s essay ‘Race and/as Technology or How to Do Things to Race’ below, point to the habitually unexamined racialised and colonial structures of […]
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This entry originally appeared in Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, eds., Posthuman Glossary (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Reproduced with permission. Critical posthumanism is a theoretical approach which maps and engages with the “ongoing deconstruction of humanism”.[1] It differentiates between the figure of the ‘posthuman’ (and its present, past and projected avatars, like cyborgs, monsters, […]
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The medical humanities were developed as a means of using the tools offered by several fields in the humanities – law, history, and literature among others – to improve or interrogate experiences of healthcare and patienthood. Humanities training for doctors, particularly, has been valued in that it encourages medics to listen to their patients […]
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