Dexl Carmen

Figurations of posthuman bodies abound in – and beyond – the American
cultural imagination. This includes, most prominently, the cyborg, defined in
Donna Haraway's “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) as a transgressive creature that
signals a breaching of not only “the boundary between human and animal” (68)
but also “the boundary between animal/human (organism) and machine” (69) and,
by extension, “the boundary between physical and non-physical” (70). With
scholarship now distinguishing mostly between the strands of ‘transhumanist
posthumanism’ and ‘posthumanist posthumanism,’ the term of ‘the posthuman’ has
gained plural and conflicting meanings (see, e.g., Hayles, Braidotti,
Badmington) that we will extrapolate and discuss in the analysis of selected
examples drawn from the fields of dance, dance film, music videos, performance
art, and interactive art. This includes Merce Cunningham’s Hand Drawn Spaces
(1998), and Biped (1999), Boston Dynamics’ robot dance, and Stelarc’s
‘internet dance’ Ping Body (1996); ORA, a collaborative project
between choreographer José Navas and filmmaker Philippe Baylaucq; Janelle
Monáe’s Metropolis: The Chase Suite (2007) and The ArchAndroid
(2010); Rachel Rosenthal’s filename: FUTUREFAX (1992); and the
installation Genesis (1999) as well as the Time Capsule project
(1997) by Eduardo Kac. 

We
will explore how these artistic practices and embodied performances frame and
stage intersections of technology and bodies in different ways and examine
their implications for relations to and notions of time and space, ranging from
concepts such as material space over constructions of communal space to the
seemingly endless ether or cyberspace. We will discuss the cultural functions
they fulfill beyond mere techno-utopian or -dystopian imaginings of the future.
Rather, they add to current debates about ‘biomedicalization’ (Estes and
Binney), especially as regards discourses of self-enhancement, longevity, and
immortality; dynamics of global ‘racial capitalism’ (Robinson; Leroy and
Jenkins); ecologism and environmentalism; and claims of human exceptionalism in
the face of more-than-human worlds.

Drawing on performance studies as both a lens
and method, we will analyze performances of aging in cultural formats focussed on the body, particularly film, dance, and social protest. We will pay particular attention
to the performance repertoire the selected examples employ, the notions of
corporeality and physicality they convey, and aspects of site-specificity,
immediacy, interactivity, and collectivity that inform them. We will explore relations
between the individual and the national body, negotiations of dominant cultural
myths, and visions of citizenship that are at their center and discuss what Jon
McKency termed the ‘resistant potential’ of cultural performance, especially as
regards its intervention in the conventional ‘decline narrative’ as opposed to
cultural discourses of ‘ageing gracefully.’

The course examines selected
examples of American literature from pre-Columbian Native American
documents through nineteenth-century literary writing. Taught in seminar
format and based on reading, discussion, and active participation, the
course places literary texts in their historical and cultural contexts.
Readings include early exploration narratives and selected texts from
colonial America, samples of nineteenth-century short fiction, Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and selected poems by prominent authors, such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

Course requirements: oral presentation.
Credit requirement: a 3,500 to 4,500-word research paper in English.
Required
Texts: Baym, Nina et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American
Literature. 8th ed. Vols. A, B, and C. New York: Norton, 2012. Print.