Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman ed. by Mark Jackson (original) (raw)

2019, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée

At an academic conference in 2018, I heard a speaker claim that a transatlantic slave ship full of human cargo can be understood as a cyborg. From my perch in the back row, I gasped, and said under my breath (but, I fear, audibly), "Nooooooo," the "o" drawn out for several seconds, like a moan issuing deep from within. Perhaps I become a cyborg when I merge with my GPS app, and in a trance-like state, follow its directions, trusting Waze to navigate me around Tampa traffic, but a densely packed wooden ship full of the tears and blood and sweat of a kidnapped human workforce reduced to objects? I object. My fundamental disagreement with this thesis is that the cyborg, after Donna Haraway, is in part, a liberatory model freeing us from the epistemological binarism instantiated in the Enlightenment; it is one of the potential complications of Haraway's passing reference to the seamstress in the home sweatshop (170)-which may have mistakenly inspired the comparison to the slave ship-and it is the reason we should not, in my opinion, apply the cyborg model to any mechanism that relegates human beings to subhuman status, as the transatlantic slave trade reduced people to freight, and then to machines and beasts of burden. (Maybe if the slave ship were the Amistad, but even then, I think not.) This way of thinking about the cyborg may be best articulated in Angela Last's essay in this collection: "Cyborgs are intersectional beings that not only have a potential for multiple oppression but multiple solidarities" (70; emphasis mine). Nonetheless, this Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée crcl september 2019 septembre rclc 0319-051x/19/46.