This is the fourth of the interview series initiated by the PENTACLE team. The interview is conducted by Başak Ağın. The text is translated into Turkish by Sümeyye Aslan and revised by Önder Çakırtaş. Türkçe versiyon için buraya tıklayınız.
Dr. Qurratulaen Liaqat is Associate Professor of English Literature at Forman Christian College, Pakistan. She is a member of the Global Posthuman Network.
Dear Qurratulaen, thank you very much for accepting our invitation for an interview with PENTACLE. There has been a growing interest in the posthuman studies in recent years. Scholars, artists, designers, and many others interested in the posthuman as a concept come from different schools of thought and different backgrounds of education. As a scholar of English literature, how would you define your relationship with the posthuman circles? Is there a specific way that you prefer to define “posthuman” and if so, what is it?
We are, no doubt, witnessing an unprecedented interest in the field of posthuman studies in connection with sociology, politics, culture, psyche, literature, aesthetics, ethics, ontology, and epistemology of the contemporary world.
For me, as an English Literature scholar, the posthuman is a broad field of inquiry which deals with the redefinition and reconfiguration of ontology and epistemology of being ‘human’ in connection with their fellow species (namely machines, environment, and animals). Along with its post-anthropocentric thrust, it has the potential to expand already existing Feminist, Postcolonial, Deconstruction, Eco-critical, and technologically oriented literary critical paradigms.
For English Literary studies, it is a model which provides us with the theoretical framework and literary tools to relocate human characters and the human environment from the perspective of the nonhuman elements in a literary text, to de-territorialize, rewrite, and deconstruct human subjectivity, and ask questions such as:
- What non-human elements are present in the text?
- What is the relationship of the nonhuman with humans?
- What is the role of the nonhuman elements in the development of the plot of the text?
- How are they perceived by human beings and how do they discern human characters?
- What is the definition of being a human within a text?
- When and how does human character become posthuman or have they always been posthuman?
- What is the point where humans do not remain more human but become one with the nonhuman elements and boundaries of being human become malleable and fluid challenging the traditional definitions and boundaries of being human?
Pardon me if my answer to the posthuman literary critique is a bit detailed, but I am doing it intentionally because most of my literature students find it very difficult to come up with guidance to apply posthuman literary theory, and I am trying to give a rough roadmap to the students of literature for applying posthuman paradigm on a literary text.
I feel being connected with posthuman circles is crucial to not only develop my own understanding of the field of posthumanism but also to find out tools and techniques to critically analyze a text through the posthuman lens. I feel Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Neil Badmington, Rosi Braidotti, Francesca Ferrando, and Stefan Sorgner have provided me with the theoretical information which then I learnt to apply with the critical posthuman frameworks proposed by Stefan Herbrechter, Ivan Callus, Manuela Rossini, and Bruce Clark. So I think it doesn’t matter whether you belong to the field of sociology, philosophy, literature or any science, a posthumanist is a posthumanist who has this common purpose to challenge the myopic approaches towards the perception of ‘being human’ and to work for an all-inclusive and equal world.
Looking at the list of your publications, I see that you have a special interest in the work of Mohsin Hamid. How do you think Hamid, as a fiction writer, contributes to the discussion of the posthuman? What makes his fiction lenient for posthumanist analyses?
Mohsin Hamid is that one writer who has an international and well-informed approach to the enmeshment of technology in human sociology. His works contribute to an understanding of the social, cultural, economic, and political repercussions of the human-machine enmeshment. His texts are full of references to daily use technology, warfare technology, and automobile technology. These technologies have been portrayed as overwhelming, threatening, and inseparable from the human characters who live with them or who own them. For instance, in Hamid’s novel Moth Smoke (2000), the character of Darashikoh is inseparable from his Suzuki Mehran car, and Aurangzeb’s Pajero seems to share the threat which his character poses to the fictional universe of the novel. Similarly, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) portrays a world which is too intrusive in human life in terms of drone and data surveillance. His short story “Terminator: Attack of the Drone”(2011) and Exit West (2017) raise awareness about the downside of drone warfare and its dangers. He seems to provide very interesting case studies to explore the psyche, sociology, culture, and politics of Pakistani characters in relation to technology. However, Uzma Aslam Khan’s novels also have the potential for posthuman inquiries, especially in relation to the environment and nonhuman species present in her works.
Some of your work emphasizes the “non-western” modes of thinking as part of the posthuman paradigm shift. As a non-western scholar myself, I do understand how these formulations of ontologies work hand-in-hand with the new materialist understanding of the posthuman, with their non-hierarchical and pluralistic aspects. But I do also wonder how you relate to such understanding. I mean, could you elaborate on how you think non-western ontologies differ from the conventional western thought?
When I study the Euro-American scholarship in the field of posthumanism, I find it mostly focused on the transhumanists’ elation and supremacy of technological interventions in the human world. But the repercussions of the posthuman for the non-western part of the world might be different. Where the Western world is thinking about consciousness uploading (a materialist approach), our culture might have an entirely different (spiritual approach) towards consciousness. Nonwestern posthumanism might be essentially different in terms of its essential spiritual, mystic, and religious ontologies while Western posthumanism is firmly grounded in virtual, cybernetic, and technology-oriented materialist posthumanism. Gautama Buddha’s spiritual experience of Nirvana or the trance of a whirling dervish might be called posthuman in their essence. In comparison with non Euro-American materialist cultures, in Eastern, South Asian, or non-Western as I call them, the spirit in itself can be called posthuman which might lead to the field of spiritual/religious posthumanism.
In addition, postcolonial and race theories might be another potential addition to lead the inquiries into nonwestern posthuman studies. Drawing insights from Braidotti’s book The Posthuman (2013), I feel that under the rubric of posthuman studies, we might look into the subhuman projections of other races by the ideal ‘humanism’ characterized by the white male as ideal man and all other species and genders as less-than-human.
Moreover, with reference to non-Western feminist posthumanism, we need a new paradigm for non-Western posthuman feminism. I have already mentioned in one of my papers on the animation series Burka Avenger that “the concepts of equal rights for women, technological assistance in reproduction, radical cosmetic surgeries, and female robotics are not very familiar concepts for a non-Western woman who is still struggling for basic rights such as education, physical and emotional security, freedom of expression, and freedom of choice”.
You also wrote on drone warfare and its use in (science-) fiction. What kind of narratives do you think this modernized, computerized, and/or digitized systems of warfare lead us to, considering our posthuman embodied and embedded lives? Do you think it is possible to alter the devastating effects of war through an affirmative posthumanist ethics?
Yes, interestingly, the majority of my published papers discuss drone fiction and the inhumanity of the posthuman era which is linked with posthuman ethics. I think Hamid’s dystopian narrative style in his short story “Terminator: Attack of the Drone” is the most appropriate both to express the nightmarish quality of living under drones and to warn the world about the repercussions of unprecedented drone strikes. Hamid’s novel Exit West is not a dystopian fiction in the strictest sense of the term but the presence of drone surveillance has been used to emphasize the downside of the posthuman eye of the drone. What I feel is that the presence of drones in a literary text is used to magnify uncomfortable nonhuman panoptic surveillance through drone cameras which creates anxiety and a feeling of being in a nightmare or dystopia. Pakistani drone fiction has the potential to do literary activism against drone use. I also feel that the presence of drones is creating a more divided world and oppressing the marginalized communities in Palestine, Pakistan, and many other locations where we do not even know drone surveillance is going on.
I really believe that a posthuman affirmative ethical code of conduct can bring a change for the better in our world and it is not only about drone warfare but all kinds of weapons are projections of the enmeshment of humans with weapons which highlight the amplification of their capacity for destroying human communities. Therefore, there should be a check and balance on the development of weapons and their use against human communities. Some kind of internationally mediated committee should be formed to keep tabs on the newly developed weapons and should be responsible for prohibiting powerful countries from using highly dangerous weapons against human communities.
Whatever is happening in Gaza right now is because we as human communities never tried to stop the development of war technology and we need to put an end to it. Posthuman warfare technologies such as drones have pushed the world into the necropolitical phase where political agendas are being met at the cost of dead bodies. I would also like to state here that for me posthuman is not only being a superhuman or more-than-human technologically enhanced form of a human but for me being degenerated, cruel, subhuman, less-than-human in terms of kindness and humanity is also a posthuman form of ‘being’ where you are not a human but an inhumane degenerated mutation of being human which needs to be reminded about the ethics of being human and humane to their fellow species.
We have met each other through the Global Posthuman Network. I feel a sense of familiarity as we come from English literature backgrounds and we both use the posthuman as a template for evolving literary analysis. But when we come to think of it in a “realistic” manner, we have never seen each other in person. How would you comment on the role of technology in making us humans both familiar and unfamiliar?
Yes, you are right the feeling is mutual I feel a special affinity with you because you are from a literature background and I also know how difficult it is to write and navigate through posthuman literary critiques since this theoretical framework is still not properly charted out for literary studies. But somehow we both survived.
It’s a very interesting observation and yes we met on Zoom but we haven’t really met in real but still technology is facilitating our human connection and extending our outreach which is one of the most commendable features of technology that it has somehow facilitated human-to-human connection. No matter how ephemeral this familiar/unfamiliar connection is it is still a link which we must cherish and acknowledge as perks of being posthumanists.
