Abstract: Cyborgs in Latin America explores the ways cultural expression in Latin America has grappled with the changing relationships between technology and human identity. The book takes a literary and cultural studies approach in examining narrative, film and advertising campaigns from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay by such artists as Ricardo Piglia, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Carmen Boullosa and Alberto Fuguet among others. Using and criticizing theoretical models developed by Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, the book will appeal to specialists and students of Latin American Studies; Posthuman Theory; and Literature, Science and Technology Studies

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org . Cyborgs in Latin America explores the ways cultural expression in Latin America has grappled with the changing relationships between technology and human identity.

This work draws from animal studies, biopolitics, and posthumanism to explore the ways in which the body is simultaneously inscribed and erased in seven Latin American texts from the last fifty years: from João Guimarães Rosa's “Meu tio o Iauaretê” (1961) to Martín Felipe Castagnet's Los cuerpos del verano (2012), and including Sara Gallardo's Eisejuaz (1971), Jorge Baron Biza's El desierto y su semilla (1998), Mario Bellatin's Flores (2000), Miguel Esquirol's “El Cementerio de Elefantes” (2008), and Rafael Pinedo's Subte (2012). In these novels and short stories the body is the place where issues of race, sexuality, and ethnicity are negociated and contested: I focus on the figures of the animal, the monster, and the cyborg as bodies that escape the confining limits of a white, rational, and heterosexual normativity modeled after modern and contemporary Western ideals. In all these narratives, the marginalized body helps to destabilize binary concepts such as nature/culture, human/animal, normal/abnormal, civilization/barbarism, and is the springboard from which biological life -- instead of the usually dominant logos -- is able to generate a field of affect, estrangement, or resistance which can be influential in the creation of alternative communities. In the aforementioned cases, the animal sign is instrumental in thinking on those bodies -- whether they are sick, disabled, queer, poor, marginalized, female, indigenous, minority -- that do not conform to an hegemonic image of Man.

This collection of critical essays investigates an emergent and increasingly important field of cultural production in Latin America: cyberliterature and cyberculture in their varying manifestations, including blogs and hypertext narratives, collective novels and e-mags, digital art and short Net-films. Highly innovative in its conception, this book provides the first sustained academic focus on this area of cultural production, and investigates the ways in which cyberliterature and cyberculture in the broadest sense are providing new configurations of subjects, narrative voices, and even political agency, for Latin Americans. The volume is divided into two main sections. The first comprises eight chapters on the broad area of cyberculture and identity formation/preservation including the development of different types of cybercommunities in Latin America. While many of the chapters applaud the creative potential of these new virtual communities, identities and cultural products to create networks across boundaries and offer new contestatory strategies, they also consider whether such phenomena may risk reinforcing existing social inequalities or perpetuate conservatism. The second section comprises six chapters and an afterword that deal with the nature of cyberliterature in all its many forms, from the (cyber)cultural legacies of writers such as Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, to traditional print literature from the region that reflects on the subject of new technology, to weblogs and hypertext and hypermedia fiction proper.

This volume provides an innovative and timely approach to a fast growing, yet still under-studied field in Latin American cultural production: digital online culture. It focuses on the transformations or continuations that cultural products and practices such as hypermedia fictions, net.art and online performance art, as well as blogs, films, databases and other genre-defying web-based projects, perform with respect to Latin American(ist) discourses, as well as their often contestatory positioning with respect to Western hegemonic discourses as they circulate online. The intellectual rationale for the volume is located at the crossroads of two, equally important, theoretical strands: theories of digital culture, in their majority the product of the anglophone academy; and contemporary debates on Latin American identity and culture.

This volume explores how Latin American and Latinx creators have engaged science fiction to explore posthumanist thought. Contributors reflect on how Latin American and Latinx speculative art conceptualizes the operations of other, non-human forms of agency, and engages in environmentalist theory in ways that are estranging and open to new forms of species companionship. Essays cover literature, film, TV shows, and music, grouped in three sections: “Posthumanist Subjects” examines Latin(x) American iterations of some of the most common figurations of the posthuman, such as the cyborg and virtual environments and selves; “Slow Violence and Environmental Threats” understands that posthumanist meditations in the hemisphere take place in a material and cultural context shaped by the catastrophic destruction of the environment; the chapters in “Posthumanist Others” shows how the reimagination of the self and the world that posthumanism offers may be an opportunity to break the hold that oppressive systems have over the ways in which societies are constructed and governed.

The Cyborg Caribbean examines a wide range of twenty-first-century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican science fiction texts, arguing that authors from Pedro Cabiya, Alexandra Pagan-Velez, and Vagabond Beaumont to Yasmin Silvia Portales, Erick Mota, and Yoss, Haris Durrani, and Rita Indiana Hernandez, among others, negotiate rhetorical legacies of historical techno-colonialism and techno-authoritarianism. The authors span the Hispanic Caribbean and their respective diasporas, reflecting how science fiction as a genre has the ability to manipulate political borders. As both a literary and historical study, the book traces four different technologies—electroconvulsive therapy, nuclear weapons, space exploration, and digital avatars—that have transformed understandings of corporality and humanity in the Caribbean. By recognizing the ways that increased technology may amplify the marginalization of bodies based on race, gender, sexuality, and other factors, the science fiction texts studied in this book challenge oppressive narratives that link technological and sociopolitical progress. .

The first-ever collection of Latin American science fiction in English.

This highly-innovative volume provides the first sustained academic focus on cyberliterature and cyberculture in Latin America, investigating the ways in which this form of cultural production is providing new configurations of subjects, narrative voices, and even political agency. Despite cyberculture’s spread throughout the Hispanic diaspora, much of the influence of this new discipline on Latin American culture remains undocumented. This timely volume focuses on the inclusivity of this new scholarship and provides extensive geographical coverage of topics as diverse as Chicano border writing and Brazilian and Argentine cybercultural phenomena.

This visionary new book explores the critical issues that link transhumanism with digitalisation, gene technologies and ethics. It examines the history and meaning of transhumanism, offering insightful reflections on values, norms and utopia.