Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America
Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America
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Overview
Latin America is experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are highly innovative in their conceptual play and their reworking of the medium. Inventive artwork and sophisticated scripts have combined to satisfy the demand of a growing readership, both at home and abroad. Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America, which is the first book-length study of the topic, argues that the graphic novel is emerging in Latin America as a uniquely powerful force to explore the nature of twenty-first century subjectivity. The authors place particular emphasis on the ways in which humans are bound to their non-human environment, and these ideas are productively drawn out in relation to posthuman thought and experience. The book draws together a range of recent graphic novels from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, many of which experiment with questions of transmediality, the representation of urban space, modes of perception and cognition, and a new form of ethics for a posthuman world.
Praise for Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America
'Challenging and rewarding ... the printed edition is excellently illustrated.' Journal of Latin American Studies
‘[An] original contribution’ … allows to point out the growth and maturity of the field of studies about comics in Latin America.'
Latin American Research Review
'Marshals an impressive range of posthumanist theories to provide a rich analysis ...An outstanding book that makes a major contribution to scholarship on graphic novels and to the nascent but rapidly growing body of work on Latin American posthumanism.'Bulletin of Latin American Research
'An alternative exploration of posthumanity ...that concentrates on the physicality of the environment around humans, not just the traditional merging of the organic and mechanical.'
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics
'Well-referenced and… well considered - the analyses it brings are overall well-executed and insightful.'
Image and Narrative, Jan 2018, vol 18, no 4
'This monograph sprawls in its scope and shines in its accomplishments.'
Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781911576495 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | U C L Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 07/03/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 23 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Edward King is Lecturer in Portuguese at the University of Bristol and the author of Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine and Brazilian Culture (2013) and Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture (2015).
Joanna Page is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Cambridge and the author of Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (2009), Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature (2014) and Science Fiction in Argentina: Technologies of the Text in a Material Multiverse (2016).
Joanna Page is Reader in Latin American Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent books are Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America (co-authored with Edward King) and Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (co-edited with María del Pilar Blanco).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
(Post)humanism and Technocapitalist Modernity
The posthuman scenarios constructed in this first series of graphic novels, from Argentina and Uruguay, are thoroughly dystopian, setting into relief the more redemptive and regenerative modes of some of the texts explored elsewhere in this book. What unites them is a consistent denunciation of the complicitous relationships between state, technology, violence and capitalism. As technology is almost exclusively figured as a threat to human freedom, identity and safety, there is no room here for the more positive representation of human/non-human commingling that characterizes the posthumanist vision of many other Latin American graphic novels. A post-anthropocentric approach begins to emerge from the environmentalist critique developed in some of the texts explored here. However, the distinctly nostalgic tone evident in all of them clearly demonstrates the persistence of humanist thought within posthumanism, suggesting the extent to which, as Neil Badmington observes, 'humanism is forever rewriting itself as posthumanism'. They are posthumanist in the same way that postmodernity, for Jean-François Lyotard, is characterized by 'the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity, and first of all modernity's claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology'. This rewriting has, as Lyotard points out, a long history within modernity itself; the same is certainly true of humanism, and in this respect one need look no further than the work of Hannah Arendt or Edward Said. The graphic novels studied in this chapter reveal some of the contradictions at the heart of antihumanist posthumanism, in their mourning for the irrevocable loss of human(ist) values and their simultaneous reassertion of those values. Crucially, it is the human perspective that remains dominant in their exploration of a posthuman world, a centrality that is radically challenged by a number of the other texts discussed in this book.
La burbuja de Bertold and Planeta Extra (Diego Agrimbau and Gabriel Ippóliti, 2007; 2009) launch an acerbic critique of the humanist domination of nature, puncturing an arrogant faith in the inevitability of human progress and revealing the cost of an exploitative and uneven modernity. Reparador de sueños (Matías Santellán and Pablo Guillermo Serafín, 2012) examines the dangers of technology as a tool of biopolitical control and repression. It exemplifies the contradictory resurgence of humanism within the posthuman imaginary, celebrating the uniqueness of human desires and dreams that cannot be fully subjected to the control of a futuristic technostate. Dengue (Rodolfo Santullo and Matías Bergara, 2012) connects development with inhumanism in much the same way as Lyotard does, reasserting the importance of embodiment and difference as a form of resistance to capitalism. Salvador Sanz's Angela Della Morte (2011, 2014) combines science fiction and horror to chart the pursuit of delirious dreams of human perfection that lead only to monstrosity and violence. In this way, it exposes the dark side of the postbiological version of posthumanism (often known as transhumanism) peddled by speculative scientists such as Hans Moravec, Raymond Kurzweil and Frank Tipler. These graphic novels insert themselves into a strong tradition of anti-capitalist, antiauthoritarian discourse in art and literature that has emerged in the rioplatense region of Latin America. This accounts, at least partly, for their frequent depiction of posthuman cyborgs and other hybrid technologies as dangerous additions to the armoury of repressive states and unscrupulous corporations.
Technodystopia
Diego Agrimbau's graphic novels are antihumanist fables, mapping out dystopian visions of the consequences of environmental exploitation or enslavement to modernizing progress. In the future societies he imagines, technological modernity has only ushered in greater social injustice and widespread ecological destruction, heralding the bleakest of posthuman futures in which humanity will eventually disappear, along with a devastated natural world. While these are issues of global concern, they have a specific resonance in contemporary Argentina. As Silvia Kurlat Ares observes, Agrimbau's texts are marked by an overwhelming sense of pessimism and anomie, in which it is not difficult to read allusions to the political and socio-economic conditions of Argentina since the 1990s. These would include economic crisis, emigration, the increasing political power of corporations, the under-regulated exploitation of the nation's natural resources and the breakdown of traditional forms of sociability.
Dystopian visions of posthumanism are, as Daniel Dinello observes, all too common in science fiction plots, in which technology often becomes a force for the destruction and enslavement of humanity. Science fiction's army of invading aliens, mad scientists, mutating monsters, rampant viruses and murderous robots offers every possible threat to the continued existence of the human race and its civilizations. Popular forms of the genre, including many Hollywood films from the latter half of the twentieth century onwards – Planet of the Apes (1968), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Blade Runner (1982), Gattaca (1997) and WALL-E (2008) being only a few of the most well known – have often expressed an intense technophobia, playing out disaster scenarios that warn of the most chilling consequences of rapid technological advance. The dystopian vision of much science fiction is at least partly a result, as Dinello suggests, of its progressive politics: it aims to awaken us to the advent of a new technological order supported by 'corporate greed, macho militarist posturing, governmental warmongering, and techno-religious propaganda'. Eroding human values such as equality and empathy, the technologies imagined in science fiction 'fortify genetic discrimination, social fragmentation, totalitarianism, surveillance, environmental degradation, addiction, mind control, infection, and destruction'. But in its critique of such ills, popular science fiction often falls back on rather conventional humanist beliefs: humans ultimately defeat the threat to their survival – be this of non-human origin or their own making – thereby proving the superiority of the human race and its destiny to overcome all others. The endless rehearsing of these narratives is suggestive, of course, of a crisis in such thinking. For Neil Badmington, repeated human victories over the aliens and the robots in Hollywood science fiction reveal an anxiety over a loss of human sovereignty, registering – malgré lui – the waning of humanism.
Agrimbau's graphic novels, while reinscribing human(ist) values, offer no such consolatory narratives, more often allowing humanity's capacity for self-destruction to play itself out. This results in environmental apocalypse, societal collapse or all-out Armageddon. La burbuja de Bertold presents a desolate portrait of life under an authoritarian regime whose intensive mining operations are sucking the last dregs of energy from a land stripped bare of its resources. The narrative takes place in the dark, heavily industrialized and poisonous city of Butania, rendered by Ippóliti in stifling, oxidized ochre (Fig. 1.1). Bertold's limbs are amputated as punishment for an act of rebellion against the authorities that led to the deaths of several fellow workers in a fire. However, it is clear that his more serious crime was daring to suggest publicly that the gas being pumped out of the ground might eventually run out. He joins the ranks of other amputees, fit only for work in the city's Teatro Neumático (Pneumatic Theatre) with its long-running show Títeres vivientes (Living Puppets). With their bodily movements precisely programmed by the puppet machine's levers and pulleys, the human actors are reduced to their voices. The play they rehearse and perform – and in which Bertold has the starring role – is clearly meant to represent a microcosm of society, exploring the consequences of the exhaustion of resources and the prospect of slow death as a result. While its writer and director had intended it to perform a politically sycophantic and hypocritical tribute to the nourishing potential of Mother Earth, Bertold improvises another meaning: it is not Mother Earth who feeds them, but they whose bodies and energy keep the failing system going, at huge cost. The puppet strings that dictate the actors' every movement become a metaphor for the authoritarian operation of power in Butania, a metaphor that Bertold exposes, producing an incendiary response from the audience.
What initially appears to be a humanist paean to the capacity of the individual to resist subjugation and to bring about revolution, however, rapidly turns into something else. In this very Brechtian fable, the individual – thoroughly instrumentalized by society – is ultimately powerless to stay its self-destructive forces. Poignantly, we leave Bertold and his love interest programmed to 'dance' mode until the theatre's generator runs out, which will be a few months away; the human race itself will not have much more time than this, we suspect, before the lights finally go out. The real forces at work here are no longer human ones: the slow death of a pillaged and polluted world cannot now be reversed. Agrimbau and Ippóliti create the bleakest of posthuman futures in which an exploitative human 'civilization' – unwilling to take responsibility for the depletion of resources and the waste that are the byproducts of its modernizing and profitmaking ambitions – careers towards extinction as the earth's energy runs out.
Unusually, Agrimbau's collaborations with Ippóliti (which include El gran lienzo, 2008) combine science fiction topoi with a graphic design that clearly references humanist traditions of portraiture. Ippóliti's carefully composed panels, evoking the rich tones, textures and shadowing techniques of oil paintings on canvas, claim artistic seriousness for the work and lend a timeless dignity to the human tragedies that unfold within these pages. The peculiar combination of futuristic setting and painterly style recalls the direct colour techniques used by Enki Bilal in his La Trilogie Nikopol (1980, 1986, 1992). La burbuja de Bertold's regular and unobtrusive frame-and-gutter format does not distract from the simple human drama it relates, and the emphasis on portraiture brings the individual to the fore. The dramatic chiaroscuro effects and earthy pigments (Fig. 1.2) evoke the humanist vision of Rembrandt and many of his contemporaries, articulating a nostalgic and paradoxical reassertion of human dignity and individualism in the face of the exhaustion of humanist values.
Planeta Extra extends Agrimbau's critique of the humanist domination of nature, but adopts a much lighter tone. It also develops the interest in theatre explored in the earlier La burbuja de Bertold, but this time not as an allegory for social control or individual expression. In Planeta Extra, theatre becomes a source of national and popular idioms and imaginaries in a narrative that returns to the debates over the modernizing programme of fin de siècle Buenos Aires. One of Agrimbau's greatest achievements In Planeta Extra is the composition of a science fiction of the vernacular, clearly rooted in the popular imagination, traditions and domestic spaces of a working-class Buenos Aires neighbourhood. As he puts it, this is very much 'ciencia ficción de barrio' (literally, 'science fiction from the neighbourhood', in the sense of humble and homegrown). Agrimbau's costumbrista drama dismantles some of the assumptions and aspirations that underpin humanist narratives of civilization and modernity. However, as we will suggest, his identification of popular tradition, thought and art as antidotes ends up reinscribing the centrality of human agency as well as values of individual freedom, fulfillment, rights and dignity that are often associated with humanism.
The overcrowding, pollution, corruption and crime that characterize many urban centres in the Third World have extended in Planeta Extra to cover the whole globe. Having thoroughly exploited the planet's resources for their own benefit, those with the connections and the financial means to do so have abandoned Earth for a better quality of life on a moon on the far side of Jupiter. The introduction of flying vehicles, space travel and virtual pets into a city that is patently lagging behind in the technological race highlights a typically uneven process of modernization (see Fig. 1.3). Space shuttles take their place among the beat-up removal vans, the congested highways, the lawless outer suburbs and the omnipresent street demonstrations that make up the urban landscape of contemporary Buenos Aires. This comically stoic vision of uneven development elicits comparison with another image of a 'ciencia ficción de barrio' produced in the ludic Argentine documentary Estrellas (Marcos Martínez and Federico León, 2007), in which a shantytown becomes the unlikely setting of an epic victory against Martian invaders.
The narrative of Planeta Extra is structured around a family conflict, sparked off by a member of the younger generation who is desperate to leave for the promise of a better life on Luna Europa, as the new world is called. The older generation, with much less interest in social and material advance, is appalled at the prospect of the family being divided. Agrimbau explains that this story of desperation to emigrate, and the struggle to obtain the necessary money and permits, was inspired by the Crisis of 2001, which led many Argentine citizens to leave the country in search of a brighter future in Europe. We might see the twentieth century in Argentina as framed by two significant waves of migration, in and out. The first was formed by European immigrants, largely from Spain and Italy, who flooded into the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second saw many of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren depart for Europe in search of more jobs and better economic prospects. As Kurlat Ares argues, therefore, Planeta Extra's treatment of such emigration points to the failure of the modernizing, civilizing project in Argentina, which for Sarmiento and Alberdi (among other founders of the modern nation) was essentially tied to an increase in urban development and European immigration.
This contrast between immigrant dream and reality, the promise of modernity and the disillusionment it has brought, is heightened by the choice to bring Planeta Extra into close dialogue with the sainete criollo, a theatrical form that enjoyed huge commercial success in Argentina around the turn of the twentieth century. Written in a costumbrista vein and based on stereotypically idiosyncratic characters, these short pieces took a tragicomic or satirical view of everyday life in Buenos Aires during the fin de siècle wave of immigration. They often focused on the effects of rapid urbanization and the tensions between tradition and modernity, conservative family values and liberal individualism. As in Planeta Extra, the central conflict of the sainete was of a sentimental nature and it was usually set in the patio of one of the tenement blocks springing up in the city to house the thousands of immigrants arriving every year.
The relationship between Planeta Extra and the sainete is noted by Agrimbau himself, who studied playwriting at the Escuela Municipal de Arte Dramático in Buenos Aires before turning his hand to scriptwriting for graphic novels. Planeta Extra consistently draws on theatrical forms and techniques, with an emphasis on characterization, an unusual continuity of action and an almost total elimination of captions in favour of speech bubbles. The final double page spread even mimics a theatrical curtain call, arranging the cast of characters as if they were taking part in a final line-up, ready to take a bow before their audience (see Fig. 1.4). The earlier sainete criollo strove to capture the colourful colloquialisms of the city's new population, including the lunfardo slang spoken by Italian immigrants in particular. Agrimbau's script is likewise faithful to the popular idiom of its characters, or at least was so until the heavy-handed editor of his Barcelona publisher stepped in to change all local and lunfardo expressions into colloquial Peninsular Spanish. This process can be traced by comparing the published edition with the previews available online. As well as the careful erasure of all exclamations of '¡che!' and references to 'lucas' (a thousand pesos), the lunfardo 'laburantes' becomes the neutral 'obreros' and the brusque 'soltá, pelotudo' (let go, you jerk) becomes the rather more prim 'suéltate, idiota'.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction
1. (Post)humanism and Technocapitalist Modernity
2. Modernity and the (Re)enchantment of the World
3. Archaeologies of Media and the Baroque
4. Steampunk, Cyberpunk and the Ethics of Embodiment
5. Urban Topologies and Posthuman Assemblages
6. Post-Anthropocentric Ecologies and Embodied Cognition
7. Intermediality and Graphic Novel as Performance
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index