BIO
Antonio Córdoba is Associate Professor at Manhattan College, where he teaches courses on Latin American and Iberian literature, film, and culture. His main focus of study is Latin American and Spanish science fiction. He has published "¿Extranjero en tierra extraña?: El género de la ciencia ficción en América Latina" [Stranger in a Strange Land? The Science Fiction Genre in Latin America] (2011). He has written articles on Latin American literature, Spanish horror film, and Brazilian science fiction cinema.
TITLE
“Disappearance, Posthuman Agency, and Post-Anthropocentric Mexico City in Diego Velázquez Betancourt’s ‘La noche que asolaron Tokio’”
ABSTRACT
How can we model post-anthropocentric existence? Is it beyond the scope of representational practices that seem to be able to approach such a concept only as a fetishized displacement of the Subject? Is the envisioning of post-anthropocentric environments nothing but the re-centralization of a human species whose concerns are projected onto fantasies of its own demise or radical transformation? I plan to address some of these questions through an analysis of Mexican zombie novel "La noche que asolaron Tokio" (The Night They Devastated Tokyo) (2013). In Diego Velázquez Betancourt’s novel, the inhabitants of Mexico City disappear one by one. It is unclear whether all of the disappeared turn into friendly, contemplative, nature-loving zombies first, but these post-human creatures come to share the eerily empty spaces of the city with the fewer and fewer survivors and an increasing number of animals of all kinds. By the end of the novel, humans are gone and the streets are becoming flooded by what looks like the original lagoon the city was built on. In this paper, I will explore how, after this massive act of human disappearance, Mexico City opens up to a post-anthropocentric future in which urban space is repossessed by non-human beings and history gives way to unfamiliar timescales. I conclude analyzing to what extent this erasure of the human species is a productive way to envision a radical post-human world and whether we can actually think post-human agency or not.
EVENT
NYU Global Posthuman 2020
Antonio Córdoba is Associate Professor at Manhattan College, where he teaches courses on Latin American and Iberian literature, film, and culture. His main focus of study is Latin American and Spanish science fiction. He has published "¿Extranjero en tierra extraña?: El género de la ciencia ficción en América Latina" [Stranger in a Strange Land? The Science Fiction Genre in Latin America] (2011). He has written articles on Latin American literature, Spanish horror film, and Brazilian science fiction cinema.
TITLE
“Disappearance, Posthuman Agency, and Post-Anthropocentric Mexico City in Diego Velázquez Betancourt’s ‘La noche que asolaron Tokio’”
ABSTRACT
How can we model post-anthropocentric existence? Is it beyond the scope of representational practices that seem to be able to approach such a concept only as a fetishized displacement of the Subject? Is the envisioning of post-anthropocentric environments nothing but the re-centralization of a human species whose concerns are projected onto fantasies of its own demise or radical transformation? I plan to address some of these questions through an analysis of Mexican zombie novel "La noche que asolaron Tokio" (The Night They Devastated Tokyo) (2013). In Diego Velázquez Betancourt’s novel, the inhabitants of Mexico City disappear one by one. It is unclear whether all of the disappeared turn into friendly, contemplative, nature-loving zombies first, but these post-human creatures come to share the eerily empty spaces of the city with the fewer and fewer survivors and an increasing number of animals of all kinds. By the end of the novel, humans are gone and the streets are becoming flooded by what looks like the original lagoon the city was built on. In this paper, I will explore how, after this massive act of human disappearance, Mexico City opens up to a post-anthropocentric future in which urban space is repossessed by non-human beings and history gives way to unfamiliar timescales. I conclude analyzing to what extent this erasure of the human species is a productive way to envision a radical post-human world and whether we can actually think post-human agency or not.
EVENT
NYU Global Posthuman 2020
