“They are here. They are everywhere. They are us.” – Posthuman Encounters in Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes (2018)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v4i2.3347Keywords:
Human/non-human binary, Animal studies, Dystopia, Posthuman, TechnologyAbstract
In Little Eyes (2018), the latest technological hype comes in the shape of cute, pet-like robots with cameras for eyes. These so-called kentukis are remotely inhabited and controlled by their human users via an online connection which is established at random. As the novel’s blurb - “They are here. They are everywhere. They are us.” - suggests, a kentuki is at once a familiar and unfamiliar creature and users’ experiences range from comforting to unsettling. The novel revolves around the theme of stranger danger and reports several uncanny encounters between humans and not-quite-humans in places around the world. The representation of these posthuman interactions in the novel remains ambiguous: Even though the potential to challenge or even transgress the human/non-human binary is addressed, the novel follows a classic dystopian narrative, which posits that it is not the technology itself which is inherently good or bad, it is us humans.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Heike Missler
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
The works in this journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.