New and Graphic Posthumans

283 BOOKS IN REVIEW contemporary French thought on the apocalyptic bent of our present times, some of which—like Latour’s—has been translated into English. But, as is typical of French academic publishing, the reader must comb through the footnotes for these sources since there is no list of works cited and the index includes only proper names. I hope that an English translation will be made available so that Engélibert’s work can gain a wider audience; for those working in apocalyptic studies who read French, his prose is clear and accessible, and reading this work demonstrates that his reputation in France and Québec is rightfully earned.—Amy J. Ransom, Central Michigan University New and Graphic Posthumans. Edward King and Joanna Page. Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America. London: UCL, 2017. 236 pp. £35 hc, £20 pbk, free ebk. Edward King (University of Bristol) and Joanna Page (University of Cambridge) discuss the advantages that the graphic novel medium provides when exploring and problematizing questions of posthumanist thought. The intermedial nature of graphic fiction allows for a unique presentation and examination of the nature of twenty-first-century subjectivity, embodiment, and mediatization that connect humans to their non-human environments. The authors examine these themes in an array of graphic novels from Latin America, with a heavy emphasis on the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay). In their introduction, King and Page perform a balancing act in considering multiple analytical and theoretical ideas when discussing posthumanism in contemporary sf graphic fiction in Latin America. In a brief historical overview, the authors discuss the graphic novel as a point of confluence among national ideologies, popular cultures, and global cultures in its material and aesthetic construction as well as in its treatment of the tensions and shifting relationships of local and global, center and periphery, popular and elite. Since the inception of Latin American graphic fiction in the nineteenth century, it “has engaged in an ambivalent critique of urban modernity that simultaneously recognizes in that modernity the conditions of its own possibility as a medium” (18). The Latin American graphic novel affords particular advantages in examining and critiquing the various disciplinary and discursive forms of posthumanism wthin philosophical, critical, and cultural frameworks. King and Page state: In our analysis, we have focused on the limits of the human as they become visible within the Latin American context, and in the light of certain defining events and experiences, such as colonization and its legacies for the present, racial and cultural hybridities, uneven modernization, dictatorship, revolution, neoliberalism and staggering socio-economic inequality, but also particular strands of political and cultural thought, including a complex (and often contestatory) literary and philosophical response to European humanism and modernity. (6) 284 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) The authors organize the book into seven chapters. In the first chapter, “(Post)humanism and Technocapitalist Modernity,” they examine a series of graphic novels from Argentina and Uruguay that condemn humanist exploitation of nature and denounce technology as a tool of biopolitical control; these works draw closer to anti-humanist rather than critical posthumanist positions. In the second chapter, “Modernity and the (Re)enchantment of the World,” they analyze two Chilean graphic novels, EDem : La conspiración de la vida eterna [The Eternal Life Conspiracy, Cristián Montes Lynch, 2012] and Las playas del otro mundo [The Beaches of Another World, Critián Barros and Demetrio Babul, 2009], and the Mexican graphic novel/web-comic Los perros salvajes [The Feral Dogs, Edgar Clement, 20112017 ]. These graphic novels engage in a culture of enchantment and gesture toward a new post-anthropocentric ethics. By blending technology, science, and spiritualism, the texts forge connections between “apparently divergent temporalities, ontologies and epistemologies” (48). In the third chapter, “Archaeologies of Media and the Baroque,” they examine the neo-baroque aesthetic of Operación Bolívar [Operation Bolívar, Edgar Clement, 1999] as an “archaeology of the history of media in Mexico” as well as a mode that explores and problematizes the connections among the material, spiritual, and virtual realms (87). In the fourth chapter, “Steampunk, Cyberpunk, and the Ethics of Embodiment,” King and Page read two Chilean graphic...

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