South Asian Transhumanist Posthuman Ontologies: The Relationship between Vehicle Art and Mind Uploading in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing

Abstract

One possible way to decolonize the posthuman field of literary criticism is to find possible stylistic and thematic affinities between the literatures from the less technologically advanced regions such as South Asia and mainstream Euro-American science fiction. This article invites and affirms alternative ways of perceiving and comprehending the transhumanist posthuman paradigms from the technologically underdeveloped world (South Asia) through a critically informed analysis of the motifs, symbols, and characters in the Pakistani writer Uzma Aslam Khan’s Anglophone novel Trespassing (2003). It argues that the nonhuman agency of truck art in Trespassing can be interpreted as a metaphor for a possible local technique for consciousness uploading. By applying the theoretical framework of transhumanist/posthumanist literary theory, this article demonstrates that the depiction of truck art in the novel can be analyzed as an analogy for the transhumanist posthuman dream of whole brain emulation.