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Clones, Fakes and Posthumans.
Cultures of Replication.
Essed, Philomena and Gabriele Schwab (Eds.)
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2012, 231 pp.
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Series:
Thamyris /Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race 25
Clones, Fakes and Posthumans: Cultures of Replication explores cloning and related phenomena that inform each other, like twins, fakes, replica, or homogeneities, through a cultural prism. What could it mean to think of a cloning mentality? Could it be that a “cloning culture” has made biotechnological cloning desirable in the first place, and vice versa that biotechnological cloning then enforces technologies of social and cultural cloning? What does it mean to say that a culture replicates? If biotechnological cloning has to do with choice and repetitive reproduction of selected characteristics, how are those kinds of desires expressed socially, politically and culturally? Lifting the issue of cloning above the biotechnological domain, we problematize the cultural context, including modernity’s readiness to imitate and manipulate nature, and the skewed privileging of desirable socialities as a basis for exclusive replication. We also explore possible relations between a cloning mentality and a consumer society that fosters a brand-name mentality. The construction and (coercive) implementation of copy-prone technological and symbolic items are at the very heart of the consumer society and its modes of mass production as they have emerged from and seek to articulate, define, and refine modernity and modernization.
Contents
Philomena Essed and Gabriele Schwab: Introduction: Cloning and Cultures of Replication
Technologies, Fantasies and Philosophies of Life
Verena Stolcke: Homo Clonicus
Heleen van den Hombergh: Gentech Agriculture
Rosi Braidotti: Transposing Life
Gabriele Schwab: Replacement Humans
Cultural Cloning
Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg: Cloning, Cultures, and the Social Injustices of Homogeneities
Ross D. Parke, Christine Ward Gailey, Scott Coltrane, and M. Robin DiMatteo: The Pursuit of Perfection
Philomena Essed: Cloning the Physician
Ackbar Abbas: Cloning Disappearance, Consuming Fakes
Replicating and Marketing Faith
Eileen Luhr: Marketing Religion
Rebecca Kugel: Civilizing Missions
Toby Miller: The Yanqui Makeover
The Cloning Imaginary: Proliferations of a Fantasy
Gabriele Schwab: Twin Enemies
Carole-Anne Tyler: Dead Ringer – Knock Off
Nancy Postero: Destiny – Eternity
The Contributors
Philomena Essed is Professor of Critical Race, Gender and Leadership studies, Antioch University, PhD in Leadership and Change Program. Best known for introducing the concepts of everyday racism and gendered racism, her work has been adopted and applied across the world. She has published widely and currently works on human dignity. In progress, also with Rodopi, is a volume on Dutch Racism.
Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Faculty Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine. Her books in English include Subjects without Selves; The Mirror-and the Killer-Queen; Haunting Legacies, and Imaginary Ethnographies (forthcoming). Edited and co-edited volumes include Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood and Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis.
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