Webliography

If popular culture has taken up the cyborg as a figure of progress, what happens to the way race is represented?

Nishime, LeiLani “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future”, accessed 2 September 2010.

In her article, Nishime draws paralells between the way cyborgs are perceived and (dated) common perceptions of mixed-race people. She makes the comparison on the basis of western culture’s long history of equating human with white European and the current trend of equating human with organic beings. Nishime goes on to explore the concept of cyborgs as contemporary mixed-race people through the narrative of cyborg cinema.

Nishime points out that popular film continues to play on the fear surrounding the mixing of races, but now uses the cyborg to do it ‘under the umbrella of generic imperatives’, so as to avoid issues that may be too threatening to approach directly. After considering the expanse of cyborg-cinema, she tends to point to the genre as using cyborgs to deflect criticism of the subliminal racial assumptions they employ and ultimately continuing to ‘problematise’ the mixed race (or mixed-body) being.

The article was written by an Assistant Professor from the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. It was originally published in 2005 by the ‘Cinema Journal’ and then made available online by Project Muse, a collaborative project between academic institutions aimed at making a wide range of humanities and social sciences material accessible online. As a research source, the article is scholarly and explains the issues in great depth. It makes useful conclusions about the way race is represented if the cyborg is taken up as a figure of progress - namely that racial representations themselves may not similarly progress in terms of attitudes toward mixed-race people. It is relatively recent and the fact it is published in the US does not affect its validity - it may even be more relevant, considering much pop culture originates there.

Schueller, Malini, “Analogy and (White) Feminist Theory: Thinking Race and the Color of the Cyborg Body”, accessed 2 September 2010

In this Essay, Schueller looks at likenesses between what she terms ‘the cyborg myth’ and Poststructuralist theory. She focusses on Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985), suggesting that Haraway couples ‘women of colour’ and cyborgs as two groups whose identity is based on otherness and difference, rather than sameness, and that both are labelled ‘monstrous selves’ in science fiction.

The author (Malini Johar Schueller) is a professor at the department of English at the University of Florida, and the article was first published in 2005 in the Journal ‘Signs: Women in Culture and Society’ by the University of Chicago. The author and original publisher make this a reliable, scholarly source. Nonetheless, it has a number of downfalls. While the essay does examine the relationship between Cyborgs and Race, it does not examine the notion of progress or any real chronological developments in the way race is represented, and so is not exactly on-topic. Also, the on-line host is ‘Filer’ a service provided by the Case Western Reserve University for open storage by its patrons, and so the user who put the essay up on Filer could take it down at any time and the link would no longer work.

Pak, Chris, “Confronting or sidestepping race in SF film adaptations: I, Robot and I Am Legend”, accessed 2 September 2010

In his article, Pak looks at two films (I Robot and I Am Legend) to examine how race is portrayed in popular science fiction. The constructions he makes are similar to those by Nishime examined above, namely that the cyborg is often deployed to examine issues of racial identity in metaphor. However, Pak instead finds that examining race in this way has allowed issues of race to progress, because in these popular narratives there is an alien or ‘other’ enemy, and so organic humans of different races are more likely to be seen as one race. To illustrate this, Pak points out that the protagonist in the film ‘I Am Legend’ is black, whereas his earlier counterpart in the book is white, and the books references to racial blood purity in that regard are transformed in the movie to references to pure human blood.

The article is written is satisfactory detail, and provides a good contrast to the article written by Nishime in relation to the given topic. Chris Pak is a PhD candidate from the University of Liverpool, and this article was first published in 2010 in the US China Foreign Language journal. It is now hosted online by linguist.org.cn, a free online database of journals for Sino-US English teaching, a host that in itself is not entirely reliable as a professional academic source because contribution is not greatly monitored – but the original publisher and credentials of the author probably suffice to ensure quality. The recentness of the article and its applicability to western culture generally goes a way to proving the advantages of sourcing research online, and although it is an isolated examination of only two films, it complements the other research listed here well.

Miyake, Esperanza, “My, is that Cyborg a little bit Queer?”, accessed 2 September 2010.

In this article, Miyake looks at whether the figure of the cyborg as one that breaks down divides, with the author’s person point of view as a ‘Japanese-Spanish-English-speaking-male-female- loving drama queen’ coming across strongly in the ideas expressed. She explains Haraway’s claim that the cyborgian culture ‘has no truck with bisexuality’, and ultimately disputes this because of the boundaries that are broken down by cyborgs (the human/animal boundary, the organic/machine boundary and the physical/non-physical boundary).

In itself, this article is not an ideal resource for the given topic because it focuses mostly on bisexuality rather than race. However, ideas that are expressed, particularly in light of the author’s context, could easily be translated onto the racial landscape, if only to make up one of a number of propositions in a potential essay. Asides from the askew relevance, the article is reliable, in depth and has good credentials - the author has masters degree from the University of York in English and related Literature and the article was published in 2004 in an online journal by Bridgewater State University.

Wilson, Victoria “Cultural Nationalism, Gender, and Cyborg Citizenship: Rethinking the Divide between Gender and Race Liberation in Cultural Nationalist Ideology”, accessed 2 September 2010.

Wilson looks at ‘cyborg citizenship’ as a metaphor through which to examine race and gender subjugation just as Pak and Nishime examined above do. Wilson’s article goes a step further, however, and demonstrates that race and gender are often seen as unrelated systems of oppression, and uses the cyborg metaphor to demonstrate that they are in face related and inextricably intertwined.

The online publisher of this article is its main weakness as a research source. It is hosted by ‘allacademic.com’, a commercial product to which anyone may submit. I would still tend to refer to this article because it is listed in the ‘graduate student accomplishments of 2007’ page on the University of California’s website, an indication of the author’s credential’s and the article’s academic standard and recentness.