Abstract:

Recent scholarship has pointed towards a shift of interest from the figure of the cyborg to that of the zombie as a critical prism for articulating a politics of posthumanism. Against this backdrop, I discuss the appearances of the figure of the zombie in the recent animated adaptations of the work of Project Itoh, with a particular attention to how their respective treatments of questions of human subjectivity and consciousness offer a meta-commentary on how animation itself is generative of zombies, of animated images that can simulate human affect and intelligence.

Biography:   

Baryon Tensor Posadas teaches Japanese literature, animation, and science fiction in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Minnesota. He is the author of Double Visions, Double Fictions: The Doppelganger in Japanese Film and Literature (2018) and the translator of Yoshio Aramaki’s New Wave science fiction novel The Sacred Era: A Novel (2017). He is currently working on a project titled “Science Fiction, Empire, Japan,” which examines techno-orientalism and the transpacific politics of futurity through the prism of Japanese science fiction.