درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This study seeks to delineate the representation of post-9/11 in Iraq through employing a range of ideas and conceptions from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s formulation of Empire to Agamben’s theorization of the state of exception so as to reveal the real cause of the US invasion of Iraq, the real significance of fundamentalism which arose in the wake of the violence resulting from the invasion, and the resistance role that fundamentalism played in Iraq. The study seeks to demonstrate how Islamophobia, terrorism, fundamentalism, and Empire are inextricably intertwined and the way they are represented in Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter. The findings of the study reveal the fact that the main intentions of the invasion arise out of the Empire’s attempts to spread its supranational sovereignty to the entire world, along the way giving rise to fundamentalism, which stands as the antithesis of the Empire and which does not have anything to do with going back to the roots of Islam but rather serves the losers of the process of globalization as the means through which they can contest its winners. The novel, thus, is an attempt at giving a narrative mode to the events that led to the fundamentalist renaissance in Iraq as a form of postcolonial confrontation and indicating how fundamentalism has been a form of resistance.

This article presents new outlooks toward gender transfiguration in David Hare’s Skylight and Pravda in the light of Judith Butler’s theory of Gender Performativity. It examines whether the linguistic performance of Hare's characters is an innate feature or a hallucinatory effect of their naturalized and gendered bodies. Butler asserts that performativity is a ritualized production and a constrained reiteration of cultural intelligibility under the prohibition pressed by power regimes. Surveying Skylight and Pravda elucidates that gender identity is an imitation, which leads Hare’s characters to resignify and recontextualize the parodic gender reproductions. Moreover, the gendered subjects were subordinated to the language that interpellated them, so that each individual became a linguistically stylized occasion. Therefore, the ever-shifting identities of Hare’s characters were established by the power of the injurious language that interpellated the subjects. Springing from the discussion about gender performativity of Hare’s characters, the article concluded that identity is a phantasmatic construction, and what an individual performs is a non-intrinsic parody of the culturally constructed regulations. As a result, the culturally acquired gender is crafted based on the socially recognizable standards, which shape the directionality of the self-representation.

The present paper intends to study Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go from the perspective of Cyborgian concepts of hybridized subjectivity, speed, metamorphic becoming, bio-narrative and bio-discourse, which intersect with cyborg biotechnology to create the bio-capital characters. Ishiguro portrays the non-unitary bio-subjectivities along with challenges of clones through tracing the main character’s memories. The Cyborgian theories of Donna Haraway, Paul Virilio and Rosi Braidotti are mainly used to analyze the genetic organs of the selected novel in bio-discourse. Cyborg biotechnology drains its bio-power, merges borderlines between the conventional polarities, de-politicizes it by destroying inequality in a natural history of transhumanism and, ultimately, makes hybridized privileged – unprivileged subjectivity. Cyborg bio-capital body is a kind of genetically modified object with a shifted boundary; a bio-semiotic body, not the human physiological body. In the novel, this study explores that cyborgian bio-capital subjectivity is the imitation of the original one due to three reasons: first, it has lost its human uniqueness; second, its self-automation is changed into a possible being; and, finally, its biological facet has constructed the equal bio-subjects. A cyborgian bio-capital subject is partly organ and partly machine in the cyborg biotechnology. The thematic features of Ishiguro’s novel as the quintessence of cyborg bio-narrative, including nomadic bio-subjectivity, development of fabricated trans-subjects, bio-animals, trans-genetic organisms, decentered subject, bio-molecule and mechanical body, are the focal points of analysis in this study.