X Close

UCL Press

Home

Menu

‘Open access will allow us to establish a much closer dialogue’

By Alison Fox, on 21 June 2016

Today’s guest blog is by Edward King, Lecturer in Portuguese and Lusophone Studies at the University of Bristol. His book, Technology, Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America will publish in 2017.

Technology, Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America will be the first book-length study of the graphic novel form in the region. Latin America is currently experiencing a boom in graphic novels that are very sophisticated, both in the concepts they are exploring and in the way they are reworking the genre. We believe that the graphic novel is emerging in Latin America and elsewhere as a uniquely powerful medium through which to explore the nature of twenty-first century subjectivity and especially forms of embodiment or mediatization that bind humans to their non-human environment. These can be very productively drawn out in relation to modes of posthuman thought and experience, and that is the focus of our book. We discuss a range of recent graphic novels from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, all of which experiment in exciting ways with transmediality, the topological representation of space in the city, or embodied modes of perception and cognition. They are often concerned with finding a new form of ethics for a posthuman world in which agency is both dispersed beyond the human self and (paradoxically) rooted in the materiality of an embodied existence.

Publishing open access with UCL Press will enable us to distribute our research much more effectively. The community of scholars interested in Latin American culture, graphic fiction and the study of posthuman subjectivities is geographically extremely dispersed so being able to download the book from the internet should be a great help. Researchers and students in Latin America often find the cost of importing books prohibitive, so the open access route will allow us to establish a much closer dialogue with them. Furthermore, as our focus in the book is on texts that intersect with the technologies of the information age in a number of ways, it is appropriate that it bestrides both print and digital media.

About the author

Edward King is a Lecturer in Portuguese and Lusophone Studies at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine and Brazilian Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). UCL Press will publis his forthcoming book (co-authored with Joanna Page) Technology, Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America in 2017.  Sign up for more details here.

Leave a Reply