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Full Description
In essays on literature, film, capitalism, and the university, this book illuminates and deepens the understanding of the parasite as a metaphor for cultural and social critique.
While symbiosis may harm the host to the benefit of the parasite, humans have nonetheless developed complex networks to rationalize intra-species parasitism. From influence to borrowing to the "creativity" of AI, and from more obvious historical discourses of appropriation, like colonialism and imperialism, parasitical logic has distinct cultural genealogies. The ubiquity of parasites seems to cheat substantial theorization, but this collection offers lively and suggestive essays on parasitical logic from global and interdisciplinary perspectives with a particular spotlight on its human and posthuman impress.
Parasitical Logic in Culture and Society assesses this condition via three complementary modes. First, it focuses on literary texts, which offers parasitism as a paradigm of cultural symbiosis through the artistic mutualism of the reader/writer. The second section approaches visual media, inspired by Bong Joon Ho's Parasite (2019), with essays that probe the representation of the parasite as a visual logic with both socio-political effects and challenges to genre and history. The third section concerns the provocative theme of parasitism in institutional structures, including within the US Army and the privatized university.
Authors in this collection ask how ideas dedicated to the diminution of exploitation might confront the power of parasitism in the production and reproduction of inequality in everyday life. Should one fight parasitical social and cultural structures or aim to live their contradictions as a universal norm? Or, does a force of nature simply condemn humanity to, as a poet once put it, prey on itself like monsters of the deep?
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Parasites!
Peter Hitchcock (Graduate Center and Baruch College, CUNY, USA)
Part One: Textuality
1. Beyond the Parasitical Logic in Octavia Butler's Fledgling (2005)
Debarati Biswas (New York City College of Technology, CUNY, USA)
2. Leeching off the Duniya: Queer Futures in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Shoumik Bhattacharya (Metropolitan State University, USA)
3. Wholly, Holey Insufficient: Parasitism as a Critique of Meaning
Tess J. Given (Indiana University, USA)
Part Two: Mediations
4. Fruiting Bodies, or, Nostalgia Is a Form of Decay
Joseph Boisvere (Graduate Center, CUNY, USA)
5. Post-Work Lumpen: Inequality and Deprivation in Contemporary Society in Amarelo Manga
Márcio Valença (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil)
6. First-Contact Scenes and Parasitical Master-Servant and Host-Guest Representations in The Servant, Parasite, and Ripley
Rebecca Dyer (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, USA)
7. The New Parasite: Nishida Kitaro and Michael Snow
Eric Cazdyn (University of Toronto, Canada)
Part Three: Structures
8. Racial Parasites and Class Rule: White Riot and Sadist Accumulation
Justin Rogers-Cooper (Graduate Center and LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, USA) and Scott Henkel (University of Wyoming, USA)
9. Olga Ravn's The Employees and the Parasitic Form of Labor Management
Christian Gerzso (Pacific Lutheran University, USA)
10. Parasites, Neoliberalism, and the Death of the University
Jeffrey R. Di Leo (University of Houston, Victoria, USA)
11. The Language of Insurrection: The Indexicality of a Parasitical Society
Renata Archanjo (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil)
Notes on Contributors
Index
