Disability and Memory in Posthuman(ist) Narrative: Reading Prosthesis and Amnesia in Hollywood’s Re-membering of the ‘War on Terror’

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Matt Boswell for his reading and comments on a draft of this article.

Notes

1 Nayar, Posthumanism, 11.

2 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 23–49; Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 19–53.

3 Braidotti, Posthuman, 13–53.

4 Gregory, “From a View,” 191.

5 Virilio, Desert Screen, 107.

6 I choose to focus on high profile Hollywood films, and not other types of cinematic or visual narratives, precisely because of the power of their global reach. It is in such texts that many cultural understanding of disability (bodies/minds) and memory (past/event) are formed, so they provide an especially important set of reference texts.

7 Samuels, Fantasies, 121.

8 Grainge, Memory and Popular Film, 1.

9 Ibid.

10 Eberwein, Hollywood.

11 Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 1.

12 Ibid., 6–7.

13 Ibid., 2–3.

14 Ibid., 3.

15 Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 2; cf. Lury, Prosthetic Culture.

16 Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, 2.

17 Ibid., 8.

18 Ibid., 9.

19 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 49 (emphasis in original).

20 Ibid., 49–50.

21 Sobchack, “Prosthetics,” 21.

22 Ibid., 27 (emphasis in original).

23 It is regrettable that important studies that have marked the field’s development, by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, Elaine Graham, Neil Badmington, and Bruce Clarke, have nothing to say on either disability or memory, despite both being – because of the ways in which they offer powerful critiques of humanism – clearly suited to the ways in which the posthuman can be understood. New critical monographs, for example by Rosi Braidotti, Stefan Herbrechter and David Roden, are equally silent, despite the strong presence of critical disability and memory studies as disciplines. The reason for the absence of disability in particular is obvious, if routinely disheartening: such critical forgetting is part of a wider process by which disability contributions are consistently written out of accounts of change, whether viewed historically or as critical/theoretical perspectives on the present and future. For similar issues surrounding memory studies, see Radstone, Memory and Methodology, 6.

24 Nayar, Posthumanism, 101.

25 Ibid., 106.

26 Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, 139.

27 Chen, Animacies, 104.

28 Ibid., 17.

29 Ibid., 18.

30 Greengrass, Green Zone. DVD Chapter 7.

31 Jones, Source Code. DVD. Chapter 11. What happens to the real Sean Fentress is something the film cannot explain. In theory he should, with all the other passengers, survive the explosion. But Stevens steals his identity and, in effect, obliterates him, a powerful statement of quite how this particular centred, individualist, humanist narrative functions.

32 Bigelow, The Hurt Locker. DVD. Chapter 1.

33 Burgoyne, “Embodiment,” 14.

34 Ibid., 13.

35 Ibid.

36 Erll, “Travelling Memory,” 9.

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Stuart Murray

Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Email: [email protected].