A Song from the Cybernetic Fold

Chapter 2 examines the prosthetic memories of postcolonial languaging in the transnational circuits of information and communication technology. In Susan Sontag’s lecture, Indian call-center operators (simulating American accents) embody the loss of authenticity in the globalizing world, the pang of which evidences the ethical agency that distinguishes human translators from computers. Sontag, salvaging human distinction in language, thus subtends dehumanization of Asians due to their closeness to technology in the global division of labor. In search of an alternative, this chapter explores the futuristic queer and diasporic memories of being human near machines/robots in Margaret Rhee’s poetry, alongside the queer genealogies of the thinking machine and the historically fractured associations between robots and Asians. Rhee’s works subvert language as a technology of distinction (which reinstitutes the sameness of the human) and, instead, demonstrate poetry as a technology of love across difference (that opens to an/other world)—which I call cosmo-poetics.