American cyborgism is about what happens to personhood in the telos of Western technology. It’s the tale of ornamentalism, the animation of objects through the synthetic, full-body prosthesis of Asiatic femininity. This is a modern story of passing that does not pivot on binary tensions such as inside/outside, essence/performance, kernel/shell. The multiple phantoms of ornamentalism remind us that the master-slave relation in American history is far from black and white. Let’s address a question that is now hovering on the edges of our inquiry: Where is blackness in the fiction of the cyborg?
...more
