New Weird Technologies: Subverting Neoliberal Globalisation through Hybridity

Bouet, Elsa

Abstract

Globalisation is often portrayed in politics as an equalising, homogenising, and beneficial phenomenon which allows for universal development, a discourse which in fact masks the inequalities that neoliberal, transnational institutions foster to retain their hegemony. The New Weird serves to undermine this misconception since it challenges the way neoliberalism has maintained colonial hierarchies and binaries, while also imagining and promoting alternative new political relations that foster openness and equality. This chapter will therefore discuss the ways in which the New Weird portrays neoliberal globalisation as dystopian since political and financial inequalities are maintained using military, surveillance and computing technologies.
To discuss this, I will examine Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987), China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011) and Tade Thomson Rosewater (2016). These three novels represent alien encounters, in which a population ends up being exploited and subjugated by a colonial force, alien in Dawn, and human in Embassytown and Rosewater. Technology is used not only to dominate the other, but also to control the flow of capital, not only financial but also in the form of a labour force deemed expandable. In doing do, these New Weird novels not only evoke the brutal past of colonialization, but also unveil the ways in which politics and economics have reformulated previous colonial structures through neoliberal institutions, portraying these as dystopian. However, these three New Weird novels also dismantle these oppressive mechanisms by representing a world of possibilities opened up by their respective monstrous hybrids, who promote global solidarity and collective decision making as a way to undo neoliberal hierarchies and structures.

Citation

Bouet, E. (2023). New Weird Technologies: Subverting Neoliberal Globalisation through Hybridity. In R. Duncan (Ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (206-220). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

• Acceptance Date: Jul 21, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Jul 3, 2023
• Publication Date: Jul 3, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jul 19, 2023
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Pages: 206-220
• Book Title: The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic
• Chapter Number: 13
• ISBN: 9781399510585
• Publisher URL: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-edinburgh-companion-to-globalgothic.html