Zitationsvorschlag
Lizenz (Kapitel)
Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International.
Identifier (Buch)
Veröffentlicht
“I’m a Patented New Fucking Life Form”: Scientific Knowledge-Making Practices and Practices of Knowing in Larissa Lai’s Ustopian Fiction
ABSTRACT This article explores how Larissa Lai’s ustopian speculative fiction novels The Tiger Flu (2018) and Salt Fish Girl (2002) critique asymmetrical power relations within (Western) scientific knowledge-making practices. Via the dystopian principle of extrapolation, they project threatening tendencies in scientific practices into the future and thereby engender a reflection on the trajectories of neo-/biocolonialism and capitalist science. The utopian impulse in Lai’s dystopian scenarios thus consists in their envisioning of collaborative knowing as alternative to Western scientific knowledge-making practices. A feminist new materialist reading of her novels highlights these narratives’ vision of reimagining ‘the human’ as only one among many more-than-human agencies. By thus reframing knowledge as a material practice, the novels contemplate how we can know inclusively and ethically beyond powerful (Western) knowledge-making practices. Through examining how the novels contrast new epistemic communities with established ideas of knowledge and how they formulate new ways of thinking that contradict prevalent tendencies during the time of their publication, this article maintains that Lai’s powerful narratives sow the seeds of more-than-human postcolonial epistemologies that can sprout urgently needed u(s)topian possibilities of re-worlding.
KEYWORDS biopiracy, epistemology, Larissa Lai, new materialism, speculative fiction
