Brill Clones, Fakes and Posthumans: Cultures of Replication: 25 (Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race, 25)

Clones, Fakes and Posthumans: Cultures of replication explores cloning and related phenomena that inform each other, like twins, fakes, replica, or homogeneities, through a cultural prism. What could it mean to think of a cloning mentality? Could it be that a "cloning culture" has made biotechnological cloning desirable in the first place, and vice versa that biotechnological cloning then enforces technologies of social and cultural cloning? What does it mean to say that a culture replicates? If biotechnological cloning has to do with choice and repetitive reproduction of selected characteristics, how are those kinds of desires expressed socially, politically and culturally? Lifting the issue of cloning above the biotechnological domain, we problematize the cultural context, including modernity's readiness to imitate and manipulate nature, and the skewed privileging of desirable socialities as a basis for exclusive replication. We also explore possible relations between a cloning mentality and a consumer society that fosters a brand-name mentality. The construction and (coercive) implementation of copy-prone technological and symbolic items are at the very heart of the consumer society and its modes of mass production as they have emerged from and seek to articulate, define, and refine modernity and modernization. About the Author Philomena Essed is Professor of Critical Race, Gender and Leadership studies, Antioch University, PhD in Leadership and Change Program. Best known for introducing the concepts of everyday racism and gendered racism, her work has been adopted and applied across the world. She has published widely and currently works on human dignity. In progress, also with Rodopi, is a volume on Dutch Racism. Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Faculty Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine. Her books in English include Subjects without Selves; The Mirror-and the Killer-Queen; Haunting Legacies, and Imaginary Ethnographies (forthcoming). Edited and co-edited volumes include Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood and Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis.