Decentering Human/ Becoming Posthuman: Monstrous Subjectivity in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013)

Abstract

Since its appearance in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818), the monster figure was deemed the human’s other that poses a threat to humanity. In 2013, in his award-winning novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi, the Iraqi acclaimed writer, appropriated Shelly’s monster in the hybrid posthuman figure of Whatsitsname that shares with Shelly’s Frankenstein the same anxieties but within the context of Iraq after the American invasion in 2003. With the advent of the twenty first century, and emergence of new social realities due to the capitalist system, the changes associated with technology, war on terrorism and globalization led to the rise of the posthuman condition in which human and other-than-human entities are envisioned in a new light. What characterizes the posthuman condition is the reassessment of the dualistic thinking that governed the human thought and the rise of hybrids as posthuman subjects. In this respect, many traditional boundaries between nature/culture, human/other, and humanity/monstrosity were transgressed. This paper aims at exploring manifestations of posthuman subjectivity in Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) by Ahmed Saadawi in the light of critical posthumanism. It claims that the monstrous figure in the novel is a posthuman subject that presents an alternative vision, not a threatening entity. It will focus on decentering human identity as highlighted in Michel Foucault’s criticism of biopolitics, and exploring posthuman subjectivity as pursued by Rosi Braidotti and Ellen L. Graham.