Description

In this presentation I look at technology, particularly in the form of machines like the telephone and tape recorder, as well as more abstract and nebulous technologies like the Internet, to map the formation of cyborg and what I call “sahiborg” subjectivities in an era of rapidly changing and ever-improving modes of communication. These technologies seem at once to bring us closer together and further apart, fostering a greater sense of global solidarity and “connectivity,” in John Tomlinson’s terms, but also setting out battle lines for revolutionary new Indian movements: between the international rich and poor, in Sinha’s work, and Global North and South, in Tyrewala’s.

Stephanie Southmayd is a fifth-year doctoral student in the English programme at the University of Toronto. Her interest in the issues of globalized middle-class labour, business, and technology in South Asian literature stems from the time she spent in Gurgaon, India, where she worked as an editor for an outsourcing firm before returning to graduate school. She hopes to finish her dissertation on postmillennial Indian fiction in English and its narrative strategies with regards to globalization and nationalism by late spring 2016.