When human flesh first touches synthetic flesh in the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” (2013), the human recoils, but keeps touching all the same: “You’re so smooth—how are you so smooth?” whispers Martha (Hayley Atwell) to the android simulacra of her dead partner, Ash (Domnhall Gleeson). The android body is framed as both supernatural and technological, …
View More Fake Flesh: Black Mirror and Ex MachinaAuthor: Sarah Chihaya
Dr Sarah Chihaya is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Princeton University, where she specializes in contemporary fiction and film, and is currently at work on her first book, The Unseen World: Metanarrative and Forms of Contemporary Fiction. Her writing has recently appeared in Public Books, Modern Fiction Studies, and C21 Literature: 21st Century Writings, and she is the editor of Contemporaries at Post45. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.
Superhumanity: Refiguring the Superhero
Like the urban thoroughfare it’s named after, Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (2012) contains diverse and highly specific multitudes. It is a…
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