(Re)visualizing Spectralized Others and Spectralizing (Re)visualized Humans/Posthumans in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

Abstract

Traditional readings of fiction create and configure othernesses that involve ideology critiques which aim at unmasking differential processes involved in specific events of image -making, representation and interpretation. The current paper re-reads Ursula K Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” through a cultural posthumanist approach with an attempt to examine the human/posthuman as a conceptual category by focussing on a neo-materialist approach that seeks to radicalize the re -composition of the dense materialities that go on to make and un-make the human/posthuman spatially. This helps to critically negotiate the terms of (re)visualizing spectralized others and spectralizing (re)visualized humans/posthumans. Thus, this paper reads Guin’s utopic parable as a thought experiment wrapped around a story—that is meant not only to teleologically re-configure and re-position the human as the posthuman and vice versa but also to countenance the cultural praxis of our gaze as perceiving-becoming subject-readers.