The Tandav of the Anthropocentric Epoch: Stories from Ukraine in the Posthumanist Narratives
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2024.66Keywords:
posthuman, Anthropocene, fragmentation, Tandav, film narrativeAbstract
The elaborate blitzkrieg of the Russo-Ukraine borders on the world map claims catastrophe in the immediacy of this Anthropocene era. The civil strife, insurgency, militarisation, trauma, violation of human rights, loss of lives, and fragmentation of hope are nothing but the gradual aftermath of the epistemic violence that leads to the making of pertinent war movies like Cyborgs (2017), Donbass (2018), Atlantis (2019), Bad Roads (2020), Reflection (2021) and many others. The paper provides a historical snapshot of the heat between Russia and Ukraine, followed by the readings of some of the films mentioned above to explain the conscious infiltration of posthumanism. The animalisation of humans and the use of nonhuman technical helpers to carry out air raids and massacres come into the scope of posthuman conditions. Today, the entire world is mired in the quicksand of competitive alliances and thinking of the imminence of World War Three in the wake of extending support to US-backed Ukraine or Russia. The struggle for power and encroachment seems to damage all possibilities of humanness and press us into thinking that technological advancements in the name of an engineered future of human beings are the posthumans accelerating the doom. In addition, the different versions of the new humans with diminishing sensibilities for their fellow humans, based on ‘otherness’, lead to non-acceptance and autocratic leadership. Francesca Ferrando, a leading voice in posthuman studies, rightly contends that humans are a category where some humans may not be considered as humans at all. The foreign becomes the evil one. The title alludes to Tandav of Shiva, the Hindu God who frantically danced to call upon the destruction of the mortal world as the human-centred planet has led to the global crises today.
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