Race, technology, and the animal: Posthuman solidarity in The Creator

Abstract:This article considers how the relationship envisioned among race, technology, and the animal within The Creator (2023) enables the film to offer radical, anti-essentialist possibilities for the posthuman as a concept within sf. It does so by analyzing how the film configures scenes of cross-species kinship within its overarching narrative of robotic civil rights. After contextualizing The Creator within a lineage of allegorized alterity that has been viewed as simultaneously liberatory and restrictive by prominent scholars of race, I demonstrate how the film utilizes moments of anthropocentric and post-anthropocentric revolutionary violence to chart a trajectory toward species cosmopolitanism as a way of theorizing posthumanism. But this trajectory is complicated by the ways in which the film reinscribes techno-Orientalism on a formal level. The result, I argue, is a triangulated picture of race, technology, and the animal that gives rise to non-binary ways of conceptualizing solidarity not simply as a written theoretical exercise but as a speculative possibility grounded in paradoxicality and plasticity.