Colonial and Postcolonial Technoscapes: Political and Historical Contingency of Human-Machine Entanglements in Pakistani Culture and Literature

This chapter charts the historical trajectory of human-machine entanglements in Pakistani cultureculture and literature. Throughout this chapter, I employ Arjun AppaduraiAppadurai’s terms ‘technoscapes’ and ‘ideoscapes’ to unpack the location of technology in the colonized and postcolonialpostcolonial Pakistani culture and literature. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the culture and politics of technology in colonized South Asia. By drawing insights from the historical, cultural, and literary texts produced in the colonial era, the second section illustrates that colonization was the most influential historical contingency in the formation of the ‘technoscapes’ of the Subcontinent and it emerges as one of the most crucial formative periods in the configuration of South Asians’ ‘ideoscapes’ about the contingency and agency of technology that is almost always introduced by the colonizers. The last section of the chapter traces the location of technology in the twenty-first-century Pakistani fiction with special reference to the rise of wars and surveillance culture in the aftermath of 9/11. This exploration demonstrates that the emotion of fearfear (perhaps of colonial manipulation or their violenceviolence) dominates the technological ideoscapes of the South Asians in this study while locomotives (trains, buses), weapons (guns, drones, bombs), and media emerge as the most prominent motifs of Pakistan’s technoscapes. This general survey of historical contingency of human-machine entanglements in the South Asian context reveals that in the nonwestern contexts, technophobia is usually intertwined with the fear of colonial manipulation, structural violence, racism, and xenophobia. Nevertheless, machinesmachines also represent the possibility—however limited—to improve the quality of life for the underprivileged communities.