Postcolonial Posthuman Cyborg Ontologies: Human-Automobile Entanglements in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke

The notion of the ‘cyborgcyborg’ has now been established as one of the most pertinent identity signifiers for exploring subjectivitysubjectivity transformation in the posthumanposthuman era. However, scholars have pointed out that these investigations into the changing contours of identities and subjectivities have been limited to Euro-American academic researchers, and there is a rising need to decolonize this field of study. This chapter intends to contribute to the decolonization of cyborg subjectivity studies and to invite debate over possible nonwestern trajectories for exploring new contours of human-automobile enmeshment as depicted in Mohsin HamidHamid’s novel Moth SmokeHamidMoth Smoke (2000). His novels are about people from postcolonialpostcolonial Pakistan who have been depicted in close connection with their vehicles. Therefore, human characters in these narratives, in relation to their vehicles, are both unconscious and metaphoric cyborgs. The study contends that a nonwestern posthuman cyborg literary critique is possible by conducting a Baradian diffractive analysis of the roles of vehicles in the plot development, character orientation, and aesthetic structure of Hamid’s novels. In other words, this chapter demonstrates that the human-vehicle relationship depicted in Hamid’s fiction yields rich interpretations for literary critiques on the possible postcolonial posthuman cyborg subjectivities emerging in contemporary milieu.