Vehicle Art and Mind Uploading: Transhumanist Posthuman Ontologies in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing

Vehicles/automobiles/locomotives are present in almost all contemporary fiction, but what sets Uzma Aslam KhanUzma Aslam Khan’s TrespassingKhanTrespassing (2003) apart from the rest of the fiction which depicts vehicles is its focus on world-famous Pakistani Truck Art. This chapter is different in its approach and treatment of the subject because it compares the motif of vehicle art/Truck Art with the popular futurist concept of consciousness uploading in Euro-American science fiction to explore the ethico-onto-epistemologicalethico-onto-epistemological and psycho-political implications of human-automobile entanglements in this text. In its approach, it is borderline transhumanist which is an often conflated corollary for posthumanism. The chapter contends that one of the many ways to study posthumanposthuman agency of matter in Pakistani humans’ lives is the depiction of Truck Art in Khan’s TrespassingKhanTrespassing which provides a nonwestern perspective on how South Asian communities try to extend their socio-political human consciousness and fight postcolonialpostcolonial forms of marginalizations through the enmeshment of locallocal artistic expression (Truck Art) and machinesmachines. By comparing a Pakistani regional art form of vehicle painting to mind uploadingmind uploading, I contend that the bodiesbodies of the vehicles, in this novel, contain figments of their decorator’s socio-political marginalization, memories, hopes, and aspirations. Therefore, the mechanical bodies of the decorated buses do not only become agents of assertion of ethnic identity of the novel’s protagonist, but it evolves as transhumanist posthuman subjectivities, because they are the material alterities that carry the mindscapes of their painters. Therefore, the novel yields a rich interpretation of the phenomenon of diffraction and its agential realismagential realism implications.