Gigi Adair, University of Bielefeld, Germany
Earl Lovelace’s 2011 novel Is Just a Movie imagines the arrival of the “age of technology” in Trinidad. Set mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, it ponders the apparent failure of the emancipatory hopes associated with independence, then the radical politics of the 1970 Black Power Revolution to ask about the role of technology in cultural and social life, and the potential for technology and culture to remake the social. Refusing both technological determinism and development discourse, both of which are portrayed as forms of neocolonialism, the novel instead insists on the possibility of a politicized and emancipatory engagement with technology that emerges from a longer history of Caribbean proto-posthumanist thought and the cultural technology of the Caribbean Carnival.