“Life” as Biofoundry in the Technocene: Politics of Extraction and Resistance in Saad Z. Hossain’s Speculative Narratives

The paper examines Saad Z. Hossain’s The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (2019) and “Bring Your Own Spoon” (2021) as speculative imaginings of the Technocene, where technology becomes an epochal subject and constructs hierarchical structures through its influence on the human and the nonhuman natural world. Drawing on Agostino Cera’s feralization of man, Anna Tsing et al.’s concept of feral patches, and Elizabeth Povinelli’s distinction between Life and Nonlife, the paper argues that geoengineering and bioengineering procedures become interlocked extractive apparatuses that operate as state- or corporate-funded solutions to climate crisis. While geoengineering manages carbon-as-Nonlife, bioengineering manages carbon-as-Life. Both extractive infrastructures turn the bodies of the environmentally poor into biofoundries. Using Ramachandra Guha’s Structural-Organizational and Political-Cultural paradigms of protest, the paper examines Hossain’s literary representations of how the environmentally poor refuse the imposed condition of surviving as developmental refugees in a poor environment, and ultimately resist the biotechnical extraction of their labor.