Hoping for Cyborgs: Cyborg Eco-Heroism, Odd Kinships, and Hopeful Heroics in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans

Abstract

Abstract Building on Donna Haraway’s advocacy for embracing “unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles” (Trouble 4), this paper reads Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans (2013) with a focus on how, in the face of profound environmental challenges, stereotypical narratives of heroism are transformed—like in a compost pile—through cyborg-elements. The essay argues that grounding hero stories in the techno-organismal entanglements of ecosystemic crisis, yields an explicitly instable, corporeal conception of heroism in/of crisis of eco-heroism. Reading Smith’s protagonists, Fen and Daniel, as eco-heroic cyborgs in conjunction with ideals of the traditional hero’s corporeal and affective superiority creates instances of hopeful heroics in the narrative that challenge supposedly stabilizing patterns of identification in traditional discourses of American heroism. This vision of cyborg eco-heroism in Orleans makes communicable an unpredictable and instable crisisstate, generating hope as a composted affect in this eco-heroic story of oddkin. (LB)