Abstract

This paper takes as its starting point the re-imagination of the Hosts as creatures of synthetic biology rather than of robotic engineering in the Westworld television series. Examining a history in which African Americans were treated as property rather than people, and the regimes of brutality used to sustain this white hegemony, Alexander Weheliye argues that we should understand the flesh as a political category that articulates a different sociality than that enacted by the body and its metaphorical associations with the body politic. Reading Westworld in this context, and drawing on the biopolitical theory of Roberto Esposito, I argue that the series makes visible racialisation as constitutive of the category “the human.” Moreover, examing the transition in envisioning the Hosts from robotic entities to ones more like creatures of synthetic biology, I argue the series emblematizes concerns about the eroding status of the human subject in a context of rampant biological commodification. Westworld confronts us with the limitations of current ways of understanding the category “the human” and points us towards better ways of imagining agency, subjectivity and mutuality. The series encourages us to acknowledge the complicity of “the human” in a settler-colonial, imperial imagination.