Robo Sacer engages the digital humanities, critical race theory,
border studies, biopolitical theory, and necropolitical theory to
interrogate how technology has been used to oppress people of Mexican
descent--both within Mexico and in the United States--since the advent
of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. As the book
argues, robo-sacer identity emerges as transnational flows of bodies,
capital, and technology become an institutionalized state of exception
that relegates people from marginalized communities to the periphery.
And yet, the same technology can be utilized by the oppressed in the
service of resistance. The texts studied here represent speculative
stories about this technological empowerment. These texts theorize
different means of techno-resistance to key realities that have emerged
within Mexican and Chicano/a/x communities under the rise and reign of
neoliberalism. The first three chapters deal with dehumanization, the
trafficking of death, and unbalanced access to technology. The final two
chapters deal with the major forms of violence--feminicide and
drug-related violence--that have grown exponentially in Mexico with the
rise of neoliberalism. These stories theorize the role of technology
both in oppressing and in providing the subaltern with necessary tools
for resistance.
Robo Sacer builds on the previous studies of Sayak Valencia, Irmgard
Emmelhainz, Guy Emerson, Achille Mbembe, and of course Giorgio Agamben,
but it differentiates itself from them through its theorization on how
technology--and particularly cyborg subjectivity--can amend the reigning
biopolitical and necropolitical structures of power in potentially
liberatory ways. Robo Sacer shows how the cyborg can denaturalize
constructs of zoē by providing an outlet through which the oppressed can
tell their stories, thus imbuing the oppressed with the power to combat
imperialist forces.
