Manjula Padmanabhan'sHarvest:Global technoscapes and the international trade in human body organs

“In bits and pieces”: bodies in movement, liminality and subaltern resistance in Manjula Padmanabhan’sHarvest

“…The practice revolves around the global economic exchange of kidneys, lungs, liver, corneas, hearts and any other parts that can be extracted from the human body and transported to different parts of the world. It involves the complex circulation of capital and humans within and across national boundaries (Das et al 2001;Inda and Rosaldo 2002;Gilbert 2006). Inda and Rosaldo note that, like other global economic activities, transplant tourism creates "a world in which a myriad of processes, operating on a global scale, ceaselessly cut across national boundaries, integrating and connecting cultures and communities in new space-time combinations".…”

Debt, the Precarious Grammar of Life, and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest

“…While the play has been variously read as an allegory of globalization, neocolonialism, global capitalism, and disability (Gilbert 2006;Detsi-Diamanti 2002;Pravinchandra Laxmidas 2009;Davidson 2008), I read it more specifically as an allegory of gendered racial debt. I argue that Harvest, through the trope of transracial whole-body transplantation rendered as a dizzying series of gender and racial crossings, generates a conceptualization of gendered racial debt as a social relation, disciplinary regime, sleight of hand, and production of subjectivity.…”

Representing Science that Isn’t:Harvestas Science Fiction Theatre

“…InterPlanta Services will maintain Om and his immediate family in a consumerist lifestyle in exchange for Om living as a spare-parts inventory for a recipient half a world away. Helen Gilbert incisively analyzes Harvest's critique of transnational capitalism through its topical inclusion of both digital and medical technologies (Gilbert 2006). My concern here is with the conjunction of the on-and off-stage manifestations of these two technologies as ways of navigating an emerging trend in science drama: its increasing openness to science fictional, as opposed to biographical or historical, subject matter.…”