How to Create Inhumanity: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Abstract

It is easy to read Kazuo Ishiguro‘s chilling novel Never Let Me Go as an indictment of human cloning, but thankfully Andrea Kowalski does not do the easy reading. In “How To Create Inhumanity,” she argues inventively that Ishiguro‘s celebrated novel, set in 1990s England, explores what Michel Foucault called “biopower,” namely the politicization of all life. Ishiguro‘s clones are created to donate their organs until they die, and they don‘t rebel against this fate despite the fact that they are intelligent and well-educated. Why? This is the central question asked by Never Let Me Go. Kowalski answers it by arguing that the workings of biopolitical racism – the stratification of people into masters and servants – are as subtle and inescapable in Ishiguro‘s novel as they are in real life.

Dr. Alice Brittan