Posthuman Dystopia and Artificial Intelligence: Reconfiguring Identity in Prayaag Akbar's Leila and Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape

Abstract: This paper offers a sustained critical exploration of dystopia and artificial intelligence as hegemonic forces that recalibrate and destabilize human identity in Prayaag Akbar’s Leila and Padmanabhan’s Escape. Situated within the theoretical frameworks of posthumanism, Foucauldian biopolitics, and critical dystopian discourse, the paper elucidates how lives are systematically quantified, and selves meticulously orchestrated, within totalizing regimes that blur the boundaries between autonomy and subjugation. Both narratives project near-future worlds wherein artificial intelligence transcends its instrumental status to emerge as an epistemological and biopolitical sovereign, regulating bodies, memories, and desires with chilling precision. Drawing upon the theoretical interventions of Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and N. Katherine Hayles, this analysis elucidates the dismantling of liberal humanist subjectivity under conditions of pervasive digital control. In Leila, AI-enabled systems of social stratification and data-driven moral regulation render identity a mutable, surveilled construct, perpetually assessed and disciplined through technocratic rationality. The protagonist Shalini’s fragmented consciousness reflects the violent imposition of algorithmic norms that reduce individuality to measurable compliance. Conversely, Escape articulates a claustrophobic dystopia in which artificial intelligence infiltrates cognitive and ethical domains, collapsing the distinction between human agency and machinic determinism. Identity in Escape becomes a spectral simulacrum, endlessly reprogrammed within a closed technological loop. The paper contends that both texts dramatize a posthuman dystopian condition characterized by ontological instability and existential precarity, wherein the human subject is reconstituted as a hybrid assemblage of flesh, code, and ideology. Ultimately, Leila and Escape foreground the catastrophic implications of surrendering identity to algorithmic governance while simultaneously gesturing toward fragile possibilities of subversive posthuman becoming. Keywords: Posthumanism, biopolitics, surveillance, algorithmic governance, technocratic control.