Journal of Posthumanism

Front Matter

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Fermenting Futures

Kaajal Modi — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper I explore the material and metaphoric affordances of fermentation as an “art of noticing” (Tsing, 2015) as embodied through a collaborative practice of making with migrant women of colour in the kitchen. In doing so, I make visible some of the ways in which our microbial entanglements make us part of our environments, and the ways in which these have the potential to connect us to planetary metabolic ecologies. Through this practice, I further work to disrupt the exclusion of marginalised people from the category of human by challenging the basis of individualism and the idea of human as a discrete category. I do so by utilising food fermentation to consider the ‘cross-cultural’/multispecies ethics at play as a heuristic for a mode of participation that can account for diverse modes of knowledge and agency.

The House of Pain: The Island of Dr. Moreau and Post/Trans/ Humanism Today

Elana Gomel — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

H. G. Wells’ novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) is a bleak critique of the Victorian notion that evolution can provide ethical or social guidance to humanity. This essay reads the novel in the context of the contemporary debate between posthumanism and transhumanism. By applying theoretical models derived from Braidotti, Agamben, Wolfe and others, the essay argues that Wells’ evolutionary antihumanism provides a corrective to both critical posthumanism’s attempts to articulate a non-anthropocentric ethics, and to transhumanism’s dreams of transcending humanity. The essay considers the chronotope of an island polity in the context of evolutionary antihumanism by comparing Wells’ novel with the contemporary biotech thriller Island 731 (2013) by Jeremy Robinson.

Sorgner, L.S. (2022). Philosophy of Posthuman Art. Schwabe Verlag.

Stefano Rozzoni — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Sorgner, L.S. (2022). Philosophy of Posthuman Art. Schwabe Verlag.

Sands, Danielle. (Ed.). (2022). Bioethics and the Posthumanities. Routledge.

Stavroula Anastasia Katsorchi — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The turn of the twenty-first century and the subsequent continuous emergence of implications related to technological advancement have brought a crisis into the heart of the humanities. Its etymological origin, humanism, a philosophical stance shaped during and perpetuated by the Enlightenment, is becoming more and more redundant. An ecological emergency and advancements in science have created a need for a renewed understanding of subjectivity as well as of humanity’s place in and relation to the rest of the world. The reviewed volume exposes the timeliness and unquestionable relevance of posthumanism in relation to the needs created by contemporary reality, both within and without the academy and the humanities. Beyond merely philosophizing, Danielle Sands explores the practical applications of posthuman theory in the field of bioethics by including nine original, insightful, and interdisciplinary chapters that aspire to build a better present and a better future for all.

Cecchetto, D. (2022). Listening in the Afterlife of Data. Aesthetics, Pragmatics, and Incommunication. Duke University Press.

Monika Jaeckel — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Cecchetto, D. (2022). Listening in the Afterlife of Data. Aesthetics, Pragmatics, and Incommunication. Duke University Press.

Moslund, S.P., Marcussen, M.K., Pedersen, M.K. (Eds.). (2020). How Literature Comes to Matter. Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to Fiction

Vedant Srinivas — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

How Literature Comes to Matter offers a path-breaking look at how New Materialist/Posthumanist theory might contribute to literary reflections on the entangled relations between humans and more-than-human material realities. By establishing a link between fiction and post-anthropocentric theory, the book attempts to broaden the scope of how such theory(-ies) might be used to interrogate the presence and significance of the objective and the non-human in literature.

Nayar, P. K. (2019). Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture. Routledge.

Jovana Isevski — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Review of Nayar, P. K. (2019). Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture. Routledge.

Can the Prosumer Economy be a Posthumanist Economy?

Eylül Tuana Çevirme, Elvan Ece Satıcı, Uygar Özesmi — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Devastated by the ongoing climate and biodiversity crises, humanity is seeking a way out. For this, the current system where profit maximization, consumption, and human dominance over nature needs to change. In the current anthropocentric economic system, human beings are considered to be the most central and significant entities in the world. Both posthumanism and the prosumer economy reject this idea. The prosumer economy postulates a way to transform the profit-maximizing consumer economy into one that is based on ecological and social justice. This shared critique indicates a relationality between these two movements. We propose an existence where the prosumer economy is the economic system of a posthumanist world. The combination of these two ideas could provide the philosophical depth of the posthumanist perspective into the practice of the prosumer economy and provide an option for posthumanism to be further actionable.

Mermaids and Drag Queens: A Queer Look at Mermaiding

Yuval Avrami — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Mermaiding is the practice of wearing a tail designed to look like that of a fish. In this work I look at this phenomenon from the lens of gender and performance, aiming to understand if mermaiding constitutes a form of drag, by establishing the position of the mermaid symbol in queer and transgender spaces, then comparing testimonies of drag performers and professional and amateur mermaids. I also look at this practice through the lens of post-human theory, determining in which ways the mermaid body constitutes an object of identification for the person wearing a tail. By doing so, I demonstrate the similarities between the phenomena and their meaning, and show that the emergence of this practice affirms posthuman predictions of a future where the connection between human body and identity dissolve and enable new, hybrid identities.

Spontaneous Cosmic Becomings: El Paso Spontaneous Shrine and Cosmic Generator Cut Together in Conocimiento

Heather Kaplan — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This paper considers Mika Rottenberg’s Cosmic Generator alongside the El Paso spontaneous shrine constructed after the August 3, 2019 mass shooting to examine the material conditions of difference with which we are entangled and construct meaning. This paper utilizes an entangled methodology to explore connections and complexities produced by reading these two works together in order to produce complicated understandings of politics, race, and capitalism. This is done while expanding new materialist methodologies and border studies’ application in art education to include discursive notions of making. This making involves the generative creation of understanding (conocimiento), where unlike works are read or held together in their difference to create new understandings and resist difference as ossified. We are left with a deeper understanding of the border as a space of cosmic possibility juxtaposed against a notion of racism complicated by an economic system, that we are all implicated in.

Locking and Unlocking: The potentialities for intra-storying-activism in “this” baglady collective.

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this article we disrupt extractivist and privileged individualised knowledge production by decentering the human ‘I’ to ‘we’ through storying. By entangling more-than-human bodies, ‘we’ is re-configured through a posthuman praxis of an iterative metamorphosing Baglady storying collective. Starting with the provocation of locking and unlocking, we story as a way to make sense of political and ethical affectivities that disrupt and interrupt everyday materialities and spatialities. From here, we speculate with movements of response-ability as “intra-activism” (Renold & Ringrose, 2017, 631). For us, storying puts in motion intra-action, speculation, calls to act, relationality and feminist community building that we frame as intra-storying-activism. Making and re-making stories with intra-storying-activism navigates non-hierarchical post-authorship to re-imagine, speculate-with and trouble the human from extractivist positions. By foregrounding relationality as a multiplying storying, we create playful, dynamic and generative spaces for knowledge making as a collective that both welcomes and provokes calls to act.