Humans and Posthumans

This chapter examines the posthuman as it emerged alongside information technologies and has continued to proliferate with the expansion of artificial intelligence technologies. In conversation with Katherine Hayles’ influential theorizations of the posthuman, as well as work by Sherryl Vint, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, this essay focuses on the concept of the human – namely, the liberal subject – carried forward by posthuman visions. This essay also turns to literary fictions including N. K. Jemisin’s “Emergency Skin,” Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and A. Merc Rustad’s “Our Aim Is Not to Die.” In varying ways, these texts both foreground the narrow and exclusionary concept of the human that structures the posthuman and offer more expansive conceptualizations of the human whether with, against, or after the posthuman.