Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader

Posthumanism has come to synthesize philosophical, literary, and artistic responses to the pressures of technology, globalization, and mass extinction in the Anthropocene. It asks what it can mean to be human in an increasingly more-than-human world that has lost faith in the ideal of humanism, the autonomous, rational subject, and it models generative alternatives cognizant of the demands of social and ecological justice.

Posthumanism in Art and Science is an anthology of indispensable statements and artworks that provide an unprecedented mapping of this intellectual and aesthetic shift in a global context. It extends across a broad range of fields such as art theory, media studies, continental philosophy, natural science, literary studies, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, environmental humanities, social and political theory, and animal studies. The reader features a diverse sampling of major thinkers including Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Michael Marder, Karen Barad, Alexander Weheliye, Jay Prosser, Anna Tsing, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, N. Katherine Hayles, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Francesca Ferrando, and Cary Wolfe, as well as innovative, acclaimed artists and curators such as Yvonne Rainer, Chus Mart nez, William Wegman, Nandipha Mntambo, Cassils, Pauline Oliveros, Doo-sung Yoo, and Gavin Steingo. Their provocative and compelling works, including previously unpublished interviews and essays, speak to the ongoing conceptual and political challenge of posthuman theories in a time of unprecedented cultural and environmental crises.

An essential primer and reference for educators, students, artists, and art enthusiasts, this volume offers a powerful framework for rethinking anthropocentric certitudes and reenvisioning equitable and sustainable futures.

Giovanni Aloi is adjunct assistant professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and adjunct faculty at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He is the author of Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (Columbia, 2018), Why Look at Plants? (2019), and Lucian Freud Herbarium (2019), and he is editor of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and coeditor of the University of Minnesota Press series Art After Nature.

Susan McHugh is professor of English at the University of New England. Her books include Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines (2011) and Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction (2019). She is coeditor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature.