Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader

Posthumanism synthesizes philosophical, literary, and artistic responses to technological advancements, 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. Amid rising social justice movements, collapsing economic structures, and the dwindling power of cultural institutions, posthumanism advances thinking on new and previously unenvisionable challenges.

Posthumanism in Art and Science is an anthology of indispensable statements and artworks that provide an unprecedented mapping of this intellectual and aesthetic development in a global context. It features groundbreaking theorists including Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Mel Y. Chen, Michael Marder, Alexander Weheliye, Anna Tsing, Timothy Morton, N. Katherine Hayles, Bruno Latour, Francesca Ferrando, and Cary Wolfe, as well as innovative, influential artists and curators such as Yvonne Rainer, Skawennati, Chus Martínez, William Wegman, Nandipha Mntambo, Cassils, Pauline Oliveros, and Doo-sung Yoo. These provocative and compelling works, including previously unpublished interviews and essays, speak to the ongoing conceptual and political challenge of posthumanist thinking in a time of unprecedented cultural and environmental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.