In his essay entitled “After Man,” Alexander G. Weheliye expresses the re-enforcing power posthumanism carries of the human subject, Man. As posthumanism offers numerous opportunities for readers and scholars to speculate, what does it mean to be post-human, on the other hand, and to argue one has moved on from something so embedded in science, culture, and being? Race, Weheliye defends, has been a prominent figure throughout history in conceptualizing what the “Rational Man” is, specifically in the progression of colonial and racial violence (323). In trying to dismantle the terms in which hate and trauma have grown, posthumanism ultimately forgets (and ignores) “the wake” left behind in its place (Sharpe 14).

How do we consider the Posthumanities, then, for those of us who are social minorities, when so much has been said regarding the field’s peripheral damage with race? Holly and Nicholaos Jones of “Race as Technology” indicate that while posthuman theory allows us to critique colonial structures and reengage with our own experience, there stands an “interconnectedness of a person’s humanness and their race” such that certain bodies are more human when coexistent against another, therefore demanding race still be considered a crucial part of identity (39). The cyborg, they write, inevitably relies on cultural concepts already existent and thriving, further preventing actual work from being done and realizing the intricacies of race and experiences said bodies have met or contended with throughout US history. For one, the authors cite Wendy Chun when describing how Asian bodies have already been made technology: “race [is] a technology that positions whites as human and Asians as robotic.”

While scholars Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and N. Katherine Hayles all posit that a posthuman identity is seen in one embodying the multiple, how can we open and think through what that means for Asian American or Latinx subjects, as well as those of multiple genealogies and biracial borders? Can posthumanism take what Patricia Melzer and Octavia Butler in Alien Constructions define as a “multiple subjectivity [that] creates spaces of disjunction that carry the potential for resistance” (“The Alien in Us” 67)? Or, does posthumanism re-colonize positions or modes such as the mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa’s theoretical figure who exists within the “borderlands” yet “needs to meet the demands of each cultural space” she encounters (91)?

Sources

Jones, Holly, and Nicholaos Jones. “Race as Technology: From Posthuman Cyborg to Human Industry.” Ilha do Desterro, vol. 70, no. 2, 2017, pp. 39-51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n2p39.

Melzer, Patricia. “The Alien in Us: Metaphors of Transgression in the Work of Octavia Butler.” Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. University of Texas Press, 2006, pp. 67-102.

Sharpe, Christina. “The Wake.” In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 1-22.

Weheliye, Alexander G. “After Man.” American Literary History, vol. 20, no. 1/2, 2008, pp. 321-336. JSTOR, doi: 10. 1093/alh/ajmO57.