Introduction: Towards an Ecological Posthumanism in English Studies

İngilizce (OpenAlex)

Since Ihab Hassan’s 1977 “Prometheus as Performer” that heralded the posthuman as a model reaching beyond the postmodern, the concept and its related theories known as posthumanism(s) have proliferated in many fields ranging across philosophy, environmental humanities, and ethics. With the material and nonhuman turns being marked by the contribution of theorists from English departments, the concept of the posthuman has finally managed to move beyond AI-related, cyborgised, mechanised, and transhumanised understandings, becoming more engaged with post-qualitative research methodologies whereby the observer and the observed are no longer divided as the knowing-doing subject and the passive-inert-silent object that lends itself to the ultimate control of the former. The narrative voice of nonhuman matter has further provoked English studies to be a site of discussion on the posthuman as a new materialist initiative in the second and the third decades of the twenty-first century. This special issue explores the posthuman and posthumanism’s engagement with such theoretical endeavors as material ecocriticism, ecofeminism, climate change, and the Anthropocene. The articles rethink and revise the theoretical frameworks that help flourish the posthumanities, while supporting their cases from narratives of speculative fiction that derive energy from technological, cultural, and ecological manifestations of the posthuman.