Perspectives on Cultural and Posthumanist Rhetorics

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Notes

¹ Querejazu argues that Pachama is often erroneously translated as “mother earth.”

² It is also interesting to note that while Tupicochans have adapted a “Hispano-Quechuan” relationship to khipu, they have maintained what Salomon calls an “ancient” term (ayllu) in their civic relationships.

³ I take Booher and Jung’s claim that feminist posthumanist scholars must maintain attention to what is at stake in issues of epistemology (7).

⁴ I should note that this tendency is not unique to the present discussion; the proliferation of new terms and approaches in such a short amount of time has left many scrambling to find the single best name to capture the spirit of these collective efforts to extend agency and significance to nonhuman forces and entities.

⁵ For example, I would challenge Wolfe on his placement of Heidegger in the Humanist Humanism quadrant. I also don’t see the affinities Wolfe implies between Latour and Derrida. Again, though, where (and who) Wolfe decided to place in his fourfold model is less important than the gradients he enables us to see within various versions of posthumanism. It might be revealing, then, to remove Wolfe’s names and substitute scholars working in cultural and posthuman rhetorics to see what connections or relations emerge that might inspire future work.

⁶ In addition to the aforementioned Kohn, see: Ian Hodder’s Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationship between Human and Thing; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins; Viveiros de Castro’s “Engaging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies”; Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times; and Robert R. Reid-Phrarr’s Archives of the Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique.