The intention behind this special issue of Agenda as expressed in the call for papers was “to curate a space for a re-thinking, re-imagining, re-defining and re-situating of existing discourses around the so-called posthuman condition”. Posthumanism is a critical response to the dominant ideas of Enlightenment (17th – 18th Centuries) of the North expressed in the liberal philosophy of Humanism: it treads on familiar ground engaged over many decades by critical feminists in the distancing from and resistance to anthropomorphism, which has excluded women, Black populations, the colonised and gender non-conforming people from the conception of what it is to be human. Eco-feminisms and post-anthropocentrism have moved into the foreground in this landscape. Further, it engages a neo-materialist view that is not centred in Cartesian dualism, dismantling obsolete scaffolding that has kept in place repressive binaries of gender, sexualities, race etc. Dispensing with identities, posthuman subjectivities transcend accepted boundaries and seek new embodiments. For this issue, what is important in the search for embodiment is the posthuman condition’s close entanglement with technologies, cyberspace, and a highly mediatised world.
The guest editors, Clare Craighead and Princess Sibanda, write in the introduction to this special issue of Agenda: “Our contention is that posthuman studies, with its impulses to open up and engage the contradictions of contemporary life and its refusal to buy into historical binary oppositions, offers a space where voices from the global South are able to challenge, trouble, push back and speak back.”
The issue includes several well-known black feminist writers, as well as new emerging voices. Writers employ posthuman discourse, hybrid concepts and techno-imaginaries in addressing the gendered implications of new technologies and posthuman subjectivities in the South. Posthumanism’s potentials for opening up unknown post-identarian terrains with new grammars comes with a need to be wary of reproducing old forms of discrimination and exclusion.
This issue begins a perhaps overdue exploration of posthumanism which we hope will open up more questioning, critical feminist and academic research and writing on the posthuman condition in the global South and explore the intersections with decolonial studies, African feminisms and feminist futures. Certainly, writers in this issue begin the conversations which are needed to speak from the South to one of posthumanism’s major concerns, what does it mean to be human? Agenda gratefully acknowledges the invaluable role played by the guest editors in curating this issue.
Lou HaysomConsulting Editor