Posthumanism in Art and Science - by Giovanni Aloi & Susan McHugh (Paperback)

About the Book

Posthumanism in Art and Science is an anthology of indispensable statements and artworks featuring groundbreaking theorists as well as innovative, influential artists and curators. Their provocative and compelling works speak to the ongoing conceptual and political challenge of posthuman theories in a time of cultural and environmental crises.

Book Synopsis

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 These provocative and compelling works, including previously unpublished interviews and essays, speak to the ongoing conceptual and political challenge of posthumanist thinking in a time of unprecedented cultural and environmental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.

Review Quotes

A wonderful and extraordinary curatorial feat that brings together fifty multidisciplinary thinkers and makers who have put forward the boldest, most creative provocations for posthumanist theorizing, writing, and aesthetic practice in the twenty-first century. An essential collection with a new perspective for understanding the work of art in more-than-human worlds.--Elaine Gan, director of Multispecies Worldbuilding Lab and coeditor of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet

Despite having achieved widespread critical currency, posthumanism is a concept that is used in multifarious ways that might be but are not systematically understood. This first comprehensive anthology on posthumanism and the arts offers a wide-ranging, informative, and authoritative account of posthumanist theory. This is a grand and ambitious intellectual project.--Robert McKay, coeditor of The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature

Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader covers a wide range of schools of thought. The assembled selections are wildly diverse in terms of artistic medium, national origin, racial composition, sexual orientation, and species identity and interrelations. It captures this theoretical diversity with a guiding interest in the new-materialist wing of posthumanist discourse. Aloi and McHugh curate an effective fusion of critical and visual discourse, with a particular emphasis on human-animal relations.--Bruce Clarke, author of Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems

Wide-ranging, interdisciplinary and representative of the current international cultural debates about posthumanism, this provocative volume will inspire students, artists, activists, and anyone who is invested in debunking anthropocentrism.--Cecilia Novero, author of Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art

About the Author

Giovanni Aloi is adjunct associate 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. His books include Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (Columbia, 2018), Why Look at Plants? (2019), and Lucian Freud Herbarium (2019). Aloi is founder and 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 Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, and the Arts: Animal Studies in Modern Worlds (2017) 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.