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Editor’s Introduction: Technology, the Posthuman, and Aesthetics in Multi-Ethnic Literature

In recent years, posthumanism has engaged scholars in the humanities and social sciences interested in the effects of technology, cybernetics, and informatics. Donna Haraway is particularly interested in transgressing boundaries between machines and organisms (and, in her recent book When Species Meet [2007], between humans and animals) in order to imagine new models for feminist intervention. “[T]here are . . . great riches for feminists,” she argues, “in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self” (“Manifesto” 2214). N. Katherine Hayles advances posthumanist thought significantly through her articulation of four assumptions characterizing a posthumanist point of view: first, it “privileges informational pattern over material instantiation” (that is, “embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life”); second, it “considers consciousness . . . an epiphenomenon” rather than a causal influence of human identity; third, it views “the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process”; and fourth, it “configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines” (2-3). Cary Wolfe challenges Hayle’s suggestion that embodiment and the posthuman are opposed, arguing that posthumanism does not suggest a condition in which our “embodiment has been transcended” but rather an opposition to “the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself” (xv, emphasis added). Wolfe contends that posthumanism is paradoxical in the sense that it