Posthumanism and India

Book excerpt: The book is about what posthumanism means in the contemporary Indian context and what different lines of consideration this can take. The world today has universalized a Eurocentric history of the human with its privileges, oppressions, exploitations and exclusions. On the one hand, this has led to the triumphalist narrative of technology, the blurring of biological embodiment through prostheses and the dream of transhumanist self-exceeding. On the other hand, we are witness to the contemporary eruption of dystopian anomalies due to the dis-balance or revolt of the “others” of humanism – climate crisis, chronic pandemic, religious, ethnocentric and geopolitical violence, ideological and authoritarian state control. Posthumanism is both an acknowledgement of these blurred boundaries of humanism and a critical response to it. The editors of this volume opine that the discourse of posthumanism in India warrants urgent consideration, if we are to adequately address both national and global emergencies and look for solutions that India may be in a unique position to offer. Essays in the volume are by scholars in the area dealing with representative directions relating to posthumanism in India. The essays are divided into five areas of cultural relevance – (1) internal selves and others; (2) technology, normativity and ethics; (3) human and animal; (4) bodies and their discards; (5) becoming-cosmos. Together they form the beginnings of an approach to a critical cartography of posthumanism as it pertains specifically to India.