ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the posthuman as it emerged alongside information technologies and proliferated with the expansion of artificial intelligence technologies. In conversation with N. Katherine Hayles’ influential theorizations of the posthuman, as well as scholarship by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Sherryl Vint, this chapter focuses on the concept of the human—namely, the liberal subject—carried forward by posthuman visions. This chapter brings these theorizations into conversations with literary fictions including N. K. Jemisin’s “Emergency Skin,” Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and A. Merc Rustad’s “Our Aim Is Not to Die.” In varying ways, these fictional texts both foreground the narrow and exclusionary concept of the human that structures the posthuman and offer more expansive conceptualizations of the human whether with, against, or beyond the posthuman.
