ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to trouble the idea of centralizing and universalizing the human figure or what Giorgio Agamben calls an “anthropological machine” that defines the conceptual, material, philosophical and political production of the human subject. It deals with a brief overview of trauma theory and focuses on its debates and discusses some emerging trends in posthumanist and new materialist studies and attempts to bring new materialism into current trauma discourse. The chapter presents a brief example from postcolonial South African literature as a case study for the potential posthumanist representation of the trauma of Apartheid. In sync with the debates on posthumanism, the concept of “new materialism” was coined in the 1990s to mark a particular moment in the cultural and theoretical turn away from the persistent dualisms in modern and humanist traditions. Posthumanist and new materialistic thinking opens an insistent and mobile space capable of questioning power structures, geopolitical sovereign control, as well as human and non-human justice.
