About

We stand today at the threshold of a crisis and a reimagination of ourselves. Time and space, considered stable transcendental conditions of human experience, have exploded into a non-local virtual ontology. Technology’s fusion with the human body is pushing the line from prosthetics to artificially engineered life-forms. Androids, robots and a host of other quasi-humans are introducing a new layer of class or caste to existing stratified hierarchies. Instead of the privileged self-portrait of the human as the inheritor of the earth, what mocks them in the mirror is the image of a creature sawing the branch on which it sits. We find ourselves in the thick of a global climate crisis that scrambles and disrupts our geological foundations, unleashing frequent mass-scale life-threatening events. The tight co-dependence of global psychosystems and ecosystems are forcing a transversal splicing of life-elements leading to unprecedented hybridities, such as our present protracted pandemic. These conditions open new possibilities and force us to rethink our future. Such a rethinking cannot be a set of surface patches to help us return to our comfortable human business as usual, it needs to address the unprecedented nature of our historical location, and our philosophical, psychological, political, cultural and technological norms of human existence.

Our contemporary global condition has its roots in the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment. At its heart is humanism, the projection and establishment of a normative human identity bound to a history of rational organization and racist, ethnocentric and androcentric privilege. Progressing through a succession of overlapping periods it has brought us to our global postmodern and postcolonial present, when our footprint is no longer cultural but geological and humanism faces a categoric crisis at the brink of obsolescence. Life and death, the human and the non-human and the anthropological and the ecological can no longer be maintained as protracted and separable categories amidst the appearance of the world as an assemblage of beings and things.

This situation has led to the rise of posthumanism as an inquiry into our contemporary condition. India occupies a complex location in this period of crisis and transition. It is a relatively new modern nation, hardly seventy years old, still sorting out the legacies of colonialism and the variant trajectories of its nationalism as its responses to modernity and humanism. Recently colonized, it lives still in the shadow of a “not quite/not white” cultural and economic subordination. At the same time, Indians occupy some of the most influential and powerful seats in the global corporate world, particularly in technological innovation which is driving our times. The imperatives of neo-liberal development have largely been uncritically accepted at the national and institutional levels, irrespective of sectarian differences, leading to technological overdetermination of all its disciplines. On the other hand, India is among the world’s most ancient living civilizations, with a variety of internal understandings and norms of being human, and a variety of relations between them, including power hierarchies. They also include a variety of understandings of the relations of humans with their others. India also has long traditions of philosophical thought and systems of praxis that may be called posthuman in an existential sense. By this is meant a definition of the human that is not static but intrinsically transitory and open to practices of self-mutation.

India also is a region with a rich biodiversity. Posthumanism in its critique of anthropocentrism addresses geosubsistence and biodiversity as part of its deep relationality and expanded identity. The effect of laws, as well as the efforts of GMP and non GMOs movements on Indian soil and nature is part of its intimate consideration.

The Indian Posthumanism Network is a site for scholars and students interested in Posthumanism as it pertains to India. It is an opportunity for scholars to share their interests and ideas and work together to ask questions and find solutions related to the foundational assumptions of “being human” in the contemporary Indian context. The network will conduct events related to Posthumanism in India, including at least one annual symposium. It will also maintain book, article and media resources, a blog and an annual electronic journal.