Screening the Posthuman

From artificial intelligence (AI) to climate change, recent technological, ecological, cultural, and social transformations have unsettled established assumptions about the relationship between the human and the more-than-human world. Screening the Posthuman addresses a heterogenous body of twenty-first-century films that turn to the figure of the “posthuman” as a means of exploring this development. Through close analyses of films as diverse as Air Doll (dir. Hirokazu Koreeda, 2009), Woman at War (dir. Benedikt Erlingsson, 2018) and Fast Color (dir. Julia Hart, 2018), the book shows that, while often identified as the remit of science fiction, the “posthuman on screen” crosses filmic genres, national contexts, and industrial settings. In the process, posthuman cinema emphasizes humanity’s entanglement in broader biological, technological, and social worlds, and exposes new models of subjectivity, politics, community, relationality, and desire. In advancing these arguments, Screening the Posthuman draws on scholarship associated with critical posthumanist theory—an ongoing project unified by a decentering of the figure of the “human” and driven by critics such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, N. Katherine Hayles, and Stacy Alaimo. As the first systematic, full-length application of this body of scholarship to cinema, the book advocates for a rigorous posthumanist critique that avoids both humanist nostalgia and transhumanist fantasy in its attention to the excitements and anxieties of posthuman existence.