Digital humanities and posthumanism

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between the Digital Humanities and Critical Posthumanism, arguing that these projects benefit from being put into explicit dialogue with one another as so many of their interests already overlap. They do not just share common objects of interest, however; DH and Critical Posthumanism also have significant connections as academic disciplines which cannot avoid investigating the nature of the normalized human subject in a world where digital technologies are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and affect every being on the planet. They both also risk complicity in maintaining and elevating a normative human subject along the very axes of power that they both profess to critique if they do not look outward from the dominant academic landscapes of the Global North to histories, presents, and futures of work by people who have been silenced, marginalized, or otherwise excluded from concern and care. As such, this chapter moves from basic definitions, to the emergence of "critical turns, " to looking at the underlying logics of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene as needing to be examined and challenged by both disciplines, and the ways in which they might support one another in this project.