Abstract
The stakes for what it means to be human have never been higher. Cascading climate crisis, the continuing Sixth Great Extinction, increased catastrophic weather events, among many other human-induced changes in the Earth’s systems, have made it necessary to question the ways in which homo sapiens interact with these systems. The challenge to contemporary ideas of citizenship, activism, and the state stems not only from the realization that the natural world is inseparable from the social, but that both are the product of hybridized human and nonhuman agencies. As a result, one must be skeptical of any notion of an environmental fix that bases itself upon an exclusively human agency. Working within the above framing, this interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the ways in which one might come to recognize and better theorize the political actor, and the political ‘act,’ or ‘event,’ in a post-anthropocentric context. What new types of citizenship might emerge from posthuman cultures and artforms? What do effective post-anthropocentric organizing strategies look like? As the relevance of the liberal humanist political subject and the conceptual norms of political realism recede, theories of national and international politics are now tasked with rethinking a contemporary environmental politics beyond humanism. To better theorize these destabilizations, this collection puts forth the value of thinking across disciplines, wherein a conversation unfolds between political theory and literary theory that meets at the crossroads of environmental humanities and ecopolitical theory.