Author(s): Dr. Claire Molloy (Author, Editor), Steven Shakespeare (Editor), Charlie Blake (Editor)
Publisher: Continuum Publishing Corporation
Publication Date: 15 Mar. 2012
Edition: Illustrated
Language: English
Print length: 272 pages
ISBN-10: 1441107428
ISBN-13: 9781441107428
Book Description
This title explores the implications of our animal origins and posthuman futures for our understanding of our humanity and our relations with other species. “Beyond Human” investigates what it means to call ourselves human beings in relation to both our distant past and our possible futures as a species, and the questions this might raise for our relationship with the myriad species with which we share the planet. Drawing on insights from zoology, theology, cultural studies and aesthetics, an international line-up of contributors explore such topics as our origins as reflected in early cave art in the upper Palaeolithic through to our prospects at the forefront of contemporary biotechnology. In the process, the book positions ‘the human’ in readiness for what many have characterized as our transhuman or posthuman future. For if our status as rational animals or ‘animals that think’ has traditionally distinguished us as apparently superior to other species, this distinction has become increasingly problematic. It has come to be seen as based on skills and technologies that do not distinguish us so much as position us as transitional animals. It is the direction and consequences of this transition that is the central concern of “Beyond Human”.
Editorial Reviews
Review
The chapters in this incisive collection offer important challenges to anthropocentric prejudices – just as the title promises, readers are taken “beyond human.” Vivid, passionate, ethically-charged critical writing embodies resistance to fixed ideas that diminish other animals. Boundaries are contested and conventions are transgressed as these writers celebrate a consciousness that displaces man as the measure of all things. This memorable and important compilation of scholarship creatively advances the agenda of human-animal studies.–Sanford Lakoff
This fascinating collection of essays is often challenging and always engaging.Drawing on an astonishing breadth of approaches this book offers a stimulating exploration of what it means to be both embodied human and animal in an increasingly post-human world. From the opening chapter with its provocative idea of handing animals tools for their own, much needed, revolution through to the final chapter which unsettlingly forces the reader to consider human-technological melding, this book will force to you see – and think about the world – differently.–Sanford Lakoff
This fascinating collection of essays is oftenchallenging and always engaging.Drawingon an astonishing breadth of approaches this book offers a stimulatingexploration of what it means to be both embodied human and animal in anincreasingly post-human world. From the opening chapter with its provocative idea ofhanding animals tools for their own, much needed, revolution through to thefinal chapter which unsettlingly forces the reader to considerhuman-technological melding, this book will force to you see – and think aboutthe world – differently.–,
About the Author
Claire Molloy is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at University of Brighton, UK and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She has published on anthropomorphism, representations of animals in videogames and literature and dangerous dogs, media and risk. She is the author of Memento (EUP 2010) and Popular Media and Animal Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and co-editor of American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
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