POSTHUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS AND HUMANISM ACROSS BRITISH, AMERICAN, POSTCOLONIAL, AND CONTEMPORARY LITERARY TRADITIONS GLOBALLY

Bipradeep Sen — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper traces the migration of literary studies from the liberal humanist paradigm toward a posthuman critical consciousness, arguing that contemporary fiction in English constitutes a laboratory in which subjectivity, cognition, ethics, materiality, and planetary relationality are being radically reconfigured. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework that synthesizes cognitive literary studies, critical posthumanism, narrative ethics, affect theory, and decolonial epistemologies, the paper reads British, American, postcolonial, and contemporary world literatures as convergent yet differentiated sites of post-anthropocentric imagination. It contends that the posthuman turn is not a repudiation of the human but a redistribution of the human across technological, ecological, and more-than-human networks, and that decolonial thought is indispensable to any posthumanism that does not merely universalize a Euro-American crisis of Man. The paper concludes by proposing planetary relationality as the horizon within which literary form, ethical response, and epistemic justice can be rethought together.

International Journal of Cultural Inheritance & Social Sciences ISSN: 2632-7597

POSTHUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS AND HUMANISM ACROSS BRITISH, AMERICAN, POSTCOLONIAL, AND CONTEMPORARY LITERARY TRADITIONS GLOBALLY