Future of Humanity

Pavlina Radia is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science and Professor in English Studies at Nipissing University, Canada. She is also Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Collaboration in the Arts and Sciences at Nipissing University. She is the author of Nomadic Modernisms and Diasporic Journeys of Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles: “Two Very Serious Ladies” (2016) and Ecstatic Consumption: The Spectacle of Global Dystopia in Contemporary American Literature (2016). She is also a co-editor of Food and Appetites: The Hunger Artist and the Arts with Ann McCulloch (2012). Sarah Fiona Winters is Associate Professor in English Studies at Nipissing University, Canada. Her research focuses on the representations of evil in post-war children’s fantasy and on the relationship of fandom studies to digital pedagogies. She has published articles on C. S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, and Margaret Mahy.Laurie Kruk is Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University, Canada. She has published The Voice Is the Story: Conversations with Canadian Writers of Short Fiction (2003) and Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story (2016). She has also published three collections of poetry: Theories of the World (1992), Loving the Alien (2006), and My Mother Did Not Tell Stories (2012).

Reframing the humanist subject as a complex temporal material and a differential ecology of affects, this exciting interdisciplinary collection enables multiple entry points to new thinking in support of posthuman futures. The essays explore shared incursions of biology and technology to redefine what it means to be human in the twenty-first century and articulate non-anthropocentric perspectives with planetary implications.

• Introduction: Reflections on the (Post)Human Future, Pavlina RadiaPart I: Humanity, Big History, and Politics of Progress, Sarah WintersChapter One: Humanity Has a Choice: Our Common Future from a Big History Perspective, Fred SpierChapter Two: Investing in Disaster: Technical Progress and the Taboo of Diminishing Returns, David WitzlingChapter Three: Gender, Religions and the SDGs: A Reflection on Empowering Buddhist Nuns, Manuel LitalienPart II: Genocidal Fractures: The Eternal Return of the Past, Laurie KrukChapter Four: The Pilgrimage to Auschwitz: Making Meaning in Late in Modernity, Gillian McCannChapter Five: From Gas Chambers to 9/11: The Future of Postmemory and Contemporary America’s Commodity Grief Culture, Pavlina RadiaChapter Six: Art, Trauma, and History: A Survivor’s Story, Aaron WeissPart III: Doctrines Revisited: Rewriting the Margins, Sarah WintersChapter Seven: The Shock Doctrine in Apocalyptic Fiction, Christine Bolus-ReichertChapter Eight: Guy Vanderhaeghe and the Fu