The article foregrounds the extent to which a thriving colonial discourse and biological racism do not (necessarily) result in a ‘fixing’ of racial others on the side of ‘animal’ (and, as such, in their ‘dehumanisation’), but rather in a strategic ‘flexibilisation’ of ‘hum-animality’ (see Ellis, 2018) in the interest of plausibilising white supremacy and the slavery system.
This article engages with versions of posthumanisation in selected novels by these authors-Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898)-and the anonymously published The Woman of Colour (1808), examining how they engage either in critiquing the perfidious overlaps between posthumanisation and colonial discourse (The Woman of Colour Frankenstein) or blur Cartesian binaries between humans and animals to reinforce colonial- ism’s narcissistic politics of non-relation (for example, see Gandhi, 2006 Simmons, 2007 and Drichel, 2018). Inspired by the accelerating as well as mutually reinforcing dynamics of colonial expansion, empiricism, new biological and scientifc findings (Darwin, paleontology, and psychology), and the rise of industrialisation, prominent writers such as Mary Shelley, the Brontë sisters, and Joseph Conrad habitually blur human-animal boundaries. Nineteenth Century novelists frequently picture life beyond and across the edges of humanity- figuratively moving the ‘posts’ of humanity-a practice that this article calls ‘posthumanisation’.
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